Jacob's Room — Chapter 12, Part 1

CHAPTER TWELVE

The water fell off a ledge like lead--like a chain with thick white links.

The train ran out into a steep green meadow, and Jacob saw striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy.

A motor car full of Italian officers ran along the flat road and kept up with the train, raising dust behind it.

There were trees laced together with vines--as Virgil said.

Here was a station; and a tremendous leave-taking going on, with women in high yellow boots and odd pale boys in ringed socks.

Virgil's bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy.

It was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms.

Then at Milan there were sharp-winged hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figures over the roofs.

These Italian carriages get damnably hot with the afternoon sun on them, and the chances are that before the engine has pulled to the top of the gorge the clanking chain will have broken.

Up, up, up, it goes, like a train on a scenic railway.

Every peak is covered with sharp trees, and amazing white villages are crowded on ledges.

There is always a white tower on the very summit, flat red-frilled roofs, and a sheer drop beneath.

It is not a country in which one walks after tea.

For one thing there is no grass.

A whole hillside will be ruled with olive trees.

Already in April the earth is clotted into dry dust between them.

And there are neither stiles nor footpaths, nor lanes chequered with the shadows of leaves nor eighteenth-century inns with bow-windows, where one eats ham and eggs.

Oh no, Italy is all fierceness, bareness, exposure, and black priests shuffling along the roads.

It is strange, too, how you never get away from villas.

Still, to be travelling on one's own with a hundred pounds to spend is a fine affair.

And if his money gave out, as it probably would, he would go on foot.

He could live on bread and wine--the wine in straw bottles--for after doing Greece he was going to knock off Rome.

The Roman civilization was a very inferior affair, no doubt.

But Bonamy talked a lot of rot, all the same.

"You ought to have been in Athens," he would say to Bonamy when he got back.

"Standing on the Parthenon," he would say, or "The ruins of the Coliseum suggest some fairly sublime reflections," which he would write out at length in letters.

It might turn to an essay upon civilization.

A comparison between the ancients and moderns, with some pretty sharp hits at Mr. Asquith--something in the style of Gibbon.

A stout gentleman laboriously hauled himself in, dusty, baggy, slung with gold chains, and Jacob, regretting that he did not come of the Latin race, looked out of the window.

It is a strange reflection that by travelling two days and nights you are in the heart of Italy.

Accidental villas among olive trees appear;

and men-servants watering the cactuses.

Black victorias drive in between pompous pillars with plaster shields stuck to them.

It is at once momentary and astonishingly intimate--to be displayed before the eyes of a foreigner.

And there is a lonely hill-top where no one ever comes, and yet it is seen by me who was lately driving down Piccadilly on an omnibus.

And what I should like would be to get out among the fields, sit down and hear the grasshoppers, and take up a handful of earth--Italian earth, as this is Italian dust upon my shoes.

Jacob heard them crying strange names at railway stations through the night.

The train stopped and he heard frogs croaking close by, and he wrinkled back the blind cautiously and saw a vast strange marsh all white in the moonlight.

The carriage was thick with cigar smoke, which floated round the globe with the green shade on it.

The Italian gentleman lay snoring with his boots off and his waistcoat unbuttoned....

And all this business of going to Greece seemed to Jacob an intolerable weariness--sitting in hotels by oneself and looking at monuments--he'd have done better to go to Cornwall with Timmy Durrant....

"O--h," Jacob protested, as the darkness began breaking in front of him and the light showed through, but the man was reaching across him to get something--the fat Italian man in his dicky, unshaven, crumpled, obese, was opening the door and going off to have a wash.

So Jacob sat up, and saw a lean Italian sportsman with a gun walking down the road in the early morning light, and the whole idea of the Parthenon came upon him in a clap.

"By Jove!"

he thought, "we must be nearly there!"

and he stuck his head out of the window and got the air full in his face.

It is highly exasperating that twenty-five people of your acquaintance should be able to say straight off something very much to the point about being in Greece, while for yourself there is a stopper upon all emotions whatsoever.

For after washing at the hotel at Patras, Jacob had followed the tram lines a mile or so out; and followed them a mile or so back; he had met several droves of turkeys; several strings of donkeys;

had got lost in back streets; had read advertisements of corsets and of Maggi's consomme; children had trodden on his toes; the place smelt of bad cheese; and he was glad to find himself suddenly come out opposite his hotel.

There was an old copy of the Daily Mail lying among coffee-cups; which he read.

But what could he do after dinner?

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.

At the age of twelve or so, having given up dolls and broken our steam engines, France, but much more probably Italy, and India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluous imagination.

One's aunts have been to Rome; and every one has an uncle who was last heard of--poor man--in Rangoon.

He will never come back any more.

But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth.

Look at that for a head (they say)--nose, you see, straight as a dart, curls, eyebrows--everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs and arms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of development--the Greeks caring for the body as much as for the face.

And the Greeks could paint fruit so that birds pecked at it.

First you read Xenophon; then Euripides.

One day--that was an occasion, by God--what people have said appears to have sense in it; "the Greek spirit"; the Greek this, that, and the other; though it is absurd, by the way, to say that any Greek comes near Shakespeare.

The point is, however, that we have been brought up in an illusion.

Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion, the Daily Mail crumpled in his hand; his legs extended; the very picture of boredom.

"But it's the way we're brought up," he went on.

And it all seemed to him very distasteful.

Something ought to be done about it.

And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about to be executed.

Clara Durrant had left him at a party to talk to an American called Pilchard.

And he had come all the way to Greece and left her.

They wore evening-dresses, and talked nonsense--what damned nonsense--and he put out his hand for the Globe Trotter, an international magazine which is supplied free of charge to the proprietors of hotels.

In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge, beneath the windows.

The whole of civilization was being condemned.

The waiter was quite indifferent to that too.

Aristotle, a dirty man, carnivorously interested in the body of the only guest now occupying the only arm-chair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down, put something straight, and saw that Jacob was still there.

"I shall want to be called early to-morrow," said Jacob, over his shoulder.

"I am going to Olympia."

This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention.

Perhaps, as Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough.

Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish.

So have we for the matter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand.

He would go into Parliament and make fine speeches--but what use are fine speeches and Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters?

Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.

That respectability and evening parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray's Inn--something solid, immovable, and grotesque--is at the back of it, Jacob thought probable.

But then there was the British Empire which was beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of giving Home Rule to Ireland.

What did the Daily Mail say about that?

For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things--as indeed the chambermaid, emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys, studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids strewn on the dressing-table, was aware.

That he had grown to be a man was a fact that Florinda knew, as she knew everything, by instinct.

And Betty Flanders even now suspected it, as she read his letter, posted at Milan, "Telling me," she complained to Mrs. Jarvis, "really nothing that I want to know"; but she brooded over it.

Fanny Elmer felt it to desperation.

For he would take his stick and his hat and would walk to the window, and look perfectly absent-minded and very stern too, she thought.

"I am going," he would say, "to cadge a meal of Bonamy."

"Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames," Fanny cried, as she hurried past the Foundling Hospital.

"But the Daily Mail isn't to be trusted," Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read.

And he sighed again, being indeed so profoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud him at any moment, which was odd in a man who enjoyed things so, was not much given to analysis, but was horribly romantic, of course, Bonamy thought, in his rooms in Lincoln's Inn.

"He will fall in love," thought Bonamy.

"Some Greek woman with a straight nose."

It was to Bonamy that Jacob wrote from Patras--to Bonamy who couldn't love a woman and never read a foolish book.

There are very few good books after all, for we can't count profuse histories, travels in mule carts to discover the sources of the Nile, or the volubility of fiction.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two.

I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

I like words to be hard--such were Bonamy's views, and they won him the hostility of those whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up the window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can't forbear a shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature.

That was not Bonamy's way at all.

That his taste in literature affected his friendships, and made him silent, secretive, fastidious, and only quite at his ease with one or two young men of his own way of thinking, was the charge against him.

But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking--far from it, Bonamy sighed, laying the thin sheets of notepaper on the table and falling into thought about Jacob's character, not for the first time.

The trouble was this romantic vein in him.

"But mixed with the stupidity which leads him into these absurd predicaments," thought Bonamy, "there is something--something"--he sighed, for he was fonder of Jacob than of any one in the world.

Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets.

There he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into groups and gesticulating with their hands.

Their lack of concern for him was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction--it was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are.

Yet next day, as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia, the Greek peasant women were out among the vines; the old Greek men were sitting at the stations, sipping sweet wine.

And though Jacob remained gloomy he had never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to be alone; out of England; on one's own; cut off from the whole thing.

There are very sharp bare hills on the way to Olympia; and between them blue sea in triangular spaces.

A little like the Cornish coast.

Well now, to go walking by oneself all day--to get on to that track and follow it up between the bushes--or are they small trees?

--to the top of that mountain from which one can see half the nations of antiquity-- "Yes," said Jacob, for his carriage was empty, "let's look at the map."

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.

To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have--positively--a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang--there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often.

The evening air slightly moved the dirty curtains in the hotel window at Olympia.

"I am full of love for every one," thought Mrs. Wentworth Williams, "--for the poor most of all--for the peasants coming back in the evening with their burdens.

And everything is soft and vague and very sad.

It is sad, it is sad.

But everything has meaning," thought Sandra Wentworth Williams, raising her head a little and looking very beautiful, tragic, and exalted.

"One must love everything."

She held in her hand a little book convenient for travelling--stories by Tchekov--as she stood, veiled, in white, in the window of the hotel at Olympia.

How beautiful the evening was!

and her beauty was its beauty.

The tragedy of Greece was the tragedy of all high souls.

The inevitable compromise.

She seemed to have grasped something.

She would write it down.

And moving to the table where her husband sat reading she leant her chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her own beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write it down.

Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or foolish when he shut his book and put it away to make room for the plates of soup which were now being placed before them.

Only his drooping bloodhound eyes and his heavy sallow cheeks expressed his melancholy tolerance, his conviction that though forced to live with circumspection and deliberation he could never possibly achieve any of those objects which, as he knew, are the only ones worth pursuing.

His consideration was flawless; his silence unbroken.

"Everything seems to mean so much," said Sandra.

But with the sound of her own voice the spell was broken.

She forgot the peasants.

Only there remained with her a sense of her own beauty, and in front, luckily, there was a looking-glass.

"I am very beautiful," she thought.

She shifted her hat slightly.

Her husband saw her looking in the glass;

and agreed that beauty is important; it is an inheritance; one cannot ignore it.

But it is a barrier; it is in fact rather a bore.

So he drank his soup; and kept his eyes fixed upon the window.

"Quails," said Mrs. Wentworth Williams languidly.

"And then goat, I suppose; and then..."

"Caramel custard presumably," said her husband in the same cadence, with his toothpick out already.

She laid her spoon upon her plate, and her soup was taken away half finished.

Never did she do anything without dignity; for hers was the English type which is so Greek, save that villagers have touched their hats to it, the vicarage reveres it; and upper-gardeners and under-gardeners respectfully straighten their backs as she comes down the broad terrace on Sunday morning, dallying at the stone urns with the Prime Minister to pick a rose--which, perhaps, she was trying to forget, as her eye wandered round the dining-room of the inn at Olympia, seeking the window where her book lay, where a few minutes ago she had discovered something--something very profound it had been, about love and sadness and the peasants.

But it was Evan who sighed; not in despair nor indeed in rebellion.

But, being the most ambitious of men and temperamentally the most sluggish, he had accomplished nothing; had the political history of England at his finger-ends, and living much in company with Chatham, Pitt, Burke, and Charles James Fox could not help contrasting himself and his age with them and theirs.

"Yet there never was a time when great men are more needed," he was in the habit of saying to himself, with a sigh.

Here he was picking his teeth in an inn at Olympia.

He had done.

But Sandra's eyes wandered.

"Those pink melons are sure to be dangerous," he said gloomily.

And as he spoke the door opened and in came a young man in a grey check suit.

"Beautiful but dangerous," said Sandra, immediately talking to her husband in the presence of a third person.

("Ah, an English boy on tour," she thought to herself.

) And Evan knew all that too.

Yes, he knew all that; and he admired her.

Very pleasant, he thought, to have affairs.

But for himself, what with his height (Napoleon was five feet four, he remembered), his bulk, his inability to impose his own personality (and yet great men are needed more than ever now, he sighed), it was useless.

He threw away his cigar, went up to Jacob and asked him, with a simple sort of sincerity which Jacob liked, whether he had come straight out from England.