“Thank you, it is very kind of you.”
The piazza1 lay white in the sunshine; the morning air was[39] crisp and clear. Carts and people from the side streets were hurrying past.
“You know, Miss Winge, I don’t think I will go home. I am as wide awake as I can be, and I should like to go for a walk. Would you think me intruding2 if I asked to be allowed to accompany you a little bit of the way?”
“Dear me, no. But will you be able to find the way to your hotel?”
“Oh, I think I can manage it in broad daylight.”
“You will find cabs now everywhere.”
They came out into the Corso, and she told him the names of the palaces. She was always a step or two ahead of him, for she moved with ease between the many people who had already come out on the pavements.
“Do you like vermouth?” she asked. “I am going in here to have one.”
She drank it all in one gulp3, standing4 at the marble counter of the bar. He did not like the bitter-sweet drink, which was new to him, but he thought it fun to look in at a bar on their way.
Jenny turned into narrow streets where the air was raw and damp, the sun reaching only the top part of the houses. Helge noticed everything with great interest: the blue carts behind mules5 with brass-studded harness and red tassels6, the bare-headed women and dark-hued children, the small, cheap shops and the display of vegetables in the porches. In one place a man was making doughnuts on a stove. Jenny bought some and offered him, but he refused politely. What a queer girl, he thought. She ate and seemed to enjoy them, while he felt sick at the mere7 thought of those greasy8 balls between his teeth on top of the various drinks in the night, and the taste of vermouth still in his mouth. Besides, the old man was very dirty.
Side by side with poor, decrepit9 houses, where greyish wash[40] hung out to dry between the broken ribs10 of the venetian blinds, stood massive stone palaces with lattice windows and protruding11 cornices. Once Jenny had to take him by the arm—a scarlet12 automobile13 came hooting14 out of a gate in baroque style, turned with difficulty, and came speeding up the narrow street, where the gutters15 were full of cabbage leaves and other refuse.
He enjoyed it all—it was so strange and southern. Year after year his fantastic dreams had been destroyed by everyday petty reality, till at last he had tried to sneer16 at himself and correct his fancies in self-defence. And so now he tried to convince himself that in these romantic quarters lived the same kind of people as in every other big city—shopgirls and factory workers, typographers and telegraph operators, people who worked in offices and at machines, the same as in every part of the world. But it gave him pleasure to think that the houses and the streets, which were the image of his dreams, were obviously real as well.
After walking through small, damp and smelly streets they came into an open space in the sunlight. The ground was raked up at random17; heaps of offal and rubbish lay between mounds18 of gravel19; dilapidated old houses, some of them partly pulled down, with rooms showing, stood between classical ruins.
Passing some detached houses, which looked as if they had been forgotten in the general destruction, they reached the piazza by the Vesta temple. Behind the big, new steam-mill and the lovely little church with the pillared portico20 and the slender tower, the Aventino rose distinct against the sunny sky, with the monasteries21 on the hill, and dust-grey, nameless ruins among the gardens on the slope.
The thing that always gave him a shock—in Germany and in Florence—was that the ruins he had read about and imagined standing in a romantic frame of green leaves with flowers in the crevices22, as you see them in old etchings or on the[41] scenery in a theatre, were in reality dirty and shabby, with bits of paper, dented23, empty tins and rubbish lying about; and the vegetation of the south was represented by greyish black evergreen24, naked, prickly shrubs25, and yellow, faded rushes.
On this sunny morning he understood suddenly that even such a sight holds beauty for those who can see.
Jenny Winge took the road between garden walls at the back of the church. The walls were covered with ivy26, and pines rose behind them. She stopped to light a cigarette.
“I am a pronounced smoker27, you see,” she said, “but I have to refrain when I am with Cesca, for her heart does not stand it; out here I smoke like a steam-engine. Here we are.”
A small, yellow house stood inside a fence; in the garden were tables and forms under big, bare elms, and a summer-house made of rush stalks. Jenny greeted the old woman who came out on the doorstep.
“Well, Mr. Gram, what do you say to breakfast?”
“Not a bad idea. A cup of strong coffee and a roll and butter.”
“Coffee! and butter! Listen to him! No, eggs and bread and wine, lettuce28 and perhaps some cheese. Yes, she says she has cheese. How many eggs do you want?”
While the woman laid the table Miss Winge carried her easel and painting accessories into the garden, and changed her long, blue evening wrap for a short coat, which was soiled with paint.
“May I have a look at your picture?” asked Helge.
“Yes—I am going to tone down that green—it is rather hard. There is really no light in it yet, but the background is good, I think.”
Helge looked at the painting; the trees looked like big grease splashes. He could see nothing in it.
[42]
Helge was not hungry. The sour white wine gave him heartburn, and he could scarcely swallow the dry, unsalted bread, but Jenny bit off great chunks30 with her white teeth, put small pieces of Parmesan in her mouth, and drank wine. The three eggs were already done with.
“How can you eat that nasty bread without butter?” said Helge.
“I like it. I have not tasted butter since I left Christiania. Cesca and I buy it only when we are having a party. We have to live very economically, you see.”
“No; it is luxury, but I think it is very essential—a little of it. We live cheaply and we eat cheaply, tea and dry bread and radishes twice or three times a week for supper—and we buy silk scarves.”
She had finished eating, lit a cigarette, and sat looking in front of her, with her chin resting on her hand:
“To starve, you see, Mr. Gram—of course I have not tried it yet, but I may have to. Heggen has, and he thinks as I do—to starve or to have too little of the necessary is better than never to have any of the superfluous32. The superfluous is the very thing we work and long for. At home, with my mother, we always had the strictly33 necessary, but everything beyond it was not to be thought of. It had to be—the children had to be fed before anything else.”
“I cannot think of you as ever having been troubled about money.”
“Why not?”
“Because you are so courageous34 and independent, and you have such decided35 opinions about everything. When you grow up in circumstances where it is a constant struggle to make ends meet, and you are always reminded of it, you sort of dare not form any opinions—in a general way—it is so tantalizing36 to[43] know that the coins decide what you can afford to wish or to want.”
Jenny nodded pensively37. “Yes, but one must not feel like that when one has health and youth and knowledge.”
“Well, take my case, for instance. I have always believed that I have some aptitude38 for scientific work, and it is the only thing I would like to do. I have written a few books—popular ones, you know—and I am now working at an essay on the Bronze Age in South Europe. But I am a teacher, and have a fairly good position—that of a superintendent39 of a private school.”
“You have come out here to work, to study—I remember you said so this morning.”
He did not answer, but continued: “It was the same thing with my father. He wanted to be an artist—wanted it more than anything else, and he came out here for a year. Then he married, and is now the owner of a lithographic press, which he has kept going for twenty-six years under great difficulties. I don’t believe my father thinks he has got much out of life.”
Jenny Winge sat as before, looking thoughtfully in front of her. In the orchard40 below grew rows of vegetables, small innocent tufts of green on the grey soil, and on the far side of the meadow one could see the yellow masses of ruins on the Palatine against the dark foliage41. The day promised to be warm. The Alban mountains in the distance, beyond the pines of the villa42 gardens, looked misty43 against the soft blue of the sky.
Jenny drank some wine, still looking straight ahead. Helge followed with his eyes the smoke of her cigarette—a faint morning breeze carried it out in the sunshine. She sat with her legs crossed. She had small ankles, and her feet were clad in thin purple stockings and bead-embroidered evening shoes. The jacket was open over the gathered silver-grey dress with the white collar and the beads, which threw pink spots on her[44] milky-white neck. The fur cap had slid back from her fair, fluffy44 hair.
“I suppose you have the support of your father, though, Mr. Gram—I mean, he understands you, doesn’t he? Surely he sees that you can’t get ahead so quickly at that school, when you have quite different work at heart?”
“I don’t know. He was very pleased that I could go abroad, of course, but”—after some hesitation45—“I have never been very intimate with my father. And then there is mother. She was anxious lest I should work too hard, or be short of money—or risk my future. Father and mother are so different—she has never quite understood him, and kept more to us children. She was a great deal to me when I was a boy, but she was jealous of father even—that he should have greater influence over me than she had. She was jealous of my work too, when I locked myself up in a room of an evening to read, and always anxious about my health and afraid I should give up my post.”
Jenny nodded several times thoughtfully.
“The letter I fetched at the post office was from them.” He took it out of his pocket and looked at it, but he did not open it. “It is my birthday today,” he said, trying to smile. “I am twenty-six.”
“Many happy returns.” Miss Winge shook hands with him. She looked at him almost in the same way as she looked at Miss Jahrman when she nestled in her arms.
She had not noticed before what he looked like, though she was under the impression that he was tall and thin and dark. He had good, regular features on the whole, a high, somewhat narrow forehead, light brown eyes with a peculiar46 amber-like transparency, and a small, weak mouth with a tired and sad expression under the moustache.
“I understand you so well,” she said suddenly. “I know all that. I was a teacher myself until Christmas last year. I[45] started as a governess and went on till I was old enough to enter the seminary.” She smiled a little shyly. “I gave up my post in the school when I was left a small amount of money by an aunt, and went abroad. It will last me about three years, I think—perhaps a little longer. Lately I have sent some articles to the papers, and I may sell some pictures. My mother did not approve of my using up all the money, and did not like my giving up my post when I had got it at last after all those years of private teaching and odd lessons here and there at schools. I suppose mothers always think a fixed47 salary....”
“I don’t think I would have risked it in your place—burning all your bridges like that. It is the influence of my home, I know, but I could not help being anxious about the time when the money would be spent.”
“Never mind,” said Jenny Winge. “I am well and strong and know a lot; I can sew and cook and wash and iron. And I know languages. I can always find something to do in England or America. Francesca,” she said, laughing, “wants me to go to South Africa with her and be a dairy-maid, for that is a thing she is good at, she says. And we shall draw the Zulus; they are said to be such splendid models.”
“That is no small job either—and the distance does not seem to trouble you.”
“Not a bit—I am talking nonsense, of course. All those years I thought it impossible to get away, even as far as Copenhagen, to stay there some time to paint and learn. When at last I made up my mind to give up everything and go, I had many a bad moment, I can assure you. My people thought it madness, and I noticed that it made an impression on me, but that made me more determined48 still. To paint has always been my most ardent49 wish, and I knew I could never work at home as hard as I ought to; there were too many things to distract me. But mother could not see that I was so old that if I wanted to learn something I must start at once. She is only[46] nineteen years older than I; when I was eleven she married again, and that made her younger still.
“The curious thing when you leave home is that the influence of the people with whom you accidentally have lived is broken. You learn to see with your own eyes and to think for yourself, and you understand that it rests with yourself to get something good out of your journey: what you mean to see and to learn, how you mean to arrange your life and what influence you choose to submit to. You learn to understand that what you will get out of life as a whole depends on yourself. Circumstances count for something, of course, as you said, but you learn how to avoid obstacles or surmount50 them in the way that comes easiest to your individuality, and most of the disagreeable things that happen to you are of your own doing. You are never alone in your home, don’t you think? The greatest advantage of travelling seems to me that you are alone, without any one to help or advise you. You cannot appreciate all you owe to your home, or be grateful for it, until you are away from it, and you know that you will never be dependent on it any more, since you are your own master. You cannot really love it till then—for how could you love anything that you are dependent on?”
“I don’t know. Are we not always dependent on what we love?—you and your work, for instance. And when once you get really fond of people,” he said quietly, “you make yourself dependent on them for good and all.”
“Ye—s”—she reflected a moment, then said suddenly, “but it is your own choice. You are not a slave; you serve willingly something or somebody that you prize higher than yourself. Are you not glad you can begin the new year alone, entirely51 free, and only do the work you like?”
Helge remembered the previous evening in the piazza San Pietro; he looked at the city, the soft veiled colourings of it in the sun, and he looked at the fair young girl beside him.
[47]
“Yes,” he said.
“Well”—she rose, buttoned her jacket, and opened the paint-box—“I must work now.”
“And I suppose you would like to get rid of me?”
Jenny smiled. “I daresay you are tired too.”
“Not very—I must pay the bill.”
She called the woman and helped him, squeezing out colours on to her palette meanwhile.
“Do you think you can find your way back to town?”
“Yes; I remember exactly how we came, and I shall soon find a cab, I suppose. Do you ever go to the club?”
“Yes, sometimes.”
“I should like very much to meet you again.”
“I daresay you will”—and after a moment’s hesitation:
“Come and see us one day, if you care, and have tea. Via Vantaggio 111. Cesca and I are generally at home in the afternoon.”
“Thanks, I should like to very much. Good-bye, then, and thanks so much.”
She gave him her hand: “The same to you.”
At the gate he looked back; she was scraping her canvas with a palette knife and humming the song they had heard in the café. He remembered the tune52, and began to hum it himself as he walked away.
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piazza
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n.广场;走廊 | |
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2
intruding
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v.侵入,侵扰,打扰( intrude的现在分词);把…强加于 | |
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gulp
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vt.吞咽,大口地吸(气);vi.哽住;n.吞咽 | |
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standing
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n.持续,地位;adj.永久的,不动的,直立的,不流动的 | |
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mules
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骡( mule的名词复数 ); 拖鞋; 顽固的人; 越境运毒者 | |
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tassels
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n.穗( tassel的名词复数 );流苏状物;(植物的)穗;玉蜀黍的穗状雄花v.抽穗, (玉米)长穗须( tassel的第三人称单数 );使抽穗, (为了使作物茁壮生长)摘去穗状雄花;用流苏装饰 | |
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mere
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adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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greasy
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adj. 多脂的,油脂的 | |
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decrepit
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adj.衰老的,破旧的 | |
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ribs
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n.肋骨( rib的名词复数 );(船或屋顶等的)肋拱;肋骨状的东西;(织物的)凸条花纹 | |
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protruding
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v.(使某物)伸出,(使某物)突出( protrude的现在分词 );凸 | |
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scarlet
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n.深红色,绯红色,红衣;adj.绯红色的 | |
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automobile
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n.汽车,机动车 | |
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hooting
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(使)作汽笛声响,作汽车喇叭声( hoot的现在分词 ); 倒好儿; 倒彩 | |
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gutters
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(路边)排水沟( gutter的名词复数 ); 阴沟; (屋顶的)天沟; 贫贱的境地 | |
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sneer
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v.轻蔑;嘲笑;n.嘲笑,讥讽的言语 | |
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random
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adj.随机的;任意的;n.偶然的(或随便的)行动 | |
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mounds
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土堆,土丘( mound的名词复数 ); 一大堆 | |
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gravel
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n.砂跞;砂砾层;结石 | |
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portico
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n.柱廊,门廊 | |
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monasteries
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修道院( monastery的名词复数 ) | |
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crevices
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n.(尤指岩石的)裂缝,缺口( crevice的名词复数 ) | |
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dented
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v.使产生凹痕( dent的过去式和过去分词 );损害;伤害;挫伤(信心、名誉等) | |
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evergreen
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n.常青树;adj.四季常青的 | |
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shrubs
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灌木( shrub的名词复数 ) | |
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ivy
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n.常青藤,常春藤 | |
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smoker
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n.吸烟者,吸烟车厢,吸烟室 | |
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lettuce
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n.莴苣;生菜 | |
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hurrah
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int.好哇,万岁,乌拉 | |
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chunks
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厚厚的一块( chunk的名词复数 ); (某物)相当大的数量或部分 | |
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beads
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n.(空心)小珠子( bead的名词复数 );水珠;珠子项链 | |
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superfluous
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adj.过多的,过剩的,多余的 | |
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strictly
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adv.严厉地,严格地;严密地 | |
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courageous
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adj.勇敢的,有胆量的 | |
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decided
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adj.决定了的,坚决的;明显的,明确的 | |
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tantalizing
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adj.逗人的;惹弄人的;撩人的;煽情的v.逗弄,引诱,折磨( tantalize的现在分词 ) | |
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pensively
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adv.沉思地,焦虑地 | |
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aptitude
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n.(学习方面的)才能,资质,天资 | |
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superintendent
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n.监督人,主管,总监;(英国)警务长 | |
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orchard
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n.果园,果园里的全部果树,(美俚)棒球场 | |
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foliage
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n.叶子,树叶,簇叶 | |
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villa
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n.别墅,城郊小屋 | |
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misty
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adj.雾蒙蒙的,有雾的 | |
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fluffy
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adj.有绒毛的,空洞的 | |
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hesitation
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n.犹豫,踌躇 | |
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peculiar
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adj.古怪的,异常的;特殊的,特有的 | |
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fixed
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adj.固定的,不变的,准备好的;(计算机)固定的 | |
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determined
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adj.坚定的;有决心的 | |
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ardent
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adj.热情的,热烈的,强烈的,烈性的 | |
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surmount
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vt.克服;置于…顶上 | |
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entirely
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ad.全部地,完整地;完全地,彻底地 | |
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tune
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n.调子;和谐,协调;v.调音,调节,调整 | |
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