Irene nodded. The band struck up again. Simultaneously the two young people got up and, united, stepped off on to the floor. It was a sordid and flashy cabaret, frequented by the worst sort of international and Italian public. The women were mostly prostitutes; a party of loud and tipsy young Englishmen and Americans were sitting in one corner with a pair of swarthy young natives who looked altogether too sober; the couples who took the floor danced with an excessive intimacy. Irene and Lord Hovenden were discussing the date of their wedding; they thought the cabaret delightful.
In the day-time, when Hovenden could get off going to the conferences, they wandered about the town buying what they imagined to be antiques for their future home. The process was a little superfluous. For, absorbed in the delights of shopping, they forgot that their future home was also a highly ancestral home.
‘Vat looks an awfully nice dinner-service,’ Lord Hovenden would say; and darting into the shop they would buy it out of hand. ‘A bit chipped’—he shook his head. ‘But never mind.’ Among the twenty-three valuable dinner-services with which their future home was already supplied was one of solid gold and one of silver gilt for less important occasions. Still, it was such fun buying, such fun to poke about in the shops! Under the pale blue sky of autumn the city was golden and black—golden where the sunlight fell on walls of stucco or travertine, black in the shadows, deeply black under archways, within the doors of churches, glossily black where the sculptured stone of fountains shone wet with the unceasing gush of water. In the open places the sun was hot; but a little wind from the sea blew freshly, and from the mouth of narrow alleys, sun-proof these thousand years, there breathed forth wafts of a delicious vault-like coolness. They walked for hours without feeling tired.
Mrs. Aldwinkle meanwhile went the round of the sights with Chelifer. She had hopes that the Sistine Chapel, the Appian Way at sunset, the Coliseum by moonlight, the gardens of the Villa d’Este might arouse in Chelifer’s mind emotions which should in their turn predispose him to feel romantically towards herself. The various emotions, she knew by experience, are not boxed off from one another in separate pigeon-holes; and when one is stimulated it is likely that its neighbours will also be aroused. More proposals are made in the taxi, on the way home from a Wagner opera, in the face of an impressive view, within the labyrinth of a ruined palace, than in drab parlours or the streets of West Kensington. But the Appian Way, even when the solitary pine trees were black against the sunset and the ghosts were playing oboes, not for the sensual ear, in the ruined sepulchres; the Coliseum, even under the moon; the cypresses, the cascades and the jade-green pools of Tivoli—all were ineffective. Chelifer never committed himself; his behaviour remained perfectly courteous.
Seated on a fallen column in the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa, Mrs. Aldwinkle even went so far as to tell him about certain amorous passages in her past life. She told him, with various little modifications of the facts, modifications in which she herself had long ago come implicitly to believe, the story of the affair with Elzevir, the pianist—such an artist! to his finger-tips; with Lord Trunion—such a grand seigneur of the old school! But concerning Mr. Cardan she was silent. It was not that Mrs. Aldwinkle’s mythopoeic faculties were not equal to making something very extraordinary and romantic out of Mr. Cardan.
No, no; she had often described the man to those who did not know him; he was a sort of village Hampden, a mute inglorious What’s-his-name, who might have done anything—but anything—if he had chosen to give himself the trouble. He was a great Don Juan, actual in this case, not merely potential. He was a mocking devil’s advocate, he was even a devil. But that was because he was misunderstood—misunderstood by everybody but Mrs. Aldwinkle herself. Secretly he was so sensitive and kind-hearted. But one had to be gifted with intuition to find it out. And so on; she had made a capital mythical figure out of him. But an instinct of caution restrained her from showing off her myths too freely before people who were well acquainted with the originals. Chelifer had never met Lord Trunion or the immortal Elzevir. He had met Mr. Cardan.
But the effect of the confidences was as small as that of the romantic scenery and the stupendous works of art. Chelifer was not encouraged by them either to confide in return or to follow the example of Elzevir and Lord Trunion. He listened attentively, gave vent, when she had finished, to a few well-chosen expressions of sympathy, such as one writes to acquaintances on the deaths of their aged grandmothers, and after a considerable silence, looking at his watch, said he thought it was time to be getting back: he had promised to meet his mother for tea, and after tea, he added, he was going to take her to look at pensions. Seeing that she was going to stay in Rome the whole winter, it was worth taking some trouble about finding a nice room. Wasn’t it? Mrs. Aldwinkle was forced to agree. They set off through the parched Campagna towards the city. Mrs. Aldwinkle preserved a melancholy silence all the way.
On their way from the hotel to the tea-shop in the Piazza Venezia Mrs. Chelifer, Miss Elver and Mr. Cardan passed through the forum of Trajan. The two little churches lifted their twin domes of gold against the sky. From the floor of the forum, deep-sunk beneath the level of the road—a foot for every hundred years—rose the huge column, with tumbled pillars and blocks of masonry lying confusedly round its base. They paused to look round.
‘I’ve always been a Protestant,’ said Mrs. Chelifer after a moment’s silence; ‘but all the same I’ve always felt, whenever I came here, that Rome was somehow a special place; that God had marked it out in some peculiar way from among other cities as a place where the greatest things should happen. It’s a significant place, a portentous place—though I couldn’t tell you exactly why. One just feels that it is portentous; that’s all. Look at this piazza, for example. Two florid little counter-Reformation churches, all trumpery pretentiousness and no piety; a mixed lot of ordinary houses all round, and in the hole in the middle a huge heathen memorial of slaughter. And yet for some reason it all seems to me to have a significance, a spiritual meaning; it’s important. And the same applies to everything in this extraordinary place. You can’t regard it with indifference as you can an ordinary town.’
‘And yet,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘a great many tourists and all the inhabitants contrive to do so with complete success.’
‘That’s only because they’ve never looked at the place,’ said Mrs. Chelifer. ‘Once you’ve really looked . . .’
She was interrupted by a loud whoop from Miss Elver, who had wandered away from her companions and was looking over the railing into the sunken forum.
‘What is it?’ called Mr. Cardan. They hurried across the street towards her.
‘Look,’ cried Miss Elver, pointing down, ‘look. All the cats!’
And there they were. On the sun-warmed marble of a fallen column basked a large tabby. A family of ginger kittens were playing on the ground below. Small tigers stalked between the blocks of masonry. A miniature black panther was standing up on its hind legs to sharpen its claws on the bark of a little tree. At the foot of the column lay an emaciated corpse.
‘Puss, puss,’ Miss Elver shrilly yelled.
‘No good,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘They only understand Italian.’
Miss Elver looked at him. ‘Perhaps I’d better learn a little, then,’ she said. ‘Cat’s Italian.’
Mrs. Chelifer meanwhile was looking down very earnestly into the forum. ‘Why, there are at least twenty,’ she said. ‘How do they get there?’
‘People who want to get rid of their cats just come and drop them over the railing into the forum,’ Mr. Cardan explained.
‘And they can’t get out?’
‘So it seems.’
An expression of distress appeared on Mrs. Chelifer’s gentle face. She made a little clicking with her tongue against her teeth and sadly shook her head. ‘Dear, dear,’ she said, ‘dear, dear. And how do they get fed?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘Perhaps they feed on one another. People throw things down from time to time, no doubt.’
‘There’s a dead one there, in the middle,’ said Mrs. Chelifer; and a note of something like reproach came into her voice, as though she found that Mr. Cardan was to blame for the deadness of the little corpse at the foot of the triumphal column.
‘Very dead,’ said Mr. Cardan.
They walked on. Mrs. Chelifer did not speak; she seemed preoccupied.
CHAPTER V
‘An pris caruns flucuthukh’; Mr. Cardan beckoned to the guide. ‘Bring the lamp a little nearer,’ he said in Italian, and when the light had been approached, he went on slowly spelling out the primitive Greek writing on the wall of the tomb: ‘flucuthukh nun tithuial khues khathc anulis mulu vizile ziz riin puiian acasri flucuper pris an ti ar vus ta aius muntheri flucuthukh.’ He straightened himself up. ‘Charming language,’ he said, ‘charming! Ever since I learned that the Etruscans used to call the god of wine
