The Fragolata[1] was the last festivity of the season, and, on account of the originality and grace of the occasion and the charm of the late Roman April, many strangers had delayed their departure after even a very late Holy Week. Since the middle of March, in the first languors of a spring laden with delicate perfumes, there had been daily gaieties in gardens and the shady majestic parks, which still surround the Roman villas. The poesy of such re-unions, in the soft, clear afternoon hours in the avenues, when light steps have a seducing rustle; in the broad meadows, covered in emerald green, which slope towards the wooded distance, when the ladies’ bright dresses in the background make them appear like nymphs;—this penetrating poesy tempts every soul, even the most barren of feeling, and the least susceptible to visions of beauty.
[1] Strawberry feast.
In various ways Roman society, by fancy-dress balls, theatricals, kermesses, had called on public charity, Italian and foreign, to help in works of well-doing for so much of the suffering which society sees, feels, and, grieving for and seeing, tries every fashionable and crafty means to alleviate. In short, the idea had been hit on to close the season with a fragolata at the Villa Borghese on behalf of the foundlings. The suggestion ran swiftly from the Court to the embassies, from the tea-rooms to the big hotels, from the most select patrician clubs to the sport clubs; and people, tired of balls in over-heated rooms, of shutting themselves up in theatres, people fond of new sensations, learnt at first with a curiosity and later with impatience that a fragolata was being arranged at Villa Borghese, and that the most fascinating dames and damsels would sell the strawberries. Later, it was known that, as well as baskets of strawberries, there would be sold roses, since April was entering into May, and lovers of strawberries are lovers of roses. So the discussion was great at the last receptions and teas. The young men shrugged their shoulders with a pretence at being bored at another charity festivity. Some declared that they could not stand strawberries, some hated roses, and some declared that they were leaving before the fragolata, while others added maliciously that they would procure a false telegram to absent themselves. But the ladies laughed, shaking their heads, knowing that all their friends and lovers would come that afternoon under the majestic trees of the Villa Borghese to take from their white hands a leaf-full of strawberries or a bunch of fragrant roses. They only were afraid of bad weather—the protectors of abandoned infancy—but not of the hardness and indifference of the human heart before everything that was attractive and pleasant; strawberries, roses, women, at a beautiful time in lovely surroundings.
Nor was the sun’s smile wanting on that day for the fragolata; a sun not too hot, a light not too strong, a sky not of an intense, but a light blue, occasionally traversed and rendered whiter by a slow soft cloud, melting towards an unknown horizon where all clouds go one never sees again. On that day the Villa Borghese was not open to the public, and on its broad, undulating paths, around its thick woods and spreading lawns, around its fountains spouting and singing their lively and crystalline measure, around its temples and little casine, with all the windows closed as if no one had lived there for years, one heard no more the dull and irritating rumbling of a hundred hired carriages, which passed there five times a week, full of unknown faces where often one reads idiocy and perversion, or often one wants to read it, in the profound irritation of seeing the Villa Borghese, the sanctuary of beauty and poesy, violated by strangers.
Towards four o’clock the carriages kept on increasing. The troop of ladies dressed in white, in stuffs of spring-like softness, of young girls in summerish muslin, in straw hats covered with flowers, became thicker, and at that moment the fragolata presented an enchanting appearance. Under the wooded plateau of the Piazza di Siena, amidst thick groups of tall trees, with their shining, almost metallic, verdure, and yet transparent with the softness of May, a large counter had been placed, on whose white cloth bunches of roses and baskets of strawberries, most graceful rustic baskets, covered with favours and ribbons of soft colours, and all sorts of strawberries, big and small, were placed on broad fresh leaves. Behind the stall were five or six ladies, Donna Flaminia Colonna, Margherita Savelli, the Princess della Marsiliana, Countess Maria Santacroce, and Maria Guasco, whose care was the sale of the baskets.
Other ladies, especially the young ladies, carried around baskets of the early strawberries come from the mountain and the garden, offering them to the groups which kept forming little by little in increasing numbers. These amateur saleswomen are nearly all beautiful. There are Donna Teresa Santacroce, the liveliest and most seductive of Roman society girls; Miss Jenkins, an English girl, who seemed to have escaped from one of Lawrence’s pictures; Mademoiselle de Klapken, an irresistible Hungarian, and Stefania Farnese, with her white complexion, chestnut hair, smiling eyes and mouth, dressed in white like a Grecian Erigone.
Amidst the trees, scattered everywhere, are little tables covered with the whitest cloths, sprinkled with rose-leaves, and seats for the people to sit and taste the strawberries, while ladies offer milk, cream, and sugar. Little conversations take place politely without hurry or bustle, just as at a promenade or a dance, and the groups round the stall and the charming assistants around the little tables, which are gradually filled, form a phantasmagoria of colours which is renewed every moment, and assumes the most unexpected and delightful aspects for appreciative eyes.
The little tables are now all taken, and the luscious fruit bathed in cream and covered with sugar moisten beautiful lips. The men even yield to the seductions of the fine, fresh food. Everywhere baskets are offered and taken, and the fruit is poured into the plates and saucers. The girls offer roses, and roses are in every lady’s hands and in every lady’s waist. Bunches of roses are on every table, and every man has a rose in his buttonhole. Several foreign ladies, lovers of flowers, have their arms laden with them. One Frenchwoman has filled her parasol with them; an English girl of eighteen has placed a cluster of the freshest white roses under the rim of her straw hat and is the picture of happy youth.
Nevertheless, Maria Guasco, at her place as patroness behind the stall, bends her head of magnificent waving hair, beneath a large white hat with white feathers, and her thoughtful face over a large bundle of red roses, of intoxicating fragrance, which Stefania Farnese, the gay Erigone, had just given her. Her face is hidden among the red roses whose perfume she has always loved; that perfume, rich with every memory, gives her a silent emotion which fills her eyes for a moment with tears.
“What is the matter?” said Flaminia to Maria.
“Nothing,” she said, biting a rose-leaf.
“You are tired?”
“Yes, a little.”
“To-morrow you will rest.”
“And what shall I do after I have rested?” Maria asked, anxiously and sadly.
Flaminia did not reply, and an expression of pain was diffused over her beautiful, good-natured face. But again people throng round the fragolata stall and buy strawberries, and Donna Margherita Savelli, quite blonde beneath her hat of white marguerites, gathers the money into a purse of antique cloth of peculiar make, now quite full, whose silver strings she cannot tie.
“See, see, Flaminia, what a lot of money!” she cried joyfully.
Gianni Provana, who had been walking round for about an hour and had approached all the little tables a little superciliously and proudly, without sitting by any one, came and leaned over the stall, exchanging a word first with one and then with another of the lady patronesses, always cold and composed, with his monocle in its place and a slightly mocking smile on his mouth. He had no rose in his buttonhole, and his eyes every now and then settled on those which Maria was smelling long and silently.
“Well, Provana,” said Flaminia Colonna, “haven’t you tasted the strawberries?”
“Not one, I assure you. I don’t want to ruin my health.”
“What a wretch you are! Don’t you like strawberries?”
“They don’t agree with me, Donna Flaminia. I am getting old, and my digestion isn’t so good.”
“Are you in a bad temper, Provana?” Maria asked indifferently.
“Very, Donna Maria, and you too, I think?”
“Oh, I!” she said, with a nonchalant gesture.
“Still,” resumed Flaminia, to change the conversation, “you haven’t given a penny, heartless man, to abandoned infancy.”
“Not a penny. I don’t like babies.”
“What a wretch! Heaven will punish you. You will die tyrannised over by your housekeeper.”
“Certainly, Donna Flaminia. But I have still something to do before dying,” he added enigmatically, looking at Maria.
“What?” asked Flaminia.
“Not to buy your strawberries, which ruin every one’s skin, but to pay for a basket to please you.”
He extracts from his purse a note for a hundred francs, giving it to the beautiful treasurer, Margherita Savelli, who gives a cry of joy.
“O Flaminia, how kind this sham knave Provana is!”
“Most kind,” Flaminia replied, and she gives him her hand, which he touches with his lips gallantly.
Other people crowd round the stall, and Provana talks softly with Maria Guasco. She replies without looking at him, as if wrapt in her own deep, dominating thoughts, which are marked from eyebrow to eyebrow.
“Are you, too, interested in foundlings, Donna Maria?” he asked.
“Yes, very,” she replied vaguely.
“Well, will you give me one of those red roses, only one?”
The request is made with seeming disingenuousness, but she understood that the man was waiting for the reply attentively. The woman was silent, and smelled her roses.
“I will pay whatever price you like—for the foundlings,” he murmured suggestively.
“Why do you value it so?” she asked, looking at him.
“Because it is yours; because it has been in your hands, because you have put it near your face, and have placed it to your lips.”
The voice is lower and the expression more ardent. The woman had never heard the like from him before. She looked at him with melancholy curiosity, but free from anger.
“Maria, give me the rose,” and he attempted to take it gently from the bunch.
Maria drew back and looked at him, protecting her flowers.
“For whom, then, do you wish to keep the roses, Donna Maria?” he asked, half bitterly and ironically.
“I don’t know; I don’t know,” she replied, trembling.
“If you don’t give me one, to whom will you, Donna Maria?”
She let the roses fall and scatter on the table, all her face was disturbed with sudden pallor. Gianni Provana quietly took a rose which she had not given him—which he had gained in spite of her; but, instead of placing it in his buttonhole, he placed it with care in the inside pocket of his coat.
“Next to the heart,” he whispered.
A short, strident laugh was Maria’s only reply.
“How badly you laugh, Donna Maria!” he exclaimed, a little irritated.
“Like you,” she replied quietly.
“Come from behind the stall and let us take a walk together?” he asked.
His tone remained simple and disingenuous, but within there was a dull agitation, which the man restrained with difficulty.
“No,” she refused drily.
“And why? Aren’t you bored there? Don’t you see that every one is walking?”
“Yes: sweethearts with their lovers; girls with their flirts; wantons with their courtiers. We belong to none of these classes.”
“Hélas!” he exclaimed in French, to hide his bitterness, and took out his eye-glass and looked at her.
“Won’t you come then? The avenues are most beautiful, and it is a lovely sunset.”
She laughed again, with a mocking, malicious laugh.
He looked at her.
“I will return later on,” he said, softly withdrawing.
When he had gone she lent her head against the arm of her rustic chair, and shut her eyes as if mortally tired.
“What is the matter?” asked Flaminia.
There was no reply.
“Are you feeling ill, Maria?”
“No; I am sad and I am bored.”
“Are you very bored?”
“Immensely. I am bored and sad as no one has ever been bored and sad in this world.”
“What should one do to distract you, to make you cheerful?” she said, with sincere anxiety and pain.
“Nothing, dear, nothing,” replied Maria in a weak and monotonous voice; “love me a little; there is no need for anything else. That will console me.”
“However, that won’t amuse you,” said Flaminia frankly.
“But it helps me to live,” replied Maria sadly.
“Do you need help so much, dear?”
“So much, so much, to go on living!” the miserable woman replied desperately.
But the lugubrious conversation was interrupted by people coming and going. In the west the light took gentle sunset tints, and the whiteness and brightness of the ladies’ dresses seemed almost vaporous and transparent, while the beauty of their faces assumed a more indefinite and mysterious aspect. A languor fell from the sky, which kept growing whiter, and the voices became softer and slower.
“Come for a little walk,” said Gianni Provana, who had returned, waiting with infinite patience.
“Do go,” said Flaminia to her friend. “Provana, tell her something brisk and witty. Maria is so mortally bored.”
“Donna Maria, I will force myself to be full of wit!” he exclaimed, with a bow.
The woman made a movement of fastidiousness and nonchalance. Then she rose slowly from her place and replaced her cloak on her shoulders, and taking her white parasol where she had introduced some roses, without seeing if Provana was near or following her, started, after giving Flaminia a little tender embrace, telling her to wait for her till she should return.
Gianni Provana rejoined her and walked beside her. They went through the long avenue on the left, which leads from the top of the wood of the Piazza di Siena towards the back of the Villa Borghese. Others were walking near and far off in couples and groups, some talking softly, others joking and laughing, stopping to chatter better and laugh and joke; others were silent. The sunset rendered the avenue more melancholy, in spite of gay voices and peals of laughter.
Maria and Gianni Provana did not speak. She walked slowly, as if very tired.
“I am incapable of any wit near you, Donna Maria,” said Provana, after a little time.
“Don’t give yourself any trouble; it is useless.”
“Is it true that you are so mortally bored?”
“You know it, it seems,” she replied indifferently, far away.
“Once you told me that you found the strength to live in yourself, and only in yourself. Those were your words, I think. I didn’t understand them very well, but I remember them.”
“Yes, I said them once,” she murmured thoughtfully. “And it was true then; but now it is no longer true.”
“Why?”
“I have nothing more within me,” she replied desolately.
But she seemed to say it to herself more than to him.
“Try to interest yourself in something outside yourself,” he suggested insinuatingly and quietly, hiding the intense interest which agitated him.
“I have tried various things; and I haven’t succeeded in binding myself to anybody or anything.”
“How is that?”
“I have nothing to do with my life, that is all,” she concluded, coldly and gloomily, looking at the gnarled trunk of a very old tree.
He was silent and troubled.
“Still, two years ago in returning to your home——” he resumed.
“That tragic and grotesque farce has ended with my husband as the travesty of a hero, and with me as a travesty of a penitent!” she exclaimed with a sneer.
“O Donna Maria!” he exclaimed, shocked.
“You already know that Emilio hates and despises me,” she continued, with an increasingly mordant irony. “He must have told you. Among men you discuss these things.”
Provana was silent, but he had an air of agreeing.
“All this for having wished to pardon me, dear Provana. Pardon wasn’t in him, neither was it in me.”
“And why?”
“Because pardon is a great thing, when the soul remains great that accords it—a pardon complete and absolute; but in the other case what a miserable, humiliating, and insulting thing a pardon is!”
“In the other case?”
“Oh, Emilio is a poor creature!” she said, with a profound accent of disdain, shrugging her shoulders, and adding nothing further, as if she had said the last word about him.
“And you, and you, Donna Maria?”
“I? I owe to one of my usual exaltations having inflicted on my lively being one of the most unsupportable humiliations feminine pride can ever endure.”
She stopped, troubled and proudly pale, with eyes veiled in tears of indignation.
“You understand, I asked his pardon humbly. I prayed humbly for him to pronounce it with loyalty, to accord it fully and generously, I, Maria Guasco; and I wept, yes wept, before him, and endured his pardon; which was, instead of an absolution, an accusation, an inquiry, a daily condemnation.”
Fortunately, the two were far away from the others, and the violet tints of the sunset became deeper beneath the trees. The woman stopped, and made a supreme effort to stifle her sighs, to repress her tears, and compose her face.
“Please forget what I have told you,” she said imperiously to Provana, putting a hand on his arm.
“Why, then, why?” he exclaimed, becoming suddenly heated; “why do you like to treat me always as a man without a heart or a soul? Who gives you the right to treat me thus? Why must I always be considered by you as an enemy? Don’t you believe that I have fibre and feelings, like other human beings? Am I a monster? Why don’t you believe that I can understand you and follow you to the depths and speak a word of consolation, even I? Am I unfit, then, to be your friend?”
She was stupefied at this cry of sorrow, new and unthought of.
“Oh, let me be, Maria, let me be your friend. Do let me, that together our two souls may be healed, mine from cynicism and yours from discomfort and desolation. I ask you to let me be your friend, nothing else. I have been ill for so many years, from every mortal illness, and I thirst for good. You, too, Maria, have been so ill; let us seek some pleasure together.”
She felt that he was sincere at that moment, sincere as he had never been, as he never would be again. But she knew that there are no pleasures in life unless accompanied by devouring poisons. She knew that there are no succours and comforts between man and woman without mortal danger, and without fatal and mortal error. The truth, impetuous and brutal, rose in the woman’s words.
“Are you asking me to be your lover?”
He at once became cold, and replied—
“Yes.”
“I don’t wish to be,” she replied, turning her back, and replacing her cloak on her shoulders to resume their walk.
Gianni Provana did not frown nor change countenance.
“Still, it will be so.”
“Why?” exclaimed Maria disdainfully.
“Because now there is nothing else to be done,” he concluded composedly.
“Ah!” she interrupted; and she would have said more but kept silent, becoming absorbed and gloomy.
“You already know that your husband will not change his behaviour to you; your disagreement can’t help becoming intenser and deeper every day.”
She assented with a nod, becoming gloomier.
“You already know, you will have been told, that Marco Fiore has become enamoured of an actress, an actress with red hair, Gemma Dombrowska, and that perhaps he will go off with her as with you ... as with you.”
Bitterness, sarcasm, anger vibrate in every word of Gianni Provana as he follows the woman, persuading and persecuting her.
She bent her head in assent, because she knew.
“You see quite well!” he exclaimed in a hissing voice, “that there is nothing else for you in life, but to become my lover.”
A sense of fatality seemed to weigh on the woman’s life, which oppressed and squashed her. Evening had fallen in the avenues and it seemed like night. All the ladies who had still remained in the wooded lawns and avenues covered themselves with their cloaks and hurried their steps, accompanied by their cavaliers.
Farewells are exchanged, light laughter, and small cries, while the waiters denude the last tables, and the great stall of the fragolata is covered with squashed strawberries and withered leaves. Every one hurries to the gate in a kind of flight, leaving the wood behind filled with night, fearful in its solitude, where it seemed to be peopled with unknown phantoms.
Near the great gate Flaminia Colonna, Maria Guasco and Gianni Provana meet face to face Donna Vittoria Fiore, accompanied by her sister Beatrice. Marco Fiore’s wife had been at the fragolata all the afternoon, but as usual had kept herself in some far-off corner in the shadow of her sister, and had not approached the patronesses’ stall, nor had she participated at any of the little strawberry tables. She was there, at the threshold of Villa Borghese, behind her sister, who had advanced to call the carriage of Casa Fiore. She was there, with her little white closed face and eyelids lowered over eyes too clear and limpid, with the lower half of her face hidden in the feathers of her white boa. But at a certain moment her eyes are raised and meet those of Maria Guasco, pregnant with sadness and pride. Vittoria’s glance flashed as never before in unspeakable hate. Maria Guasco smiled and laughed, as bending towards Gianni Provana she said—
“Not so bad! not so bad! She at any rate has not pardoned me.”