Helge smiled, embarrassed.
“Perhaps not, but we have some interests in common, and when one goes about without having anybody to talk to. …”
“Yes, but you must make up your mind to speak Italian; you know the language, don’t you? Come for a walk with me and we will talk Italian all the way. I shall be a very strict maestra, you will see.”
“Thank you very much, Miss Jahrman, but I am afraid you will not find me very entertaining—except unwittingly perhaps.”
“Rubbish! Look here, I’ve got an idea! Two old Danish ladies left for Capri the day before yesterday. Their room may be vacant still. I am sure it is. A nice little room and cheap. I don’t remember the name of the street, but I know where it is. Shall I go with you and have a look at it? Come along.”
On the stairs she turned round and smiled awkwardly at him:
“I was awfully rude to you the other evening, Mr. Gram. Please accept my apologies.”
“My dear Miss Jahrman!”
“I was out of sorts that day. You cannot imagine what a scolding I got from Jenny, but I deserved it.”
“Not at all. I was to blame for forcing my company upon you, but it was so tempting to speak to you when I saw you and heard that you were Norwegians.”
“Of course, an adventure like that could be great fun, but I spoilt it with my bad temper. I was ill, you see. My nerves worry me; I can’t sleep and I can’t work, and then I get horrid sometimes.”
“Are you feeling better now?”
“Not really. Jenny and Gunnar are working—everybody works but myself. Is your work getting on all right? Aren’t you pleased? Every afternoon I sit to Jenny for my picture. I am having a day off today. I think she does it only to prevent me from being alone with my thoughts. Sometimes she takes me for a ride outside the walls. She is like a mother to me—Mia cara mammina.”
“You are very fond of your friend?”
“I should think so! She is so good to me. I am delicate and spoilt, and nobody but Jenny could stand me in the long run. She is so clever too, intelligent and energetic. And pretty—don’t you think she is lovely? You should see her hair when it is let down! When I am good she lets me do it for her. Here we are,” she said.
They mounted a pitch-dark staircase.
“You mustn’t mind the stairs; ours are still worse: you will see for yourself when you pay us a visit. Come one evening. We’ll get hold of the others and all go for a proper rag. I spoilt the last one for you.”
She rang a bell on the top floor. The woman who opened the door looked nice and tidy. She showed them a room with two beds. It looked out over a grey backyard with washing hanging in the windows, but there were plants on the balconies; loggias and terraces with green shrubs rose above the grey roofs.
Francesca went on talking to the woman while she examined the beds and looked into the stove, and explained things to Helge:
“There’s sun here all the morning. When one bed’s moved out, the room will look bigger; and the stove is all right. The price is forty lire without light and fire, and two for servizio. It is cheap. Shall I say you take it? You can move in tomorrow, if you like.”
“Don’t thank me. I just loved to help you,” she said, as they walked down the stairs. “I hope you will like it. Signora Papi is very clean, I know.”
“It is not a common virtue here, I suppose?”
“No, indeed. But I don’t think the people who let rooms in Christiania are much better. My sister and I lived once in rooms in Holbergsgate and I had a pair of patent leather shoes under the bed, but I never dared to take them out. Sometimes I peeped at them under the bed; they looked like two little white woolly lambs.”
“I have no experience in that way. I have always lived at home.”
Francesca burst out laughing all of a sudden. “The signora thought I was your moglie, do you know, and that we were going to live there together. I said I was your cousin, but she did not catch on. Cugina—it is not an accepted relationship anywhere in the world, it seems.”
Both laughed.
“Would you care to go for a walk?” asked Miss Jahrman suddenly. “Shall we go to Ponte Molle? Have you been there? Is it too far? We can come back by tram.”
“Is it not too far for you? You’re not well.”
“It does me good to walk. ‘You must walk more,’ says Gunnar always—Mr. Heggen, you know.”
She chatted all the time, looking at him now and again to see if he was amused. They took the new road along by the Tiber; the yellow-grey river rolled between the green slopes. Small, pearl-tinted clouds sailed over the dark shrubbery of Monte Mario and the blocks of villas between the evergreen trees.
Francesca nodded to a policeman and said laughingly to Gram:
“Do you know, that man has proposed to me. I used to walk here very often alone, and sometimes I spoke to him, and one day he proposed. The son of our tobacconist has also proposed to me. Jenny says it was my own fault, and I suppose it was.”
“Miss Winge seems to scold you very often. She is a strict mamma, I can see.”
“No, she isn’t. She only scolds me when I need scolding: I wish somebody had done it long before.” She sighed. “But nobody ever did.”
Helge Gram felt quite free and easy in her company. There was something very soft about her—her lissom gait, her voice, and her face under the big mushroom hat. He did not quite like Jenny Winge when he thought of her now; she had such determined grey
