A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error Read online

  The prince slapped his leg. “Anna,” he said, “you tell us. Your mother is terrible, she knows everything.”

  The principessa said that this required pencil and paper, and Constanza ran to touch the bell.

  “It was Luigino who told me about the dark,” said Constanza, who took a detached interest in the truth of things. “He says he doesn’t like it, it cuts his working day.” Luigino was the prince’s tenant, a cobbler who occupied a shop and living space on the ground-floor. “It’s cold in the street now and it costs more in the wineshop if you sit longer.”

  The prince crowed. His wife looked all attention. “You should take her on your committee, Anna,” he said. “What do you know about the bottiglieria, my ragamuffin?”

  “I go there with Cosima to get charcoal,” said Constanza.

  “A good way to get to know her Rome,” said the principessa. “She cannot start too early.”

  The prince did not try to take this in too much. His sisters used to be taken up the Pincio in a carriage and home again before sundown. “Ah, well,” he said, “she’s your business, you’re the mother.”

  “Papa, the Luigini have to take the soup to the bottiglieria be-cause they have no chairs. There’s no room to put them, the bed is so big. All the Luigini sleep in one bed. I have a bed of my own to sleep in, you have a bed of your own, mama has a bed of her own——”

  The prince roared again. “That’s because your mother is an American,” he said, “that’s the American way.”

  “I know,” said Constanza, “because Americans are richer than Italians. I knew that. Papa, is that why we live in a whole palazzo?”

  The principessa said quickly, “Your father’s family have always lived in this house.”

  “How long is always?”

  The prince hugged his daughter. “The parroco is going to tell you that when the time comes for you to go to catechism.”

  “I was only speaking of the Quattrocento,” said the principessa. She was smiling but her plans were revolving round education.

  •

  Anna Howland had enjoyed an excellent New England education herself. For her time, as she would add ruefully, for she had just not gone to college. (She was born in the early eighteen-seventies.) Everything else that could be done by way of exemplary governesses, art-masters, music-masters, lectures and tutoring by her own learned father, had been done. Anna had a good mind and set store by it and very likely it would have been over-rated anywhere because she was possessed of a fine memory, inherited from her father; in the environment into which she had pleased to cast herself, she was regarded as an intellectual giant, a role which she accepted without a tremor of self-consciousness. Anna’s father had been a constitutional lawyer and later on held judicial office in his own state. He had retired early to give himself entirely to writing and research. One of his brothers—they were a close-knit family—was a man of letters of considerable distinction, another held a chair of modern history. The Howlands also had some more mercantile connections and in a quiet way without making many bones about it they were soundly and amply prosperous. The white and columned house Anna was brought up in was not only architecturally full of grace, it was charming inside and had comforts and refinements such as she did not find again in her future life until she managed to introduce them there herself. The elder Howlands were liberals, Republicans (of course), inclined towards Agnosticism, Darwin, and all of them, men and women, were articulately concerned with the moral and political future of mankind. Anna was raised on Jefferson and her father’s passionate devotion to the rule of law; she scarcely remembered her mother (having been a late-born child) but knew that she had done early battle for women’s rights. Her father had admired Lincoln—a contemporary—known him, done work under him. When Anna was a girl, the events which gave rise to the Gettysburg Address were part of people’s living memory, as close to them as the events behind Winston Churchill’s speeches are still to us, and so it was that even she, a child growing up on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States in the Eighteen-Seventies and Eighties, heard a good deal about war and the threat of war.

  Her father and uncles, who had seen it, came to loathe it. The American Civil War they held to have been forced upon men of good will to preserve a cause; the Franco-Prussian War that followed it so soon they saw as a cold-blooded clash of two false causes, based on despotic calculations, nationalism and mob response, and thus wholly wrong as well as of incalculable consequences. Modern war, they argued, as it was plain for everyone to see, had become so diabolical, so destructive, so incompatible with ethics, Christian teaching, Nineteenth-Century thought or mere common sense as to be as unthinkable for men to use against one another as putting one another into a pot to boil and eat. They also saw, being honest men, that very few people anywhere saw anything of the kind. Confronted by the evidence of battle-ship and sabre rattling from across the ocean, they had to revise their hopes and some of their written work since both of these had been based on a belief in progress and the perfectibility of man.

  In their own lives the Howlands were in most respects civilized as well as virtuous; they believed in, and practised, absolute commercial probity, tolerance, the arts, charity, good manners. They also believed in absolute domestic respectability. Yet their children were brought up most gently. Their freedom of thought and action was never questioned; the first because thought must be free, the second because their children were trusted. So Anna’s youth was pleasant as well as interesting, and quite a fair part of it was skating and dancing and sailing. Anna, who professed to have worshipped her father, was always a great reader. She had absorbed a decent amount of history, but what she enjoyed most was literature: Shakespeare, some Dante, Molière, Victor Hugo, and most of all Scott, Thackeray and Dickens. Byron she condemned, though she was open to his spell; Dickens she loved placidly. She knew great chunks of all of them by heart, as did the rest of the family and in the winters they read to each other aloud. If Anna’s home life lacked anything (except of course a mother after she was four or five), it was brothers. They were all girls. But her sisters—so very much older than herself—married early and soon there were brothers-in-law in the house and to visit. One sister married a man in banking, the other one in the U.S. Diplomatic Service. Anna was the prettiest of the Howland girls. She was very pretty. Very fair, with fine light hair and delicate features, small hands and feet, a fine waist, a slender figure and a graceful bearing but the overall impression she gave was one of elegance and presence. Nor did she lack in height; if she was not noticeably tall in her own land, she was to appear so in Europe. From the first she had a very good sense of clothes. She did not spend an unconscionable amount of thought or time on the whole business—she did spend quite a deal of money—but throughout her life both people who knew or cared little about such things and people who knew minutely would remark on how well Anna dressed. With that she was never anything but wonderfully groomed, exquisitely neat, and always, as a girl, a woman, near old age, she looked inescapably, imperturbably, embarrassingly, ladylike.

  If Anna’s father appears to have been very much a man of a pattern of a time and place—a good pattern admittedly—it is possible that there was more to him than that. His writings for one thing, if one comes across them, are still readable. That he had a lawyer’s mind is evident in every line, but if a lawyer’s mind means an ability to grasp facts and their implications, a gift of exposition and a willingness to see the other side, then a lawyer’s mind is an asset indeed for any writer. What is more surprising is to find, in these not very voluminous tomes, irony, an element of compassion, a curt absence of verbiage, and wit. A good deal of wit. The author emerges as a man much nearer in spirit to Anatole France than to Emerson. His daughter always claimed that he had been a most amusing man; reading him one can believe her.

  There was also a hint—Anna called it a shadow—that although appearances were never as much as scratched, he had not been entirely happy in his marriage.


  When Anna was sixteen she was sent to Switzerland and also for a while to Florence to be finished. She came back, beautifully polished in her languages and rather in love with Italy, and began to keep house for her papa. She did it very well.

  They entertained mostly elderly men, but there were plenty of aunts and cousins and Anna did not go short of balls. She delighted in society and what it offered her: admiration, talk, the sight of pretty rooms, clothes, lights, decorous living at a festive pitch. Anna excelled in charades, and she was also something of a flirt. One year she went to London to stay with the sister whose husband was posted there. In New England Anna had been made much of; here, she was taken up by a set and turned into the centre of a raving fashion. London made her feel that the world was at her feet. She enjoyed it vastly, but as the most natural thing; not in conceit but as part of the glory of life.

  She returned the next June and the magic was unabated. After only a few years of this life her father caught first pleurisy, then pneumonia, then died. Anna was stricken. For some weeks she remained immured in the family house, refusing relatives, friends, consolation. She wrote that she was going to leave the world, she would join some missionary order. As she knew next to nothing about such organizations, the project hung fire. Meanwhile her sister succeeded in persuading her to come and make her home with them in London. Youthful resilience did the rest. A short year later Anna met her future husband by one of the Italian lakes.

  She was fascinated to be meeting a real Roman, born in what she liked to call the Eternal City and to which she had never been. The prince, a very young prince then, was a handsome enough fellow and, though he did not stand much higher than she did in his shoes, he had the head of a young man of a renaissance bust, and on this occasion must have proved himself persuasive. He was his own master, his father as it happened having been killed in a shooting accident not long ago, and was now the head of his house; Anna, though not quite of age, had no-one to say her nay. All that was required of her from her side was to marry for love. The wedding was in London from her sister’s house and such of the Italian relatives who undertook the journey showed themselves enchanted with the arrangements made. They were highly pleased with what they saw and with all that was being done for them. Indeed, high pleasure all round appears to have been the first keynote of Anna’s new life.

  The house, noble, shuttered, peeling, stood in a backstreet in the papal quarter between the Tiber and the Farnese Square. It was her home, it was everything she had ever imagined, and she loved it.

  Anna succumbed to Rome at sight. It overwhelmed her as nothing had ever done before and this seemed to touch something in her nature; while her new relations, her husband’s mother and the young sisters and their circle fell for her. They admired her looks, her ways, her dresses, her liveliness and initiative. They were as nice to her as they knew how, and very affectionate, and they shrieked with laughter and appreciation at everything she said the livelong day, and tried to do all she wished. It must have been very very different from what one has heard and read—gospel truth no doubt—of foreign brides subdued in the unheated houses of the Catholic European Aristocracy. No-one gambled away or tied up her dowry, no old lady told her that such was the Will-of God, no-one attempted to tell her how she must behave. Rome is not Ravenna, nor Westphalia nor the Touraine, and in any case Anna was Anna. It was she who soon ruled the roost and everybody the merrier for it. Her husband’s mother, the old principessa as they called her after her son’s marriage, was a woman of simple heart and mind and of great good-nature. She saw Anna’s entering their lives as a kind of blessed apparition, a fair paragon from a fabled land for whom nothing was too fine. Whenever she had the chance she would follow this precious creature about, hobbling after her swift passage through the flight of drawing-rooms. Anna responded graciously and was rewarded by the knowledge that she was filling the old lady’s declining years with glamour and contentment.

  Anna must have brought a goodish bit of money; but it, or a fair part of it, must have been hers to spend. And spend she did, on hospitality, on the roof, the gardens, on her new family, on herself, on charities. . . . Anna was always generous. As to the religious question, that had hardly stirred a ripple. It must have been obvious as soon as they had thought of marriage that Anna would have to enter the Roman Catholic Church. This she did. We know from many curious and authenticated tales how christened savages adapt in their practices and their minds the new religion to their old beliefs. Saint Anthony can be seen sporting Aztec feathers in many a village church in Central America. In just such a way the principessa must have amalgamated her conversion, if that is the right word. Inherited Puritanism, her father’s Agnosticism, misty private Transcendentalism and formal adherence to the Catholic Creed appear to have floated swimmingly one into the other and flowed on in a harmonious stream of organ music, clever talk, enlightenment, righteousness, tradition and the veiled vague immanence of God. Those entrusted with her spiritual welfare may have acted with the kind of discretion exercised by the Missionary Fathers towards the Guatemalan Indians, what is certain is that Anna got away with it. If anything, it was she who was a little surprised by the lack of formality in the observances of her entourage. If she had expected to be led to High Mass in the Sistine Chapel leaning on her husband’s arm, she was disappointed. They all went, she found, singly, more or less round the corner and at inconspicuous hours. Soon she established her own custom, which was to set out in mid-morning with her maid and a mantilla made of the softest of black lace to some church that had caught her fancy or her favour.

  Rico, her husband, naturally had his part in the scheme of things. If he was out a good deal, at his club, riding, shooting, doing things with men, in Umbria looking after his estate, Anna had been used at home to not having the menfolk underfoot all day, and it suited her own habits. When she saw him he was usually in fine good humour—at times he could brood a little—and he, too, laughed a lot at what she said and did, and would not interfere. When she said they ought to have someone in to catalogue the library, he said very well, although he did not see that there was much to catalogue; he teased her about her endless daily sight-seeing but arranged the introductions to museum people she had asked him for; and whenever she gave a dinner-party for a French archaeologist, an English poet or dear Lady Gwendolyn who was wintering in Rome, he would be there and do his best. It was only when she tried to organize a musical evening that he flung up his hands and broke into a little dance of horror. No, no, no, cara—there’s better to be heard than that! She had been about to engage the wrong soprano. Anna caught on at once: her husband’s ear was better than her own, and she was wise enough to act on that new knowledge.

  She was aware that Rico was not clever—her word—but he was new to her and an exotic bird; and in some ways she was baffled. And of course he was absolutely devoted, she said, in fact he worshipped her.

  Soon she had gathered a whole devoted circle, First Secretaries with a taste of letters, elder diplomatists with a taste for pretty women, American girls she was called to chaperone, some very polished clergy, visitors of every kind and of course a large number of charming and delightful Italians who flirted a little with her and she with them and to whom she did not give a thought next morning.

  •

  It was this circle which stood Anna in good stead at the time she decided that her girl was to have the advantages—educationally—that she had had herself. It was said in Rome that the way to the principessa’s drawing-room lay through her daughter’s school-room. Middle-aged scholars, eminent in their field, took Constanza on botanical outings and architectural promenades, collected insects for her, brought her books; painters let her squeeze their colours; bright young men just down from Harvard or Oxford introduced her to Euclid, Tales from Chaucer, Latin grammar and the English kings. The French Naval Attaché talked French to her for an hour twice a week (Anna saw to it that all was quite regular and systematic). A gentleman from the Bolivi
an Legation kindly proposed himself for South American geography, but Anna discovered him to be shaky in his subject and put a stop to it. American history and Constitution Anna chose to take herself, and Constanza quite literally learnt of the pursuit of happiness at her mother’s knee.

  Only in matters of religious instruction did the principessa relinquish all authority, feeling in honour bound that she must leave this sphere, as she had promised, to the child’s paternal family. In consequence Constanza was visited, also twice a week, by their parish priest and made to learn a number of things by rote.

  As she grew older, the range widened. Her mother’s choices had proved wise or very lucky: Constanza all in all was taught extremely well. She was given a view of European history seen from many sides; literature was put into her hands in a way to fire her, she was helped to see and to connect art and told imaginatively of landscapes, cities, travel, ways of living; she learnt to grasp something of biology, economics, social history, the history of thought. . . . If the mentors came to please the mother, they stayed to educate Constanza. The girl had something that matched brilliance; she was as quick as a bird, and as live, and it all came easy to her, natural as life, as breathing, talking, reading, thinking, arguing, which indeed it was. She enjoyed being with people who knew things, she enjoyed logic and pulling questions apart and going to the heart of a matter and looking at more than one side. Everything fascinated her, to whatever they brought her there was resonance; teaching Constanza was like training a strong young player at tennis.

  The prince, when it became too evident, what with no needlework and Stendhal and John Stuart Mill littering up the drawing-room, that Constanza was not being led the way of an Italian daughter, shrugged and said what did it matter after all, she was only a girl. Let her mother have her way, poor woman, all alone in a strange country, it was the least they could do. Then he would laugh and add that it didn’t appear to be doing the bambina any harm, did it? And his mother and his sisters laughed too and agreed, and Constanza, who was growing more beautiful to look at every day, slid out of her grandmother’s embrace, exchanged one volley of words with her aunts, flung herself into an armchair—Anna’s importations—and got on with her book.