Twelve Stories and a Dream (24 page)

Before they reached Rome this young man was tacitly of their party. They
did not know his name nor what he was, but it seemed he taught, and Miss
Winchelsea had a shrewd idea he was an extension lecturer. At any rate
he was something of that sort, something gentlemanly and refined without
being opulent and impossible. She tried once or twice to ascertain
whether he came from Oxford or Cambridge, but he missed her timid
importunities. She tried to get him to make remarks about those places
to see if he would say "come up" to them instead of "go down"—she knew
that was how you told a 'Varsity man. He used the word "'Varsity"—not
university—in quite the proper way.

They saw as much of Mr. Ruskin's Florence as the brief time permitted;
he met them in the Pitti Gallery and went round with them, chatting
brightly, and evidently very grateful for their recognition. He knew a
great deal about art, and all four enjoyed the morning immensely. It was
fine to go round recognising old favourites and finding new beauties,
especially while so many people fumbled helplessly with Baedeker. Nor
was he a bit of a prig, Miss Winchelsea said, and indeed she detested
prigs. He had a distinct undertone of humour, and was funny, for
example, without being vulgar, at the expense of the quaint work of
Beato Angelico. He had a grave seriousness beneath it all, and was quick
to seize the moral lessons of the pictures. Fanny went softly among
these masterpieces; she admitted "she knew so little about them," and
she confessed that to her they were "all beautiful." Fanny's "beautiful"
inclined to be a little monotonous, Miss Winchelsea thought. She had
been quite glad when the last sunny Alp had vanished, because of the
staccato of Fanny's admiration. Helen said little, but Miss Winchelsea
had found her a little wanting on the aesthetic side in the old days and
was not surprised; sometimes she laughed at the young man's hesitating
delicate little jests and sometimes she didn't, and sometimes she seemed
quite lost to the art about them in the contemplation of the dresses of
the other visitors.

At Rome the young man was with them intermittently. A rather "touristy"
friend of his took him away at times. He complained comically to Miss
Winchelsea. "I have only two short weeks in Rome," he said, "and my
friend Leonard wants to spend a whole day at Tivoli, looking at a
waterfall."

"What is your friend Leonard?" asked Miss Winchelsea abruptly.

"He's the most enthusiastic pedestrian I ever met," the young man
replied, amusingly, but a little unsatisfactorily, Miss Winchelsea
thought. They had some glorious times, and Fanny could not think what
they would have done without him. Miss Winchelsea's interest and
Fanny's enormous capacity for admiration were insatiable. They never
flagged—through pictures and sculpture galleries, immense crowded
churches, ruins and museums, Judas trees and prickly pears, wine carts
and palaces, they admired their way unflinchingly. They never saw a
stone pine or a eucalyptus but they named and admired it; they never
glimpsed Soracte but they exclaimed. Their common ways were made
wonderful by imaginative play. "Here Caesar may have walked," they would
say. "Raphael may have seen Soracte from this very point." They happened
on the tomb of Bibulus. "Old Bibulus," said the young man. "The oldest
monument of Republican Rome!" said Miss Winchelsea.

"I'm dreadfully stupid," said Fanny, "but who WAS Bibulus?"

There was a curious little pause.

"Wasn't he the person who built the wall?" said Helen.

The young man glanced quickly at her and laughed. "That was Balbus," he
said. Helen reddened, but neither he nor Miss Winchelsea threw any light
upon Fanny's ignorance about Bibulus.

Helen was more taciturn than the other three, but then she was always
taciturn, and usually she took care of the tram tickets and things like
that, or kept her eye on them if the young man took them, and told him
where they were when he wanted them. Glorious times they had, these
young people, in that pale brown cleanly city of memories that was once
the world. Their only sorrow was the shortness of the time. They said
indeed that the electric trams and the '70 buildings, and that criminal
advertisement that glares upon the Forum, outraged their aesthetic
feelings unspeakably; but that was only part of the fun. And indeed Rome
is such a wonderful place that it made Miss Winchelsea forget some
of her most carefully prepared enthusiasms at times, and Helen, taken
unawares, would suddenly admit the beauty of unexpected things. Yet
Fanny and Helen would have liked a shop window or so in the English
quarter if Miss Winchelsea's uncompromising hostility to all other
English visitors had not rendered that district impossible.

The intellectual and aesthetic fellowship of Miss Winchelsea and the
scholarly young man passed insensibly towards a deeper feeling.
The exuberant Fanny did her best to keep pace with their recondite
admiration by playing her "beautiful," with vigour, and saying "Oh!
LET'S go," with enormous appetite whenever a new place of interest was
mentioned. But Helen developed a certain want of sympathy towards the
end, that disappointed Miss Winchelsea a little. She refused to "see
anything" in the face of Beatrice Cenci—Shelley's Beatrice Cenci!—in
the Barberini gallery; and one day, when they were deploring the
electric trams, she said rather snappishly that "people must get about
somehow, and it's better than torturing horses up these horrid little
hills." She spoke of the Seven Hills of Rome as "horrid little hills!"

And the day they went on the Palatine—though Miss Winchelsea did not
know of this—she remarked suddenly to Fanny, "Don't hurry like that,
my dear; THEY don't want us to overtake them. And we don't say the right
things for them when we DO get near."

"I wasn't trying to overtake them," said Fanny, slackening her excessive
pace; "I wasn't indeed." And for a minute she was short of breath.

But Miss Winchelsea had come upon happiness. It was only when she came
to look back across an intervening tragedy that she quite realised
how happy she had been, pacing among the cypress-shadowed ruins, and
exchanging the very highest class of information the human mind
can possess, the most refined impressions it is possible to convey.
Insensibly emotion crept into their intercourse, sunning itself
openly and pleasantly at last when Helen's modernity was not too near.
Insensibly their interest drifted from the wonderful associations about
them to their more intimate and personal feelings. In a tentative way
information was supplied; she spoke allusively of her school, of her
examination successes, of her gladness that the days of "Cram" were
over. He made it quite clear that he also was a teacher. They spoke of
the greatness of their calling, of the necessity of sympathy to face its
irksome details, of a certain loneliness they sometimes felt.

That was in the Colosseum, and it was as far as they got that day,
because Helen returned with Fanny—she had taken her into the upper
galleries. Yet the private dreams of Miss Winchelsea, already vivid and
concrete enough, became now realistic in the highest degree. She figured
that pleasant young man, lecturing in the most edifying way to his
students, herself modestly prominent as his intellectual mate and
helper; she figured a refined little home, with two bureaus, with white
shelves of high-class books, and autotypes of the pictures of Rossetti
and Burne-Jones, with Morris's wall papers and flowers in pots of beaten
copper. Indeed she figured many things. On the Pincio the two had a few
precious moments together, while Helen marched Fanny off to see the muro
Torto, and he spoke at once plainly. He said he hoped their friendship
was only beginning, that he already found her company very precious to
him, that indeed it was more than that.

He became nervous, thrusting at his glasses with trembling fingers as
though he fancied his emotions made them unstable. "I should of course,"
he said, "tell you things about myself. I know it is rather unusual my
speaking to you like this. Only our meeting has been so accidental—or
providential—and I am snatching at things. I came to Rome expecting
a lonely tour... and I have been so very happy, so very happy. Quite
recently I found myself in a position—I have dared to think—. And—"

He glanced over his shoulder and stopped. He said "Damn!" quite
distinctly—and she did not condemn him for that manly lapse into
profanity. She looked and saw his friend Leonard advancing. He drew
nearer; he raised his hat to Miss Winchelsea, and his smile was almost
a grin. "I've been looking for you everywhere, Snooks," he said. "You
promised to be on the Piazza steps half an hour ago."

Snooks! The name struck Miss Winchelsea like a blow in the face. She
did not hear his reply. She thought afterwards that Leonard must have
considered her the vaguest-minded person. To this day she is not sure
whether she was introduced to Leonard or not, nor what she said to
him. A sort of mental paralysis was upon her. Of all offensive
surnames—Snooks!

Helen and Fanny were returning, there were civilities, and the young
men were receding. By a great effort she controlled herself to face the
enquiring eyes of her friends. All that afternoon she lived the life
of a heroine under the indescribable outrage of that name, chatting,
observing, with "Snooks" gnawing at her heart. From the moment that it
first rang upon her ears, the dream of her happiness was prostrate in
the dust. All the refinement she had figured was ruined and defaced by
that cognomen's unavoidable vulgarity.

What was that refined little home to her now, spite of autotypes, Morris
papers, and bureaus? Athwart it in letters of fire ran an incredible
inscription: "Mrs. Snooks." That may seem a little thing to the reader,
but consider the delicate refinement of Miss Winchelsea's mind. Be as
refined as you can and then think of writing yourself down:—"Snooks."
She conceived herself being addressed as Mrs. Snooks by all the people
she liked least, conceived the patronymic touched with a vague quality
of insult. She figured a card of grey and silver bearing "Winchelsea,"
triumphantly effaced by an arrow, Cupid's arrow, in favour of "Snooks."
Degrading confession of feminine weakness! She imagined the terrible
rejoicings of certain girl friends, of certain grocer cousins from whom
her growing refinement had long since estranged her. How they would
make it sprawl across the envelope that would bring their sarcastic
congratulations. Would even his pleasant company compensate her for
that? "It is impossible," she muttered; "impossible! SNOOKS!"

She was sorry for him, but not so sorry as she was for herself. For him
she had a touch of indignation. To be so nice, so refined, while all the
time he was "Snooks," to hide under a pretentious gentility of demeanour
the badge sinister of his surname seemed a sort of treachery. To put it
in the language of sentimental science she felt he had "led her on."

There were of course moments of terrible vacillation, a period even when
something almost like passion bid her throw refinement to the winds. And
there was something in her, an unexpurgated vestige of vulgarity, that
made a strenuous attempt at proving that Snooks was not so very bad a
name after all. Any hovering hesitation flew before Fanny's manner, when
Fanny came with an air of catastrophe to tell that she also knew the
horror. Fanny's voice fell to a whisper when she said SNOOKS. Miss
Winchelsea would not give him any answer when at last, in the Borghese,
she could have a minute with him; but she promised him a note.

She handed him that note in the little book of poetry he had lent her,
the little book that had first drawn them together. Her refusal was
ambiguous, allusive. She could no more tell him why she rejected
him than she could have told a cripple of his hump. He too must feel
something of the unspeakable quality of his name. Indeed he had avoided
a dozen chances of telling it, she now perceived. So she spoke of
"obstacles she could not reveal"—"reasons why the thing he spoke of was
impossible." She addressed the note with a shiver, "E. K. Snooks."

Things were worse than she had dreaded; he asked her to explain. How
COULD she explain? Those last two days in Rome were dreadful. She was
haunted by his air of astonished perplexity. She knew she had given him
intimate hopes, she had not the courage to examine her mind thoroughly
for the extent of her encouragement. She knew he must think her the most
changeable of beings. Now that she was in full retreat, she would not
even perceive his hints of a possible correspondence. But in that matter
he did a thing that seemed to her at once delicate and romantic. He made
a go-between of Fanny. Fanny could not keep the secret, and came and
told her that night under a transparent pretext of needed advice. "Mr.
Snooks," said Fanny, "wants to write to me. Fancy! I had no idea. But
should I let him?" They talked it over long and earnestly, and Miss
Winchelsea was careful to keep the veil over her heart. She was
already repenting his disregarded hints. Why should she not hear of
him sometimes—painful though his name must be to her? Miss Winchelsea
decided it might be permitted, and Fanny kissed her good-night with
unusual emotion. After she had gone Miss Winchelsea sat for a long time
at the window of her little room. It was moonlight, and down the street
a man sang "Santa Lucia" with almost heart-dissolving tenderness.... She
sat very still.

She breathed a word very softly to herself. The word was "SNOOKS." Then
she got up with a profound sigh, and went to bed. The next morning he
said to her meaningly, "I shall hear of you through your friend."

Mr. Snooks saw them off from Rome with that pathetic interrogative
perplexity still on his face, and if it had not been for Helen he
would have retained Miss Winchelsea's hold-all in his hand as a sort of
encyclopaedic keepsake. On their way back to England Miss Winchelsea on
six separate occasions made Fanny promise to write to her the longest of
long letters. Fanny, it seemed, would be quite near Mr. Snooks. Her new
school—she was always going to new schools—would be only five miles
from Steely Bank, and it was in the Steely Bank Polytechnic, and one or
two first-class schools, that Mr. Snooks did his teaching. He might even
see her at times. They could not talk much of him—she and Fanny always
spoke of "him," never of Mr. Snooks,—because Helen was apt to say
unsympathetic things about him. Her nature had coarsened very much,
Miss Winchelsea perceived, since the old Training College days; she
had become hard and cynical. She thought he had a weak face, mistaking
refinement for weakness as people of her stamp are apt to do, and when
she heard his name was Snooks, she said she had expected something of
the sort. Miss Winchelsea was careful to spare her own feelings after
that, but Fanny was less circumspect.