Roman Pictures

I FOUND myself loitering by that pretty little Fountain of the Tortoises, not for the first time; but this time (it was an afternoon of late April, long years ago) I looked stupidly at the boys and the tortoises and the dripping water, with a wish in my mind for something more. But what? I had drifted hither and thither about Rome, from the Gate of the People to the Baths of Caracalla—drifted day after day in my solitude through a month of April more divinely blue and golden than the first spring-days of the world; and whether I was in the body or out of the body I scarcely knew, for I moved in a great bubble of imagination that I had never known the like of in all the years (perhaps twenty) of my life before I came to Rome. I had escaped from the poor chamber of myself; for the imagination I dreamed and revelled in was surely none of my own. It was of the spirit of all time, livelier, lovelier than I could say, a power and a freedom that a rather lean young soul, ignorantly aspiring, may enter into and take possession of unconsciously, without an effort—in Rome.

But I do remember lingering about the Fountain of the Tortoises at last, between sun and shadow, with a wish that something now, something or some one, would break into my solitude and my dream; not that I was tired of either, but because my dream and my solitude would be still more beautiful if I could look at them for an hour across an interval, across the kind of division that is created by—yes, exactly!—by the sight to which I presently raised my eyes, turning away from the dapple and ripple of the fountain. A young man, passing across the square, met my blank gaze at this moment and suddenly threw out a sign of recognition; and I saw with surprise that it was my precious Deering, of whose presence in Rome I had been quite unaware. Deering it was!—after four or five lonely weeks, in which I had never happened to see a face that I knew, it was Deering who linked me to the real world again by crossing the Square of the Tortoises at that hour of that afternoon. I had left my shining bubble in a flash (he hadn’t noticed it) and joined hands with common life.

We weren’t really on terms of intimacy; but in the strangeness of Rome our little English acquaintance had the air of a cordial friendship. I gushed over with a warmth that surprised me and that would have been impossible at home; the fountain and the palaces and the Roman sunshine had pushed me forward into a familiarity that I shouldn’t have ventured upon elsewhere. He was of my own age, but so much more exquisite and mannerly that I looked raw indeed at his side; I was an aspiring amateur, he was a citizen of the world. At school I had tried to avoid him, because I had courted (vainly, vainly) the society of the more fashionably and the less refined; but I was eager enough to seize him by both hands in my new freedom and to take advantage of his riper experience. “Why, Deering—!” He did look experienced, with his broad-brimmed hat and his neat black clothes, as I moved towards him and directed my greeting, a little too effusively.