Jenny | Page 8

she looked as she lay with her sad, childish face on Jenny's shoulder, letting herself be fed by her friend. Ahlin sat and stared at her and Heggen played absent-mindedly with the match-ends.
"Have you been in town long, Mr. Gram?" he asked.
"I have taken to saying that I came from Florence this morning by train."
Jenny gave a polite little laugh, and Francesca smiled faintly.
At this moment a bare-headed, dark-haired woman with a bold, yellow, greasy face entered the room with a mandolin. She was accompanied by a small man in the threadbare finery of a waiter, and carrying a guitar.
"I was right, you see, Cesca," said Jenny, speaking as to a child. "There is Emilia; now we are going to have some music."
"That's jolly," said Helge. "Do the ballad singers really still go about here in Rome singing in the taverns?"
The singers tuned up "The Merry Widow." The woman had a high, clear, metallic voice.
"Oh, how horrid," cried Francesca, awakening; "we don't want that, we want something Italian - la luna con palido canto, or what do you think?"
She went up to the singers and greeted them like old friends - laughed and gesticulated, seizing the guitar, and played, humming a few bars of one or two songs.
The Italian woman sang. The melody floated sweet and insinuating to the accompaniment of twanging metal strings, and Helge's four new friends joined in the refrain. It was about amore and bacciare.
"It is a love song, is it not?"
"A nice love song," laughed Miss Jahrman. "Don't ask me to translate it, but in Italian it sounds very pretty."
"This one is not so bad," said Jenny. She turned to Helge with her sweet smile: "What do you think of this place? Is it not a good wine?"
"Excellent, and a characteristic old place."
But all his interest was gone. Miss Winge and Heggen spoke to him now and again, but as he made no effort to keep up a conversation, they began to talk art together. The Sweedish sculptor sat gazing at Miss Jahrman. The strange melodies from the strings floated past him - he felt that others understood. The room was typical, with a red stone floor, the walls and the ceiling, which was arched and rested on a thick pillar in the middle of the room, being distempered. The tables were bare, the chairs had green rush bottoms, and the air was heavy with the sourish smell of the wine barrels behind the counter.
This was artist life in Rome. It was almost like looking at a picture or reading a description in a book, but he was not in it - on the contrary, he was hopelessly out of it. As long as it was a question only of books and pictures, he could dream that he was a part of it, but he was convinced that he would never get in with these people.
Confound it - well, never mind. He was no good at associating with people anyway, least of all with people like these. Look at Jenny Winge now, how unconcernedly she holds the smeared glass of dark red wine. It was a revelation to him. His father had drawn his attention to the glass, which the girl in Barstrand's picture from Rome in the Copenhagen museum holds in her hand. Miss Winge would probably think it a poor picture. These young girls had probably never read about Bramante's courtyard in the Cancellaria - "this pearl of renaissance architecture." They might have discovered it one day by chance, when they went out to buy beads and finery, and had perhaps taken their friends to see this new delight, of which they had not dreamt for years. They had not read in books about every stone and every place, until their eyes could not see the beauty in anything, unless it exactly corresponded to the picture already in mind. They could probably look at some white pillars standing against the dark blue sky and enjoy the sight without any pedantic curiosity as to what temple they were part of and for what unknown god it had been built.
He had read and he had dreamed, and he understood now that nothing in reality was what he had expected it to be. In the clear daylight everything seemed grey and hard, the dream had enveloped the pictures of his fancy in a soft chiaroscuro, had given them a harmonious finish, and covered the ruins with a delicate green. He would now only go round and make sure that everything he had read about was really there, and then he would be able to lecture on it to the young ladies at the Academy, and say that he had seen it. Not a single thing would he have to tell them that he had discovered for