That was only one of several such incidents. After a series of them, he positively hated the sight of ravishing creatures: an obvious enough case of sour grapes. If a lovely young thing asked him the way to the Coliseum, or the baths of Caracalla, he was downright rude to her; and at the discovery of a bevy of beautiful girls who were dining at the next table to his and Miss Thingumabob’s in the hotel, he would become as morose as a hypochondriac. He would listen in torment to the delicious voices, the charming and fatuous conversation, the amusing attempts to speak Italian with the bored old waiter, who vastly preferred to conduct the meal in English; and then, when the agony became no longer endurable, he would plead a headache to old Miss Thingumabob and retire to his room. His trip to Italy was being ruined. Absolutely ruined.
He bore it, nevertheless, with fortitude; and he was careful (he insisted) to remain scrupulously polite to his extraordinary companion. What else, indeed, could he do? Duty was duty, the work had to be done, but he was not the sort that sulks. He was unhappy, but he behaved like a perfect gentleman. Day after day, therefore, they rushed from place to place, cataloguing and photographing; and he simply tried to forget that this was, after all, Italy, attempting to see it as simply a corner of his blessed museum. And he comforted himself with the thought that some day, at last, it would come to an end.
It did: but not before it had culminated, for Hamerton, in what he termed a “moment.” He had a singular theory about moments—he believed that one’s life consisted of at most half a dozen moments of supreme experience, or perhaps not even as many as that. There might be nothing to show for these moments—they might be simply an instant of acute awareness, or of misery, or of exaltation. You never knew when they were coming, or whether you would have the courage to seize them by the tail as they flew. A great deal depended on this matter of courage. Hamerton said that it was a source of perpetual anxiety to him that he was rather timid about these things. Several such crises had come and gone, and he had remained supine before them—paralyzed, hypnotized, fascinated, but unable to act or to feel with sufficient speed and self-forgetfulness. The chief requisite was a complete and glorious recklessness, a sublime willingness to risk one’s whole life, one’s sanity, one’s everything; and all for the very dubious pleasure of being able to say, afterward, that you had so jeopardized yourself. He told me of one such moment which had occurred when he had just reached the ripe age of ten. He was enthralled, at that time, by the sea and by ships. He used to haunt the wharves of the New England seaport town in which he lived, keeping, in a notebook, a list of the names of all the ships he encountered. One day he talked with the captain of a coal barge, and asked whether small boys like himself ever got a chance to go to sea. The captain surprised him by saying that if he would bring with him half a dozen books and fifteen or twenty old magazines (the captain seems to have been something of a reader) he could come aboard and sail to Norfolk, Virginia. Hamerton was electrified. He spent the night in a fever, selected six books, tied up a bundle of old magazines (which he found in the attic), and felt that he was already as good as at sea. But somehow or other he never went near that particular wharf till the barge had gone. And the moment was irretrievably lost.
That was the kind of thing he meant; and his singular trip to Italy was destined, for all its unpromising beginning, to provide him with a really first-rate example—a brilliant and unique specimen. It happened in Rome. He and Miss Thingumabob used Rome as a kind of “support”—they would dash away from it to some obscure hilltown, where they had heard rumors of some priceless item hidden away in a church crypt, and then, having tracked down this phoenix of Etruscan beauty, or discovered it to be a myth, they would dash back again. They always stayed at the same hotel, a small one in the Piazza Barberini, which had the great advantage of being cheap. They had been to it a half dozen times, in all; and on the eve of their final departure from Italy they returned to it once more. On this particular occasion they had come from Assisi, and the return journey had been brightened and blighted for Hamerton, in about equal proportions, by the fact that the train was filled, simply filled, with beautiful English girls. There were about fifteen of them, and they were all entrancing—very free-and-easy, smoking cigarettes, sophisticated, charmingly dressed. They literally swarmed over the train, chattering like sparrows. Hamerton had gone to sleep, finally, in sheer self-defense. With old Miss Thingumabob sitting opposite him, bolt upright, mercilessly eager to assimilate every detail of Italian life as revealed in the sliding landscape (and terrifyingly intelligent about it), he couldn’t bear to look at them.
Imagine his delight and horror, therefore, when he discovered, on arriving at the Hotel Concordia, that the fifteen beautiful English girls, every one of them, had preceded him. There they were, swarming around the bewildered old concierge, quarreling with three or four taxi drivers, darting in and out of the portico—they had simply taken possession of the poor old Concordia. It was exactly, he said, as if a flock of Brazilian parakeets, or birds of Paradise, vociferous of tongue and hued like the rainbow, should suddenly take possession of a bare little tree in the Public Gardens of Boston, Massachusetts; just as brilliant, and just as surprising. The Concordia was at once changed for him. It became a place of more than tropic beauty and luxury—it glowed, it sang, it vibrated, it positively rocked, with color and light. The bare corridors, with their coconut-fiber mats and potted palm trees, had formerly seemed dreary to him; but now they were full of mystery and wonder; overtones hummed in them, perfumes raced through them; and he wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if the gray walls had suddenly blossomed. The hotel had acquired a soul.
For the first time since the arrival in Italy, he was ridiculously happy. He sang as he washed in the little washbowl which was all that his room afforded; it was the same room that he had once before, but now he felt an outburst of deep affection for it. He looked out into the dark courtyard at the back, surrounded by tenements with high balconies, and saw the camellia tree standing there in the moonlight. There it was, in bloom, and there, as usual, were the innumerable cats who used its shadow for their nocturnal assignations. How he had hated those cats! But now, he almost loved them. An indefinable magic, emanating from the fifteen English girls, had touched and altered everything. He put on a clean shirt and the most splendid of his neckties, and sauntered down to the dining room, feeling exalted and powerful, like Jason approaching the golden fleece.
But alas, everything went wrong. Miss Thingumabob had forestalled him; she had already arrived, and she had already taken a table; she was sitting there, dressed in decent black, like the Sibyl herself; and worst of all, the Brazilian parakeets had been assigned to the long table at the extreme opposite end of the long room. There was absolutely nothing to be done about it—he groaned to himself and sat down; and for once he allowed his feelings to overcome his manners. He was unable to say a word. Miss Thingumabob tried one topic after another, with her usual unconquerable brightness, but to all of them he was wearily unreceptive. The Coliseum by moonlight, she suggested? No, he was too tired. A concert at the Augusteo? Heaven forbid; he was sick of these Italian audiences, and their childish habit of booing and hissing and jumping up on their seats. He never wanted to see another Italian as long as he lived. A café in the Piazza di Venezia, with perhaps a cassata ala Siciliana? Miss Thingumabob obviously played what she thought was a trump card in this, for she knew his passion for cassatas; but even to this he turned a deaf ear. He wanted his parakeets—he wanted to sit near them and see them, he wanted to listen to their delicious gossiping chatter, to see them come and go in the lounge, reading guidebooks and magazines, pulling the bright silk scarfs over their shoulders, smoking their English cigarettes, and glancing eagerly about them with their beautiful English-blue eyes. That was all he wanted—and he wanted to be able to do it alone. He wanted to be rid of Miss Thingumabob. He urged her, therefore, to go along to the Augusteo—she could take a cab, and it would be quite simple and quite safe. Perfectly. He found himself becoming really oratorical on the subject, in the hope of making it obvious to Miss Thingumabob that he wanted, for once, to be by himself. Perhaps, if she realized this, she would be offended, and go to her room. But he had no luck. She merely sighed and smiled and gave him up; realized, with excessive reasonableness and good nature, that he must, after so hard a day, be very tired; it would indeed be better for both of them to spend a quiet evening in the library, talking things over.