After walking through small, damp and smelly streets they came into an open space in the sunlight. The ground was raked up at random; heaps of offal and rubbish lay between mounds of gravel; dilapidated old houses, some of them partly pulled down, with rooms showing, stood between classical ruins.
Passing some detached houses, which looked as if they had been forgotten in the general destruction, they reached the piazza by the Vesta temple. Behind the big, new steam-mill and the lovely little church with the pillared portico and the slender tower, the Aventino rose distinct against the sunny sky, with the monasteries on the hill, and dust-grey, nameless ruins among the gardens on the slope.
The thing that always gave him a shock—in Germany and in Florence—was that the ruins he had read about and imagined standing in a romantic frame of green leaves with flowers in the crevices, as you see them in old etchings or on the scenery in a theatre, were in reality dirty and shabby, with bits of paper, dented, empty tins and rubbish lying about; and the vegetation of the south was represented by greyish black evergreen, naked, prickly shrubs, and yellow, faded rushes.
On this sunny morning he understood suddenly that even such a sight holds beauty for those who can see.
Jenny Winge took the road between garden walls at the back of the church. The walls were covered with ivy, and pines rose behind them. She stopped to light a cigarette.
“I am a pronounced smoker, you see,” she said, “but I have to refrain when I am with Cesca, for her heart does not stand it; out here I smoke like a steam-engine. Here we are.”
A small, yellow house stood inside a fence; in the garden were tables and forms under big, bare elms, and a summerhouse made of rush stalks. Jenny greeted the old woman who came out on the doorstep.
“Well, Mr. Gram, what do you say to breakfast?”
“Not a bad idea. A cup of strong coffee and a roll and butter.”
“Coffee! and butter! Listen to him! No, eggs and bread and wine, lettuce and perhaps some cheese. Yes, she says she has cheese. How many eggs do you want?”
While the woman laid the table Miss Winge carried her easel and painting accessories into the garden, and changed her long, blue evening wrap for a short coat, which was soiled with paint.
“May I have a look at your picture?” asked Helge.
“Yes—I am going to tone down that green—it is rather hard. There is really no light in it yet, but the background is good, I think.”
Helge looked at the painting; the trees looked like big grease splashes. He could see nothing in it.
“Here’s breakfast coming. We’ll throw the eggs at her if they are hard. Hurrah, they aren’t!”
Helge was not hungry. The sour white wine gave him heartburn, and he could scarcely swallow the dry, unsalted bread, but Jenny bit off great chunks with her white teeth, put small pieces of Parmesan in her mouth, and drank wine. The three eggs were already done with.
“How can you eat that nasty bread without butter?” said Helge.
“I like it. I have not tasted butter since I left Christiania. Cesca and I buy it only when we are having a party. We have to live very economically, you see.”
He laughed, saying: “What do you call economy—beads and corals?”
“No; it is luxury, but I think it is very essential—a little of it. We live cheaply and we eat cheaply, tea and dry bread and radishes twice or three times a week for supper—and we buy silk scarves.”
She had finished eating, lit a cigarette, and sat looking in front of her, with her chin resting on her hand:
“To starve, you see, Mr. Gram—of course I have not tried it yet, but I may have to. Heggen has, and he thinks as I do—to starve or to have too little of the necessary is better than never to have any of the superfluous. The superfluous is the very thing we work and long for. At home, with my mother, we always had the strictly necessary, but everything beyond it was not to be thought of. It had to be—the children had to be fed before anything else.”
“I cannot think of you as ever having been troubled about money.”
“Why not?”
“Because you are so courageous and independent, and you have such decided opinions about everything. When you grow up in circumstances where it is a constant struggle to make ends meet, and you are always reminded of it, you sort of dare not form any opinions—in a general way—it is so tantalizing to know that the coins decide what you can afford to wish or to want.”
Jenny nodded pensively. “Yes, but one must not feel like that when one has health and youth and knowledge.”
“Well, take my case, for instance. I have always believed that I have some aptitude for scientific work, and it is the only thing I would like to do. I have written a few books—popular ones, you know—and I am now working at an essay on the Bronze Age in South Europe. But I am a teacher, and have a fairly good position—that of a superintendent of a private school.”
“You have come out here to work, to study—I remember you said so this morning.”
He did not answer, but continued: “It was the same thing with my father. He wanted to be an artist—wanted it more than anything else, and
