The Woman Who Did

Chapter 10

All happy times must end, and the happier the sooner. At one short

week's close they hurried on to Perugia.

And how full Alan had been of Perugia beforehand! He loved every

stone of the town, every shadow of the hillsides, he told Herminia

at Florence; and Herminia started on her way accordingly well

prepared to fall quite as madly in love with the Umbrian capital as

Alan himself had done.

The railway journey, indeed, seemed extremely pretty. What a march

of sweet pictures! They mounted with creaking wheels the slow

ascent up the picturesque glen where the Arno runs deep, to the

white towers of Arezzo; then Cortona throned in state on its lonely

hill-top, and girt by its gigantic Etruscan walls; next the low

bank, the lucid green water, the olive-clad slopes of reedy

Thrasymene; last of all, the sere hills and city-capped heights of

their goal, Perugia.

For its name's sake alone, Herminia was prepared to admire the

antique Umbrian capital. And Alan loved it so much, and was so

determined she ought to love it too, that she was ready to be

pleased with everything in it. Until she arrived there--and then,

oh, poor heart, what a grievous disappointment! It was late April

weather when they reached the station at the foot of that high hill

where Augusta Perusia sits lording it on her throne over the wedded

valleys of the Tiber and the Clitumnus. Tramontana was blowing.

No rain had fallen for weeks; the slopes of the lower Apennines,

ever dry and dusty, shone still drier and dustier than Alan had yet

beheld them. Herminia glanced up at the long white road, thick in

deep gray powder, that led by endless zigzags along the dreary

slope to the long white town on the shadeless hill-top. At first

sight alone, Perugia was a startling disillusion to Herminia. She

didn't yet know how bitterly she was doomed hereafter to hate every

dreary dirty street in it. But she knew at the first blush that

the Perugia she had imagined and pictured to herself didn't really

exist and had never existed.

She had figured in her own mind a beautiful breezy town, high set

on a peaked hill, in fresh and mossy country. She had envisaged

the mountains to her soul as clad with shady woods, and strewn with

huge boulders under whose umbrageous shelter bloomed waving masses

of the pretty pale blue Apennine anemones she saw sold in big

bunches at the street corners in Florence. She had imagined, in

short, that Umbria was a wilder Italian Wales, as fresh, as green,

as sweet-scented, as fountain-fed. And she knew pretty well whence

she had derived that strange and utterly false conception. She had

fancied Perugia as one of those mountain villages described by

Macaulay, the sort of hilltop stronghold

"That, hid by beech and pine,

Like an eagle's nest hangs on the crest

Of purple Apennine."

Instead of that, what manner of land did she see actually before

her? Dry and shadeless hill-sides, tilled with obtrusive tilth to

their topmost summit; ploughed fields and hoary olive-groves

silvering to the wind, in interminable terraces; long suburbs,

unlovely in their gaunt, bare squalor, stretching like huge arms of

some colossal cuttlefish over the spurs and shoulders of that

desecrated mountain. No woods, no moss, no coolness, no greenery;

all nature toned down to one monotonous grayness. And this dreary

desert was indeed the place where her baby must be born, the baby

predestined to regenerate humanity!

Oh, why did they ever leave that enchanted Florence!

Meanwhile Alan had got together the luggage, and engaged a

ramshackle Perugian cab; for the public vehicles of Perugia are

perhaps, as a class, the most precarious and incoherent known to

science. However, the luggage was bundled on to the top by Our

Lady's grace, without dissolution of continuity; the lean-limbed

horses were induced by explosive volleys of sound Tuscan oaths to

make a feeble and spasmodic effort; and bit by bit the sad little

cavalcade began slowly to ascend the interminable hill that rises

by long loops to the platform of the Prefettura.

That drive was the gloomiest Herminia had ever yet taken. Was it

the natural fastidiousness of her condition, she wondered, or was

it really the dirt and foul smells of the place that made her

sicken at first sight of the wind-swept purlieus? Perhaps a little

of both; for in dusty weather Perugia is the most endless town to

get out of in Italy; and its capacity for the production of

unpleasant odors is unequalled no doubt from the Alps to Calabria.

As they reached the bare white platform at the entry to the upper

town, where Pope Paul's grim fortress once frowned to overawe the

audacious souls of the liberty-loving Umbrians, she turned mute

eyes to Alan for sympathy. And then for the first time the

terrible truth broke over her that Alan wasn't in the least

disappointed or disgusted; he knew it all before; he was accustomed

to it and liked it! As for Alan, he misinterpreted her glance,

indeed, and answered with that sort of proprietary pride we all of

us assume towards a place we love, and are showing off to a

newcomer: "Yes, I thought you'd like this view, dearest; isn't it

wonderful, wonderful? That's Assisi over yonder, that strange

white town that clings by its eyelashes to the sloping hill-side:

and those are the snowclad heights of the Gran Sasso beyond; and

that's Montefalco to the extreme right, where the sunset gleam just

catches the hill-top."

His words struck dumb horror into Herminia's soul. Poor child, how

she shrank at it! It was clear, then, instead of being shocked and

disgusted, Alan positively admired this human Sahara. With an

effort she gulped down her tears and her sighs, and pretended to

look with interest in the directions he pointed. SHE could see

nothing in it all but dry hill-sides, crowned with still drier

towns; unimagined stretches of sultry suburb; devouring wastes of

rubbish and foul immemorial kitchen-middens. And the very fact

that for Alan's sake she couldn't bear to say so--seeing how

pleased and proud he was of Perugia, as if it had been built from

his own design--made the bitterness of her disappointment more

difficult to endure. She would have given anything at that moment

for an ounce of human sympathy.

She had to learn in time to do without it.

They spent that night at the comfortable hotel, perhaps the best in

Italy. Next morning, they were to go hunting for apartments in the

town, where Alan knew of a suite that would exactly suit them.

After dinner, in the twilight, filled with his artistic joy at

being back in Perugia, his beloved Perugia, he took Herminia out

for a stroll, with a light wrap round her head, on the terrace of

the Prefettura. The air blew fresh and cool now with a certain

mountain sharpness; for, as Alan assured her with pride, they stood

seventeen hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean. The

moon had risen; the sunset glow had not yet died off the slopes of

the Assisi hill-sides. It streamed through the perforated belfry

of San Domenico; it steeped in rose-color the slender and turreted

shaft of San Pietro, "Perugia's Pennon," the Arrowhead of Umbria.

It gilded the gaunt houses that jut out upon the spine of the Borgo

hill into the valley of the Tiber. Beyond, rose shadowy Apennines,

on whose aerial flanks towns and villages shone out clear in the

mellow moonlight. Far away on their peaks faint specks of

twinkling fire marked indistinguishable sites of high hill-top

castles.

Alan turned to her proudly. "Well, what do you think of that?" he

asked with truly personal interest.

Herminia could only gasp out in a half reluctant way, "It's a

beautiful view, Alan. Beautiful; beautiful; beautiful!"

But she felt conscious to herself it owed its beauty in the main

to the fact that the twilight obscured so much of it. To-morrow

morning, the bare hills would stand out once more in all their

pristine bareness; the white roads would shine forth as white and

dusty as ever; the obtrusive rubbish heaps would press themselves

at every turn upon eye and nostril. She hated the place, to say

the truth; it was a terror to her to think she had to stop so long

in it.

Most famous towns, in fact, need to be twice seen: the first time

briefly to face the inevitable disappointment to our expectations;

the second time, at leisure, to reconstruct and appraise the

surviving reality. Imagination so easily beggars performance.

Rome, Cairo, the Nile, are obvious examples; the grand exceptions

are Venice and Florence,--in a lesser degree, Bruges, Munich, Pisa.

As for Umbria, 'tis a poor thing; our own Devon snaps her fingers

at it.

Moreover, to say the truth, Herminia was too fresh to Italy to

appreciate the smaller or second-rate towns at their real value.

Even northerners love Florence and Venice at first sight; those

take their hearts by storm; but Perugia, Siena, Orvieto, are an

acquired taste, like olives and caviare, and it takes time to

acquire it. Alan had not made due allowance for this psychological

truth of the northern natures. A Celt in essence, thoroughly

Italianate himself, and with a deep love for the picturesque, which

often makes men insensible to dirt and discomfort, he expected to

Italianize Herminia too rapidly. Herminia, on the other hand,

belonged more strictly to the intellectual and somewhat inartistic

English type. The picturesque alone did not suffice for her.

Cleanliness and fresh air were far dearer to her soul than the

quaintest street corners, the oddest old archways; she pined in

Perugia for a green English hillside.

The time, too, was unfortunate, after no rain for weeks; for

rainlessness, besides doubling the native stock of dust, brings out

to the full the ancestral Etruscan odors of Perugia. So, when next

morning Herminia found herself installed in a dingy flat, in a

morose palazzo, in the main street of the city, she was glad that

Alan insisted on going out alone to make needful purchases of

groceries and provisions, because it gave her a chance of flinging

herself on her bed in a perfect agony of distress and disappointment,

and having a good cry, all alone, at the aspect of the home where

she was to pass so many eventful weeks of her existence.

Dusty, gusty Perugia! O baby, to be born for the freeing of woman,

was it here, was it here you must draw your first breath, in an air

polluted by the vices of centuries!