Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 6
VI
One of them was an American sculptor of French extraction, or remotely perhaps of Italian, for he wore like a charm, in the Roman air, his fine name of Gloriani. He was a man of forty, he had been living for years in Paris and in Rome, and he now drove an active trade in sculpture of the ingenious or sophisticated school. In his youth he had had money; but he had spent it recklessly, much of it scandalously, and at twenty-six had found himself obliged to make capital of his talent. This was quite inimitable, and fifteen years of indefatigable exercise had brought it to perfection. Rowland admitted its power, though it gave him very little pleasure; what he relished in the man was the extraordinary vivacity and frankness, not to call it the impudence, of his opinions. He had a definite, practical scheme of art, and he knew at least what he meant. In this sense he was almost too knowing. There were so many of the æsthetic fraternity who were floundering in unknown seas, without a notion of which way their noses were turned, that Gloriani, conscious and compact, unlimitedly intelligent and consummately clever, helpful only as to his own duties, and at once gracefully deferential and profoundly indifferent to those of others, had for Rowland an effect of refreshment quite independent of the character of his works. These were considered by most people to belong to a very extravagant, and by many to a thoroughly depraved type. Others found in them strange secrets of the plastic and paid huge prices for them; and indeed to be able to point to one of Gloriani's figures in the best light in your library was tolerable proof that you were not a fool. Of an art that had wandered far they freely spoke, and of a taste that was the latest fruit of time. It was the artist's opinion that there is no essential difference between beauty and ugliness; that they overlap and intermingle in a quite inextricable manner; that there is no saying where one begins and the other ends; that hideousness grimaces at you suddenly from out of the very bosom of loveliness, and beauty blooms before your eyes in the lap of vileness; that it is a waste of wit to nurse metaphysical distinctions and a sadly meagre entertainment to caress imaginary lines; that the thing to aim at is the expressive and the way to reach it is by ingenuity; that for this purpose everything may serve and that a consummate work is a sort of hotch-potch of the pure and the impure, the graceful and the grotesque. Its prime duty is to amuse, to puzzle, to fascinate, to report on a real aesthetic adventure. Gloriani's effects, elegant and strange, exquisite and base, made no appeal to Rowland as a purchaser, but the artist was such an independent spirit, and was withal so deluged with orders, that this signified nothing for their friendship. This highly modern master was a free and vivid talker, whose phrase seemed ever to have in it, if not the touch of the brush, at least the print of the expert thumb. He might have been, facially, for firmness, one of his own expensive bronzes, and when sometimes he received you at his lodging he introduced you to a lady without art of utterance whom he called Madame Gloriani — which she was not.
Rowland's second guest was also an artist, but of a very different type. His friends called him Sam Singleton; he was an American, and he had been in Rome a couple of years. He painted small landscapes, chiefly in water-colour; Rowland had seen one of them in a shop window, had liked it extremely and, ascertaining his address, had gone to see him and found him established in a very humble studio near the Piazza Barberini, where apparently fame and fortune had not yet come his way. Rowland, treating him as a discovery, bought several of his pictures; Singleton made few speeches, but was intensely grateful. Rowland heard afterwards that when he first came to Rome he painted worthless daubs and gave no promise of talent. Improvement had come, however, hand in hand with patient industry, and his talent, though of a slender and delicate order, was now incontestable. It was as yet but scantily recognised and he had hard work to hold out. Rowland hung his little water-colours on the library wall, and found that as he lived with them he grew very fond of them. Singleton, short and spare, was made as if for sitting on very small camp-stools and eating the tiniest luncheons. He had a transparent brown regard, a perpetual smile, an extraordinary expression of modesty and patience. He listened much more willingly than he talked, with a little fixed grateful grin; he blushed when he spoke, and always offered his ideas as if he were handing you useful objects of your own that you had unconsciously dropped; so that his credit could be at most for honesty. He was so perfect an example of the little noiseless devoted worker whom chance, in the person of a moneyed patron, has never taken by the hand, that Rowland would have liked to befriend him by stealth. Singleton had expressed a yearning approval of Roderick's productions, but he had not yet met the young master. Roderick was lounging against the chimney-piece when he came in, and Rowland presently introduced him. The visitor stood as a privileged pilgrim, with folded hands, blushing, smiling and looking up as if Roderick had been himself a statue on a pedestal. He began to murmur something about his pleasure, his admiration; the desire to say something very appreciative gave him almost an air of distress. Roderick looked down at him surprised, and suddenly burst into a laugh. Singleton paused a moment and then, with an intenser smile, went on: "Well, sir, your work's most interesting, all the same!"
Rowland's two other guests were ladies, and one of them, Miss Blanchard, belonged also to the artistic fraternity. She was an American, she was young, she was pretty, and had made her way to Rome alone and unaided. She lived alone, or with no other duenna than a bushy-browed old serving-woman, though indeed she had a friendly neighbour in the person of a certain Madame Grandoni, who in various social emergencies lent her a protecting wing and had come with her to Rowland's dinner. Miss Blanchard had a small fortune, but she was not above selling her pictures. These represented generally a bunch of dew-sprinkled roses, with the dew-drops very highly finished, or else a wayside shrine and a peasant woman, with her back turned, kneeling before it. She did backs very well, but was a little weak in faces. Flowers, however, were the chief of her diet, and, though her touch was a little old-fashioned and finical, she painted them with remarkable skill. Her pictures were chiefly bought by the English. Rowland had made her acquaintance early in the winter, and as she kept a saddle horse and rode a great deal he had asked permission to be her cavalier. In this way they had become informal allies. Miss Blanchard's name was Augusta; she was slender, pale and elegant; she had a very pretty head and brilliant auburn hair, which she braided with classic simplicity. She talked in a sweet soft voice, inclined to the flower of speech scarcely less than to that of the garden, and made literary allusions. These had often a patriotic strain, and Rowland had more than once been treated to quotations from Mrs. Sigourney in the cork-woods of Monte Mario, and from Mr. Willis among the ruins of Veii. Rowland was of a dozen different minds about her, and was half surprised at times to find himself treating it as a matter of serious moment that he should like her or not. He admired her, and indeed there was something exemplary in her combination of beauty and talent, of isolation and self-support. He used sometimes to go into the little high-niched ordinary room which served her as a studio, to find her working at a panel six inches square, by an open casement, profiled against the deep blue Roman sky. She welcomed him with a meek-eyed dignity that made her seem a painted saint on a church window receiving the daylight in all her being. The breath of vulgar report passed her by with folded wings. And yet Rowland wondered why he could n't like her better. If he failed, the reason was not far to seek. There was another woman whom he liked better, an image in his heart which gave itself small airs of exclusiveness.
On that evening to which allusion has been made, when Rowland was left alone between the starlight and the waves with the sudden knowledge that Mary Garland was to become another man's wife, he had taken after a while the simple resolution to forget her. And every day since, like a famous philosopher who wished to abbreviate his mourning for a faithful servant, he had said to himself in substance: "Remember to forget Mary Garland." Sometimes it seemed as if he were succeeding; then suddenly, when he was least expecting it, he would find her name inaudibly on his lips and seem to see her eyes meeting his eyes. All this made him uncomfortable and seemed to plant he scarce knew what ugly danger on the brow of the future. False positions were not to his taste; he shrank from imperious passions, and the idea of finding himself jealous of an unsuspecting friend could only disgust him. More than ever then the path of good manners was to forget Mary Garland, and he cultivated oblivion, as we may say, in the person of Miss Blanchard. Her fine temper, he said to himself, was a trifle cold and conscious, her purity prudish perhaps, her culture pedantic. But since he was obliged to turn the image of the girl in far New England with its face to the wall, his dull star owed him a compensation, and he had fits of angry sadness in which it seemed to him that to attest his right to sentimental satisfaction he should indulge in some defiantly incongruous passion. And what was the use, after all, of bothering about a possible which was only perhaps a dream? Even if Mary Garland had been free, what right had he to assume that he should have pleased her? The actual was good enough. Miss Blanchard had beautiful hair, and if she was a trifle old-maidish there was nothing like the conjugal tie for curing that deformity.
Madame Grandoni, who had formed with the companion of Rowland's rides an alliance which might have been called defensive on the part of the former and attractive on that of Miss Blanchard, was a thoroughly ugly old lady, highly esteemed in Roman society for her homely benevolence and her shrewd and humorous good sense. She had been the widow of a German archæologist who came to Rome in the early ages as attaché of the Prussian legation on the Capitoline. Her acuteness had failed her but on a single occasion, that of her second marriage. This occasion would have demanded a double dose of it, but these are by general consent not test cases. A couple of years after her first husband's death she had accepted the hand and the name of a Neapolitan music-master ten years younger than herself and with no fortune but his fiddle-bow. The union had proved a union of exasperated opposites, and the Maestro Grandoni was suspected of using the fiddle-bow as an instrument of conjugal correction. He had finally run off with a prima donna assoluta, who, it was commonly hoped, had given him a taste of the quality implied in her title. He was believed to be living still, but he had shrunk to a small black spot in Madame Grandoni's life, and for ten years she had not mentioned his name. She wore a light flaxen wig, which was never very artfully adjusted; but this mattered little, as she made no secret of it. She used to say "I was not always so ugly as this; as a young girl I had beautiful golden hair, very much the colour of my wig." She had worn from time immemorial an old blue satin dress and a white crape shawl embroidered in colours; her appearance was ridiculous, but she had an interminable Teutonic pedigree, and her manners in every presence were easy and jovial, as became a lady whose ancestor had been cup-bearer to Frederick Barbarossa. Thirty years' observation of Roman society had sharpened her wit and given her an inexhaustible store of anecdote; but she had beneath her crumpled bodice a deep-welling fund of Teutonic sentiment, which she communicated only to the objects of her particular favour. Rowland had a great regard for her, and she repaid it by wishing him to offer somebody his hand, which she called his hant. She never saw him without whispering to him that Augusta Blanchard was just the somebody.
It seemed to him indeed a foreshadowing of matrimony to see Augusta Blanchard stand gracefully on his hearth-rug and bloom behind the central bouquet at his circular dinner-table. The dinner was very prosperous, and Roderick amply filled his position as hero of the feast. He had always an air of dauntless intention, but on this occasion he manifested a good deal of harmless pleasure in his glory. He drank freely and talked bravely; he leaned back in his chair with his hands in his pockets and flung open the gates of his eloquence. Singleton sat gazing and listening open-mouthed, as if Phœbus Apollo had been talking. Gloriani's fine smile showed the light of general scepticism and an evident disposition to draw Roderick out. Rowland had his apprehensions, for he knew that theory was not his young friend's strong point and that it was never fair to take his measure from his mere magnificence of speech.
"As you 've begun with Adam and Eve," said Gloriani, "I suppose you 're going straight through the Bible." He was one of the persons who thought Roderick delightfully fresh.
"I may make a David," said Roderick, "but I shall not try any more of the Old Testament people. I don't like the Jews; I like the big nose, as any sculptor must, but only the Christian, or still better the pagan, form. David, the boy David, is rather an exception; you can think of him and treat him as a young Greek. Standing forth there on the plain of battle between the contending armies, rushing forward to let fly his stone, he looks like a beautiful runner at the Olympic games. After that I shall skip to the New Testament. I mean to make a ripping Christ."
"You will put nothing of the Olympic games into him, I hope," said Gloriani.
"Oh, I shall make him very different from the Christ of tradition; more— more—" And Roderick paused a moment to think. This was the first that Rowland had heard of his so oddly described Christ.
"More rationalistic, I suppose," suggested Miss Blanchard.
"More idealistic!" cried Roderick. "The perfection of form, you know, to symbolise the perfection of spirit."
"For a companion-piece," said Miss Blanchard, "you ought—since a sculptor 'must' like the big nose—to make a Judas."
"Never! I mean never to make anything ugly. The Greeks never made anything ugly, and I 'm a Hellenist; I 'm not a Hebraist! I have been thinking lately of making a Cain, but I should never dream of making him ugly. He should be a very handsome fellow indeed, and he should lift up the murderous club with the beautiful movement of the fighters in the Greek friezes who are chopping at their enemies."
"There's no use trying to be a Greek," said Gloriani. "If Phidias were to come back he would recommend you to give it up—he 'd send you about your business. I 'm half Italian and half French, and, as a whole, an abandoned cosmopolite. What sort of a Greek should I be? I think the Judas is a capital idea for something. Much obliged to you, madam, for the suggestion. What an insidious little scoundrel one might make of him, sitting there nursing his money-bag and his treachery! There may be a great deal of interest in an ugly nose, my dear sir—especially if one has put it there."
"You mean there may be a great deal of character. Very likely," said Roderick, "but it 's not the sort of character I care for. I care only for beauty of Type—there it is, if you want to know. That 's as good a profession of faith as another. In future, so far as my things don't rise to that in a living way, you may set them down as failures. For me it 's either that or nothing. It 's against the taste of the day, I know; we 've really lost the faculty to understand beauty in the large ideal way. We stand like a race with shrunken muscles, staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted. But I don't hesitate to proclaim it—I mean to lift them again! I mean to go in for big things; that 's my notion of my art. I mean to do things that will be simple and sublime. You shall see if they won't be sublime. Excuse me if I brag a little; all those Italian fellows in the Renaissance used to brag. There was a sensation once common, I 'm sure, in the human breast—a kind of religious awe in the presence of a marble image newly created and expressing the human type in superhuman purity. When Phidias and Praxiteles had their statues of goddesses unveiled in the temples of the Ægean, don't you suppose there was something more than a cold-blooded, critical flutter? The thing that there was is the thing I want to bring back. I want to thrill you, with my cold marble, when you look. I want to produce the sacred terror; a Hera that will make you turn blue, an Aphrodite that will make you turn—well, faint."
"So that when we come and see you," said Madame Grandoni, "we must be sure and bring our smelling-bottles. And pray have a few sofas conveniently placed."
"Phidias and Praxiteles," Miss Blanchard remarked, "had the advantage of believing in their goddesses. I insist on believing, for myself, that the pagan mythology is n't to be explained away by a ruthless analysis, and that Venus and Juno and Apollo and Mercury used to come down in a cloud into this very city of Rome where we sit talking nineteenth-century English."
"Nineteenth-century nonsense, my dear!" cried Madame Grandoni. "Mr. Hudson may be a new Phidias, but Venus and Juno—that 's you and I—arrived to-day in a very dirty cab; and were cheated by the driver too."
"But, my dear fellow," objected Gloriani, "you don't mean to say you are going to make over in cold blood those poor old academic bugbears, the prize bores of Olympus. 'Turn blue'?—they may make us indeed! Only Canova has so thoroughly shown them how that there 's nothing left for you."
"Ah, I think I could have shown Canova how," Roderick gaily rejoined. "It won't matter a rap what you call them—you 'll just know them for more than mortal. They shall be simply divine forms. They shall be Beauty; they shall be Wisdom; they shall be Power; they shall be Genius; they shall be Daring. That 's all the Greek divinities were."
"That 's rather depressingly abstract, you know," said Miss Blanchard.
"Cher beau jeune homme," Gloriani remarked, "there 's only one thing in the world that 's divine for us—which is to be twenty-five years old. You're delightfully young!"
"Isn't that indeed just it?" Singleton echoed with a flush of sympathy across his large white forehead. "You can do anything in the world, Mr. Hudson, that you try."
"Well, there are all the Forces and Elements and Mysteries of Nature," Mr. Hudson assentingly pursued. "I mean to do the Morning; I mean to do the Night! I mean to do the Ocean and the Mountains, the Moon and the West Wind. I mean to make a magnificent image of my Native Land."
"Your native land, your native mountains—why not say at once your native moon? You do make it shine on us!" Gloriani kindly laughed.
"I shall—and it will make you at least mad!" Roderick returned with expression. "My figures shall make no contortions, but they shall mean a tremendous deal."
"I 'm sure there are contortions enough in Michael Angelo," said Madame Grandoni. "Perhaps you don't approve of him."
"Ah, why drag him in?" the young man reminiscently cried; at which they were none of them too stale of spirit to laugh. He had done, after all, some fine things.
Rowland had bidden one of the servants bring him a small portfolio of prints and had taken out a photograph of Roderick's little statue of the drinking youth. It pleased him to see his friend sitting there in radiant ardour, defending idealism against so knowing an apostle of the sophisticated, and he wished to help Gloriani to be confuted. He silently handed him the photograph.
"Bless me!" cried his guest. "Did he go and do this?"
"Oh, ages ago," said Roderick.
Gloriani looked at the photograph a long time and with evident admiration. "It's deucedly pretty," he declared at last. "But, my dear young friend, it 's a kind of thing you positively can't keep up, you know."
"I shall do better," said Roderick.
"You 'll do worse. You 'll do it on purpose. This thing was n't done on purpose. It could n't have been. You 'll have at any rate to take to violence, to contortions, to romanticism, in self-defence. Your beauty, as you call it, is the effort of a man to quit the earth by flapping his arms very hard. He may jump about or stand on tiptoe, but he can't do more. Here you jump about very gracefully, I admit; but you can't fly; there 's no use trying."
"My colossal 'America' shall answer you!" said Roderick, shaking towards him a tall glass of champagne and drinking it down.
Singleton had taken the photograph and was poring over it with a little murmur of delight. "Was this done in America?" he asked.
"In a square white wooden house at Northampton Mass," Roderick answered.
"Dear old white wooden houses!" said Miss Blanchard. "Dear old Northampton, dear old 'Mass'!"
"If you could do as well as this there," said Singleton blushing and smiling, "one might say that really you had only to lose by coming to Rome."
"Our host's to blame for that," said Roderick. "But I 'm willing to risk the danger."
The photograph had been passed to Madame Grandoni, whose eyeglass had the handle of a warming-pan. "It resembles," she said, "the things a young man used to do whom I knew years ago, when I first came to Rome. He was a German, a pupil of Overbeck and a votary of spiritual art. He used to wear a black velvet tunic and a very low shirt-collar; he had a neck like a sickly crane and he let his hair grow down to his shoulders. His name was Herr Schafgans. He never painted anything so profane as a man taking a drink, for none of his people had anything so vulgar as an appetite. They were all angles and edges—they looked like diagrams of human nature. They were figures if you please, but geometrical figures. He would n't have agreed with Gloriani any more than you. He used to come and see me very often, and in those days I thought his tunic and his long neck infallible symptoms of genius. His talk was all of gilded aureoles and beatific visions; he lived on weak wine and biscuits and wore a lock of Saint Somebody's hair in a little bag round his neck. If he was not a Beato Angelico it was not his own fault. I hope with all my heart that Mr. Hudson will do the fine things he talks about, but he must bear in mind the history of dear Mr. Schafgans as a warning against high-flown pretensions. One fine day this poor young man fell in love with a Roman model, though she had never sat to him, I believe, for she was a buxom, bold-faced, high-coloured creature, and he painted none but pale and sickly women. He offered to marry her, and she looked at him from head to foot, gave a shrug and consented. But he was ashamed to set up his ménage in Rome. They went to Naples, and there, a couple of years afterwards, I saw him. The poor fellow was ruined. His wife used to beat him, and he had taken to drinking. He wore a ragged black coat and had a blotchy red face. Madame had turned washerwoman and used to make him go and fetch the dirty linen. There was nothing, unfortunately, to be done, in the 'doing-up' way, with his genius—that would n't 'wash,' and he was getting his living by painting views of Vesuvius in eruption on the little boxes they sell at Sorrento."
"Moral: don't fall in love with a buxom Roman model," said Roderick. "I 'm much obliged to you for your story, but I don't mean to fall in love with any one."
Gloriani had possessed himself of the photograph again and was looking at it curiously. "Ah, you 'll have been young, par exemple—you 'll have been young!" he exclaimed with almost confessed envy. "It 's the only case I 've ever known of genius in the cradle."
The two sculptors continued to play with paradox after dinner, and Rowland left them at it where, in a corner of the drawing-room, the vague white presence of Roderick's Eve, above them in the shaded lamplight, might have been that of the guardian angel of the young idealist. Singleton was listening to Madame Grandoni, and Rowland took his place on the sofa near Miss Blanchard. They had a good deal of familiar desultory talk; every now and then Madame Grandoni turned round at them. Miss Blanchard at last asked Rowland certain questions about Roderick—who he was, where he came from, whether it was true, as she had heard, that Rowland had discovered him and brought him out at his own expense. Rowland answered her questions; to the last he gave a vague affirmative. Finally, after a pause, looking at him, "You 're most awfully splendid, you know to be so generous," Miss Blanchard said. The tribute was offered with extreme directness, but it brought to Rowland's sense neither delight nor confusion. He had heard something like it, and yet so unlike, before; he suddenly remembered the grave sincerity with which Mary Garland had told him he was generous while he strolled with her in the woods on the day of Roderick's picnic. They had pleased him then; now he asked Augusta Blanchard if she would n't have tea.
When the two ladies withdrew he went with them to their conveyance. Coming back to the drawing-room he paused outside the open door; he was struck by the group formed by the three men. They were engaged in discussion of the so admirable Eve, and the author of the figure had lifted up the lamp and was showing different parts of it to his companions. He was talking with the confidence that never failed and yet never betrayed him—the lamp light covered his head and face. Rowland stood looking on, for the group appealed to him by its romantic symbolism. Roderick, bearing the lamp and glowing in its radiant circle, seemed the beautiful image of a genius which combined sincerity with power. Gloriani, with his head on one side, pulling his long moustache like a genial Mephistopheles and looking keenly from half-closed eyes at the lighted marble, represented art with a mixed motive, skill unleavened by faith, the mere base maximum of cleverness. Poor little Singleton, on the other side, with his hands behind him, his head thrown back and his eyes following devoutly the course of Roderick's charming extravagance, might pass for an embodiment of aspiring candour afflicted with feebleness of wing. In all this Roderick's was certainly the beau rôle.
Gloriani turned to Rowland as he came up; he pointed back with his thumb to the statue, his smile half sardonic and half sympathetic. "A pretty thing—a devilish pretty thing. It 's as fresh as the foam in the milk-pail. He can do it once, he can do it twice, he can do it at a stretch half a dozen times. But—but—!"
He was returning to his former refrain; Rowland intercepted him. "Oh, he 'll keep it up—you see I 'm here to make him!"
Gloriani had obviously a high vision of his own consistency, and he liked interesting young men to be consistent with that. Roderick had taken this in with his bright clear face; he was floating on the tide of his happy magniloquence. Now, suddenly, however, he turned with a flash of irritation in his eye and demanded in a ringing voice: "In a word then you prophesy that I shall fizzle out?"
Gloriani answered imperturbably, patting him kindly on the shoulder. "My dear fellow, passion burns out, inspiration runs to seed. Some fine day every artist finds himself sitting face to face with his lump of clay, with his empty canvas, with his sheet of blank paper, waiting in vain for the revelation to be made, for the Muse to descend. He must learn to do without the Muse! When the fickle jade forgets the way to your studio, don't waste any time in tearing your hair and meditating on suicide. Come round and see me, and I 'll show you how to console yourself."
"If I break down," said Roderick passionately, "I shall stay down. If the Muse deserts me she shall at least have her infidelity on her conscience."
"You 've no business," Rowland interposed to Gloriani, "to talk lightly of the Muse in this company. Mr. Singleton too has received pledges from her which place her constancy beyond suspicion." And he pointed out on the wall, near by, two small landscapes by the modest water-colourist.
The sculptor examined them with deference, and Singleton himself began to laugh nervously; he was all active with hope that the great Gloriani would be pleased. "Yes, these are fresh too," Gloriani said; "extraordinarily fresh. How old are you?"
"Twenty-six, sir," said Singleton.
"For twenty-six they 're famously fresh. They must have taken you a long time; you work slowly."
"Yes, unfortunately I work very slowly. One of them took me six weeks, the other two months."
"Upon my word the Muse pays you long visits." And Gloriani turned and looked from head to foot at so unlikely an object of her favours. Singleton smiled and began to wipe his forehead very hard. "Oh, you," said the sculptor—"you 'll keep it up!"
A week after his dinner Rowland went into Roderick's studio and found him sitting before an unfinished piece of work with his head in his hands. He might have fancied that the fatal hour foretold by Gloriani had already of a sudden struck. Roderick rose with sombre decision, flinging down his tools. "It 's no use," he said; "I give it up!"
"What's the matter?"
"I 've struck a shallow! I was sailing, as you may have seen, before as stiff a breeze as ever was. But for the last day or two my keel has taken to grinding the bottom."
"You 've come upon a difficult bit?" Rowland asked with a sympathetic inflexion and looking vaguely at the roughly-modelled figure.
"Oh, it 's all difficult bits! But it 's not the poor old clay. The difficult bit is here!" And Roderick struck a blow on his heart. "I don't know what 's the matter with me. Nothing comes; all of a sudden I hate things. My old things look ugly; everything looks asinine."
Rowland was at first, but only at first, disconcerted. He was in the situation of a man who had been riding a blood-horse at a steady elastic gallop and of a sudden felt him stumble or shy. But he bethought himself that if half the "lift" of intercourse with Roderick was his having fine nerves he himself had no right to enjoy the play of the machine—which was quite definitely what he did enjoy—without some corresponding care for it and worry about it. He immediately recognised the present hour as the very ground of his original act. He saw why he had risked it; he felt a flood of comradeship rise in his heart which would float them both safely through the worst weather. "Ah, you 're simply tired. Of course you 're awfully tired," he said. "You 've a right to be awfully tired."
"Do you think I 've a right to be awfully tired?" Roderick looked at him rather wanly askance.
"Unquestionably, after all you 've done."
"Well, then, right or wrong, I am dog-tired. I really must have done a fair winter's work. I want a big change."
Rowland declared that it was certainly high time they should have a big change, time they should be leaving Rome. They would go north and travel. They would go to Switzerland, to Germany, to Holland, to England. Roderick assented, his eye brightened, and Rowland talked of a dozen things they might do. Roderick walked up and down; he seemed to have something to say which he hesitated to bring out. He hesitated so rarely that Rowland wondered and at last asked him what was on his mind. Roderick stopped before him, frowning a little.
"I 've such unbounded faith in your extraordinary nature," he said, "that I believe nothing I could ever say would ever offend you."
"Well, try!"
"Dunque," Roderick continued, "I think my journey will do me more good if I take it alone. I need n't say I prefer your society to that of any man living. For the last six months it has been a fund of comfort. But I 've a feeling that you 're always expecting something of me, that you 're measuring my doings by a terrifically high standard. You 're watching me, my dear fellow, as my mother at home watches the tea-kettle she has set to boil, and the case is that somehow I don't want to be watched. I want to go my own way; to work when I choose and to be a fool, to be even a wretch, when I choose, and the biggest kind of either if necessary. It 's not that I don't know what I owe you; it 's not that we 're not the best friends in the world. It 's simply—it 's simply—!"
"It 's simply that I bore you," said Rowland.
Roderick sounded his eyes to a depth that almost hurt him. It was as if he were probing for safety. Well, he should have it. Rowland met this long look, and then his friend laughed. "Go and amuse yourself better too!"
Rowland grasped him by the hand. "I 'll do exactly what you desire. I shall miss you, I need n't assure you, and I dare say you 'll occasionally give a howl, even, for me. But I 've only one request to make—that if you get into trouble of any kind whatever you 'll immediately let me know."
They began their journey, however, together, crossing the Alps side by side, muffled in one rug, on the top of the Saint-Gothard coach. Rowland was going to England to pay some promised visits; his companion had no plan save to ramble through Switzerland and Germany as fancy should guide him. He had money that would outlast the summer; when it was spent he would come back to Rome and find the golden mood again awaiting him there. At a little mountain village by the way Roderick declared that he would stop; he would scramble about a little in the high places and doze in the shade of the pine-forests. The coach was changing horses; the two young men walked along the village street, picking their way between dunghills, breathing the light cool air and listening to the plash of the fountain and the tinkle of cattle-bells. The coach overtook them, and then Rowland, as he prepared to mount, felt an almost overmastering reluctance.
"Say the word," he exclaimed, "and I 'll stay with you."
Roderick looked almost black. "Ah, that shows you don't really believe in me—as distinguished from believing in yourself."
Poor Rowland flushed, hesitating but an instant. "Yes, I 'm afraid there 's no doubt I do believe, where you are concerned, in myself. But 'go it' then, and buon divertimento. Good-bye!" Standing in his place as the coach rolled away, he looked back at his friend lingering by the roadside. A great snow mountain behind Roderick was beginning to turn pink in the sunset. The slim and straight young figure waved its hat with a sort of mocking solemnity. Rowland settled himself in his place, reflecting, after all, that this was a salubrious beginning of independence. Roderick was among forests and glaciers, leaning on the pure bosom of nature. And then—and then—was it not in itself a guarantee against folly to be engaged to Mary Garland?