Part 46 (1/2)
”Yes, I still am. I'm only in Rome for five days. But I won't be long in the States. I'll be on my way to China and the East.”
Livingstone was mildly interested. ”You don't say so! Well, you might really get there by starting off to New York. But I admit I don't see the connection. Why don't you take a P. and O. for India?”
”A little business to attend to first. A small inheritance to cash in on.”
”Inheritance!” cried Livingstone, sitting up straight. ”The very word makes my mouth water. Why doesn't that ever happen to me?” The expression on his face was like that of the loungers in front of the Cathedral when they heard the coin drop.
Through the lather of soap-suds on his face, Neale laughed, ”A very two-for-a-cent inheritance. An old great-uncle I hardly knew--never saw him but once or twice, years ago when I was a kid, left me his home and his little old-fas.h.i.+oned saw-mill and wood-working plant, back up at the end of nowhere in Vermont.”
”_No money!_” sympathized Livingstone. ”But then of course you can sell all that for _some_thing. But no real money at all?”
”There's what he had in the savings bank--about four thousand dollars, the executor writes. Just enough to do nothing at all with.”
Livingstone made a mental calculation. ”I wouldn't wonder if you might get fifty dollars a month out of the whole thing. And that's enough. Ma foi! That's enough if you cut corners a little. _I_ only have eighty-five. And then you can always give an occasional English lesson to piece out. You won't need ever to do a lick of work or ever live in the States. Mes felicitations! That's the life! You'll be knowing Europe as well as I do, next. How soon will you be back?”
”I'm not coming back,” said Neale, b.u.t.toning on a clean collar. ”When I've cashed in and got what I can out of my uncle's business I'm going overland to San Francisco, and from there to the East.”
Livingstone considered this, ”Well, they do say that Chinese cooking is super-excellent once you get used to it.”
”I'm not going for the cooking.”
”No? What _are_ you going for?”
”Oh, I don't know,” said Neale rather sharply. ”Because I feel like it.
Why shouldn't I?”
Livingstone perceived that he had run on a hidden reef and backed off.
”Don't you want to come on into the salon and let me present you to the crowd?” he asked standing up and moving towards the door. ”Since you were here some awfully nice people have come over from the Pension Alfierenti. Poor old Alfierenti died suddenly and his place is shut up for the present.”
”No, thanks,” said Neale. ”I'm going up on the roof for a smoke before I go to bed.”
”Oh, yes,” Livingstone remembered, ”you always did prefer the terrazza and your solitary pipe to the society of the ladies. Well, there is a nice view from up there; but between a view and a pretty girl who could hesitate?”
”Who, indeed?” said Neale dryly, going off up the stairs.
The plaster floor and low walls of the terrazza gleamed white and empty.
As Neale had hoped there was not a soul there. Below him spread the roofs and domes and streets of Rome, richly-colored even in the white light of the moon, hanging like a great lamp over the city.
He took the corner that had been his favorite before, in the black shadow cast by a thick-leaved grapevine, and perching on the edge of the wall, looked down meditatively on the city as he filled his pipe.
Well, so here he was in Rome--just as if something had pushed him here, where least of all places he had expected to find himself again. Odd that his year of travel should end with a second visit to the first European city that had stirred his imagination, that had given him a hint of what it was he had come to Europe to see. It was during his first stay in Rome that he stopped being a dumb, Baedecker-driven tourist, that he first got the idea of what Europe might teach him better than America could. It was here that he first thought of trying to get from Europe some idea of what men during a good many centuries had found worth doing.
For, unlike America, Europe was crammed full of objects little and big that men alone or in groups had devoted their lives to create. America had tried a number of experiments--once; but Europe had tried them all, so many times, at such different periods, in so many, so various centers of civilization! Such a crowded graveyard of human endeavor might perhaps suggest a satisfactory motive (if one existed) for going on living.
For a long time he had made no headway, had discovered no general underlying motive--indeed much of what he saw filled him with utter astonishment at the things men had cared for, even to the point of giving their lives to win them.
He still remembered that morning during his first stay, when he had stared with stupefaction at the rows of portrait-busts in the Capitoline Museum. So many men, most of them apparently intelligent had schemed and plotted through long years--and what for? To be the conventional head of an unworkable Empire, top-heavy with administration; to endure the hideous tedium of ceremony and pompous ritual which the office had imposed; to be forced to work through sycophants and grafters, to be exiled from healthy human life into a region where in the nature of things you could never hope to see one spontaneous sincere expression on any human face; where your life, your work, your reputation hung on the whim of the Praetorian Guard or the disgruntled legions on a distant frontier--why, if you lay awake nights you couldn't think of a more thankless job than being a Roman Emperor! And yet for centuries men had sacrificed their friends, their honor, their very lives to hold the office. Those old Romans, for all they looked so like ordinary everyday men you meet in the street, must have had a queer notion of what was worth-while in life!
Then he had left Rome and gone away without plan, anywhere the train would take him; and wherever he had gone he had walked about, silently attentive to what men had done with their lives. That was what he had been looking for as he walked around on battle-fields, or gazed up at Cathedrals or looked seriously at the statues thick-sown as the sands of the sea all over European cities; that was what he had been looking for as he sat alone in a pension bed-room reading a history or a biography that helped him fit together into some sort of a system all the diverse objects he had been considering.
Wherever he went, wherever he looked, he was like an archaeologist raking over an inexhaustible kitchen-midden--he was surrounded by relics of innumerable generations crowding the long centuries during which men had lived and died on this old continent. Perhaps if he looked hard enough at what they had left behind them he might find out what men really wanted to do with their lives--perhaps he might get some hint of what he could do with his own life.