“You are very optimistic, Miss Winge.”
“I am,” she said, and after a while: “I have become an optimist since I have seen how much people really can stand without losing courage to struggle on, and without being degraded.”
“That is exactly what I think they are—reduced in value, anyway.”
“Not all. And even to find one who does not allow life to abase or reduce him is enough to make you optimistic. We are going in here.”
“This looks more like a Montmartre café, don’t you think?” said Helge, looking around.
Along the walls of the small room were plush-covered forms; small iron tables with marble tops stood in front of them, and the steam rose from two nickel boilers on the counter.
“These places are the same everywhere. Do you know Paris?”
“No, but I thought. …” He felt suddenly irritated with this young girl artist who went about the world as she pleased—and God knows where she got the money from. It seemed to her quite as natural for him to have been in Paris as in a restaurant in Christiania. It was easy for people like her to speak of self-reliance. An unhappy love affair in Paris, which she forgot in Rome, was probably the greatest of her trials, and made her feel so confident and brave and able to solve the questions of life.
Her shape was almost scraggy, but the face was healthy and the colouring beautiful.
He wished he could speak to Miss Jahrman, who was wide awake now, but she was engaged by Ahlin and Heggen. Miss Winge was eating a poached egg and bread and drinking hot milk.
“The customers of this place look rather mysterious,” he said, turning to her. “Perfect criminal types, it seems to me.”
“Possibly—we have a little of everything here, but you must remember that Rome is a modern metropolis and that many people have night work. This is one of the few places open this time of night. But aren’t you hungry? I am going to have some black coffee.”
“Do you always stay out so late?” Helge looked at his watch; it was four o’clock.
“Oh no,” she laughed. “Only now and then. We watch the sun rise and then go and have breakfast. Miss Jahrman does not want to go home tonight.”
Helge scarcely knew why he stayed on. They had some green liqueur and he felt drowsy after it, but the others laughed and chatted, mentioning people and places unfamiliar to him.
“Don’t talk to me about Douglas—with his preachings—I have done with him. One day last June, when he and the Finn—you remember him, Lindberg?—and I were alone in the life class, the Finn and I went out to have some coffee. When we came back Douglas was sitting with the girl on his knee. We pretended not to see, but he never asked me to tea after that.”
“Dear me,” said Jenny. “Was there any harm in that?”
“In springtime and in Paris,” said Heggen, with a smile. “Norman Douglas, I tell you, Cesca, was a splendid chap—you cannot deny that—and clever too. He showed me some beautiful things from the fortifications.”
“Yes, and do you remember that one from Père Lachaise, with the purple rosaries to the left?” said Jenny.
“Rather! It was a gem; and the one with the little girl at the piano?”
“Yes, but think of the dreadful model,” said Miss Jahrman—“that fat, middle-aged, fair one, you know. And he always pretended to be so virtuous.”
“He was,” said Heggen.
“Pugh! And I was on the verge of falling in love with him just because of that.”
“Oh! That of course puts it in another light.”
“He proposed to me lots of times,” said Francesca pensively, “and I had decided to say yes, but fortunately I had not done it yet.”
“If you had,” said Heggen, “you would never have seen him with that model on his knee.”
The expression on Francesca’s face changed completely; for a second a shadow of melancholy passed over her soft features.
“Nonsense! You are all alike. I don’t believe one of you. Per Bacco!”
“You must not think that, Francesca,” said Ahlin, lifting his head for a moment from his hand.
She smiled again. “Give me some more liqueur.”
Toward dawn Helge walked beside Jenny Winge through dark, deserted streets. The three in front of them stopped; two half-grown boys were sitting on the stone steps of a house. Francesca and Jenny talked to them and gave them money.
“Beggars?” asked Helge.
“I don’t know—the big one said he was a paperboy.”
“I suppose the beggars in this country are merely humbugs?”
“Most of them, but many have to sleep in the street even in winter. And many are cripples.”
“I noticed that in Florence. Don’t you think it is a shame that people with nasty wounds or terribly deformed should be allowed to go about begging? The authorities ought to take care of those unfortunate people.”
“I don’t know. It is the way out here. Foreigners can hardly judge. I suppose they prefer to beg; they earn more that way.”
“On the Piazza Michelangelo there was a beggar without arms; his hands came out straight from the shoulders. A German doctor I was living with said the man owned a villa at Fiesole.”
“All the better for him!”
“With us the cripples are taught to work so that they can earn their living in a respectable way.”
“Hardly enough anyhow to buy a villa,” said Jenny, laughing.
“Can you imagine anything more demoralizing than to make one’s living by exposing one’s deformity?”
“It is always demoralizing to know that one is a cripple in one way or another.”
“But to live by invoking people’s compassion.”
“A cripple knows that he will be pitied in any case, and has to accept help from men—or God.”
Jenny mounted some steps and lifted the corner of a curtain that looked like a thin mattress. They entered a small church. Candles were burning on the
