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IT HAPPENED therefore that I reached the little restaurant with my Zola and my drawings, and Mr. Montmorency shook his head at the first of these.

“Scabrous,” he said. “That’s what Zola is. Dirt. Couldn’t keep his hand off dirt. What are you going to have now?”

I thought that I would have some fruit. A fine bowl of oranges, figs, pears and bananas was placed in front of me, and without a moment’s delay Mr. Montmorency helped himself to the largest pear. He then made an extraordinary statement.

Dropping his voice a little he confided:

“I was once a clergyman. Church of England. I was a curate at Little Fieldway in Wiltshire.”

You would have supposed that he was confessing to me something extremely disgraceful. His eyes searched mine anxiously. His unshaven chin seemed to flush beneath its grey shadow.

“Oh, I’ve stayed in Wiltshire two or three times,” I said lightheartedly, to cover any shame that he might be feeling. And indeed I had. Some fragments—scent of mimosa, trees blowing in the wind, names from the Greek mythology, The Chaplet of Pearls, the long haunted passage where if you listened you could hear carriage wheels and the postilion cracking his whip—these fragments from Longbridge Deveril where, as a small, grudging, rebellious, paying guest, I had spent my holidays with a kind clergyman and his family who were all so deeply learned that they called their dolls Achilles and Hector, Troilus, Pandarus and Cressida, and the clergyman’s wife read us a chapter from The Chaplet of Pearls every Sunday and we had a chocolate each at the end of the chapter. Edward, Elsie, Dorothea—here now, after forty years, I greet you!

“Yes,” I said. “I know Wiltshire quite well.”

“Do you? But Little Fieldway. You wouldn’t know it. Although it had a very fine church—Norman tower. I put the choirboys into surplices and the villagers didn’t like it. There was a Colonel Thomas——”

“Was that why——?” I asked, pausing delicately.

“Well. That—and other things. I had trouble with my bishop ... my enemies made up stories. The singing was very good. I trained the choir myself. They objected to my writing poetry.”

“Why, surely——”

“It was a pity. I published two sonnets in a magazine. Not under my own name. They were a little free perhaps. Looking back now I can see that they were a little free.... And then there was a girl ... oh, well—what matters it? I was unfrocked if you want to know! Yes, I was. A monstrous injustice!”

He glared at me. I saw to my astonishment that his eyes were full of tears. He took another pear and began to gulp it down, skin and all.

I was terribly sorry for him. I didn’t mind what he had done. I was very broad-minded, and pleased that I was. I struggled to think of the right thing to say. It wasn’t easy.

“After all, if you weren’t meant to be a clergyman, perhaps it was better. My father wanted me to be a clergyman, but I saw that it wouldn’t do.”

He was already brightening. His eyes were dry, his mouth moist with pear.

“No. You’re right. But I was an excellent preacher. People came from miles on a Sunday. I gave it them hot and strong, I can tell you.”

The meal was over. I began to consider the bill. But Mr. Montmorency had still something to show me. He began to feel in his pockets, all stuffed with different articles.

It was with him that I encountered for the first time a phenomenon that I was frequently to witness again. There is a kind of human being who, like the snail, carries his house with him. His lodging is for ever impermanent, a back street, a bed-sitting room, here today, gone tomorrow, and so that he may be always in readiness, he carries about his person all that he may immediately need—old recommendations from friends now possibly with God, faded testimonials, a love letter, a dog-eared snapshot, a tattered notebook with addresses, a bill or two, and even, it may be, a collar in a piece of paper, a couple of handkerchiefs and a pocket razor.

Mr. Montmorency was of this tribe, and out of his pockets popped, for brief exciting moments, the oddest things—I can see now a toothbrush, a dog collar and a small dry sponge—but perhaps my imaginative recollection betrays me.

It does not, however, betray me in the least concerning his ultimate production. He nudged me, drew a little closer to me, glanced around the restaurant, then, in the cup of his hand, displayed to me a series of indecent photographs, shabby, dog-eared and wearily ashamed of themselves.

“You can have the lot cheap,” he said in a seedy whisper. “Dirt cheap—I’m tired of carrying them around.”

At this point I should, I suppose, have got up and left him, revolted to my very soul. I should, at least, have behaved as Colonel Newcome did to the hoary, trembling old Captain Costigan. (I never liked Colonel Newcome from the very first moment of meeting.) But I did not. I examined the photographs with interest. Not, however, with much curiosity. Our admirable system of English public-school education had acquainted me, at the tender age of nine, with many things far worse than these.

“Oh no, thank you,” I said politely, anxious not to hurt his feelings. “I don’t think those things are very amusing. They’re all the same, aren’t they?”

“A bit monotonous,” Mr. Montmorency agreed, putting them back into his pocket. He sighed. His face now was wet and shiny, and the lock of hair that had been like dry seaweed half an hour ago had a dank, soaked look.

“It’s damned hard to make a living,” he said, eyeing my money with an eager stare. “I do what I can. But it’s damned hard. That’s what it is.”

I paid the bill and he rose.

“Do you mind my coming a little bit of the way with you?”

I did mind very much and for one good sound reason: namely, that I was convinced that at the very moment when we started down the street he would ask me for money.

Now I couldn’t afford to give him a penny and well I knew it, but my bones turned to water when anyone asked me for money face to face.

Is there anything more curious in human nature than this changing element of generosity and meanness? There are the rare souls who are wildly, even madly, generous. For it is a sort of insanity. They are not happy unless they are giving somebody something, and they will give away things that are not theirs to give and will run into debt in order to give, afterwards avoiding the debt they actually owe.

And at the other end are the really mean, the misers, the clutchers and hoarders of investments and landed estates and possessions. Balzac knew all about these, but I must confess that, all through life and with a wide acquaintance with many different people, I have never known a real miser. Most of us are alike, generous one minute and mean the next. The two living persons for whom I care most are also the most generous persons I know, and that is in part, I suppose, why I love them.

It is not difficult to be generous to those you love. One of the exquisite pleasures in life is to see the look of happiness and joy in the eyes of a friend at the realization of a gift. And it is not hard to be generous when your heart is touched. You are pleased with yourself that you have so sensitive a heart, and you are pleased with the suppliant for touching you. No, the difficult generosities are those that follow earlier generosities—the generosities from which all the colour is faded, the generosities that must be repeated because you are too weak in character to break the repetition, the generosities to those whom you suspect of becoming hangers-on but whom you have yourself made hangers-on, the generosities to those who are already deeply resenting you for being generous, the generosities to those who have changed, because you have been generous, from gratitude to patronage.

There is the further mystery of the Small Sum. To write a cheque is not so difficult if you have money in the bank; to empty your pockets to pay constantly for someone who avoids the charge of taxis, theatre tickets, drinks and cigarettes, this is the irritating thing!

Much of this comes from a youth when every penny meant more than a penny. Arnold Bennett was a curious example of this. No man alive was more generous than he, and no one will ever know of all his secret charities, but I have seen him manoeuvring with elaborate words and movements to avoid the paying of a taxicab.

Another friend of mine is very frank about the whole of this. His rule is very simple. He never gives anything away. He insists that to give away money is to ruin the recipient of it. But he is not a mean-spirited man. He follows a principle. He never gives money a thought except to see that he holds on to it.

One famous public man who is very wealthy and has given pleasure, by his taste and energy, to hundreds and thousands of people, told me once that he never supported the needy and the out-of-luck. “They will never come to anything or be the better for your help. I help those who are already getting on. Then you are doing something useful.” A sensible rule, perhaps, but surely one very difficult to follow.

I believe that it is in childhood that the foundations of generosity or meanness are laid. I am absurdly greedy about certain foods, and all because I was starved at my first school. At this school (then a very bad one, now a very good one) there was a system known as ‘Extras.’ Richer parents paid more, and their fortunate sons were allowed ‘Extras’ at breakfast. These ‘Extras’—one day a sausage, another a fish cake, another a poached egg—were laid out in a row in front of the headmaster at the high table. When he said ‘Extras’ the richer boys leapt to their feet, rushed to the dais and claimed their ‘Extras’, while the poorer boys, who had only bread and dripping, watched them greedily. The smaller richer boys, however, seldom enjoyed their advantage, for as soon as they returned to their places the bigger poorer boys snatched their ‘Extras’ from them. I was a smaller richer boy and, during the two years I was at this school, I never once, I think, enjoyed my ‘Extra.’

That is nearly half a century ago, and still for me sausages, fish cakes and poached eggs have an unholy unnatural fascination.

In any case to be mean is to be shut off from your fellow-men, to lose all true companionship, never really to be loved. To be wildly, casually generous is to be a fool. To be self-righteously pleased because you are generous is the worst fault of all.

I had, however, no intention of being generous to Mr. Montmorency. I began, in my secret heart, to beat up all my forces. I was resolved to be firm but kindly, and to give him the slip on the first opportunity.

He walked briskly along beside me.

“If you have nothing to do for a quarter of an hour I will show you what I think the most beautiful thing in Rome.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Oh, it’s a pleasure. It’s a Fountain—one that most people miss.”

He had entirely recovered all his confidence. He was my patron, my guide of the moment.

“You know,” he said very cheerfully, “this meeting has given me great pleasure. I have reached the age when I like the company of youth. They remind me of my own early days when all the world seemed in front of me.”

Then he added, most unexpectedly:

“You don’t think you’re in any danger of becoming a bit of a prig, do you?”

This was so sudden and so surprising a blow that I stopped for a second in my walk, simultaneously resolving to show that I was not hurt, that I thought it a quite ordinary question to which I would give a common-sense impersonal answer.

It was a blow the stronger because I had been so happily patronizing Mr. Montmorency, taking him under my wing as it were, and feeling greatly pleased about it. That he should ask me this question! Moreover, all my life long I have been ready to believe at once almost anything anyone told me about myself. And why not? At that age, at least, when I considered myself, I seemed to have every possible quality and also the opposite of every possible quality. I was generous, I was mean, I was intelligent, I was stupid, I was educated, I was ignorant, I was loyal, I was a gossip, I was pure, I was obscene, I was active, I was lazy, I was sophisticated, I was immature, I was religious, I was pagan, I was affectionate, I was cold, I was adroit, I was clumsy, I was unusual, I was ordinary, I had no feeling about class difference, I was a snob, I was masculine, I was feminine, I was calm, I was hasty-tempered, I was ascetic, I was sensuous, I was a wit, I was a fool....

The one thing of which I was quite sure was that I was an English gentleman, but that nowadays it was better not to be and certainly better never to think that you were!

But a prig? That was an awful thing! I could not say anything worse of anyone than that I thought him a prig. And yet I was not sure exactly what a prig might be.

“Oh, do you think so?” I said, with a gay indifference.

“I don’t know. I’m only suggesting it. I’ve always been a great student of human nature. You’re very young. You’re almost the youngest young man I’ve ever met! So I hope you won’t mind my remark.”

“Oh, of course not. But what do you mean by a prig exactly?”

Mr. Montmorency considered, looking very wise indeed as he did so.

“I should say that a prig is someone who takes himself very seriously. Believes that he is better than other people.”

This was awful. Did I believe that I was better than other people? I certainly believed that I was better than Mr. Montmorency.

“Oh, do you think so? I don’t know what I believe about myself. I think I’m very ordinary.”

This was a lie, and Mr. Montmorency, who now seemed as sharp as a needle, at once detected it.

“I don’t suppose you do. Nobody does that. People couldn’t live if they did.”

“What makes you think I’m a prig?”

“You are very solemn about yourself, aren’t you? You were shocked by my showing you those postcards, although you were determined to show that you weren’t.”

There I was certain that he was wrong.

“Oh no, I wasn’t. Not in the least. Only I thought it a pity you should waste your time with such things.”

Mr. Montmorency suddenly looked very dejected.

“You’re right. You’re perfectly right. I haven’t any shame left. When I see a young man like you I think of what I might have been, and then I’m irritated. I’ve let myself go to pieces.” He cheered up again. “It doesn’t matter. I shall turn the corner. All I need is to find the right place for my abilities. I shall return to England at the first possible opportunity. All I want is a hundred pounds.”

The moment had come then! I knew exactly what his next words would be.

“You couldn’t lend me a hundred pounds? I’d pay you back in instalments.”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t,” I said, feeling deeply ashamed of my firmness. “I’ve barely enough to get home with.”

“Never mind,” he said cheerfully, and I saw that he had made the same request of many persons before. “If, when you get home, you find you have it lying around—even fifty would do—send it along.”

I realized then, what I have found since to be a universal law, that if you refuse a borrower he likes you all the better for refusing him, while if you give him the money he thinks you a fool.

This little matter happily concluded, I was able to attend to the beauty of the scene.

There are many ways of being a traveller, but the great division between one traveller and another is visiting foreign places with knowledge and visiting with no knowledge at all. Both are good. With knowledge, you observe and note a thousand things that, more ignorant, you would miss. Every church, every monument, every picture is a mine of information. You dig and dig, and your clever excavations fill you with pride and self-satisfaction. Without knowledge you move in a wonderful country, filled with surprising apparitions belonging not at all to your ordinary everyday world. Places are not places but sudden miracles having no relation at all to facts or dates or any kind of geography. On this first visit to Rome I knew nothing about Rome. I had my guidebook, but as soon as I looked at it I was lost in a multitude of confusing facts, and always the things that I didn’t want to see were the things I saw.

I have always been stupid about maps, which never show me the places for which I am searching. My present geographical knowledge of Rome was based on some four or five places that seemed to me to be of infinite unrealizable distances the one from the other. My map of Rome was something like this:

map of Rome

I walked, then, in a miraculous place with a miraculous name, and I might see anything at any time anywhere.

And now I realized the light.

Roman light has, it seems to me, a different quality from light in any other place. The light in Africa is clear, without mercy, so powerful that you too feel powerful. The dim light of an English spring day is germinating light, rich with seed, promising flowers through rain. The light of Russia pouring down upon steel-silver snow is ancient and boundless. The light of Egypt, as you wake in early morning on the Nile, is fresher than any other in the world, and is like the beginning of the world. The light in California is seasonless and thin, but eternal. It seems there impossible that it should ever be dark.

The Roman light, except in July and August, when it is not to be borne (although at evening it is blessedly cool), is light upon light, veils of light, each veil clear but, in colour, transmuting substances of stone and mortar and marble to qualities of light. On a dark sombre day in Rome, the whole town changes and sinks into a kind of apathy, as though Rome said, “I will do nothing about this but wait until light returns again.”

During the spring and the autumn Roman light has a life of its own, as though, in the sky, there were an activity quite independent of the earth. When you are on one of the Roman hills you seem to be in a world of light that is neither the world of the earth nor the world of the heavens above, and, from the Janiculum, I have seen Rome soaked in a light that removes it both from earth and sky. Florence and Venice, the two other most beautiful towns in the world, are often unreal because of their beauty, but they live in one light which is a miracle but a reasonable miracle. The Roman light gives you three worlds, and the best of these is the one that you never see but know to be there.

I had been intent on my talk with Mr. Montmorency, and so now, when I forgot him and looked about me, I was surprised by a sudden glory.

How many times since then I have tried to recover the streets and houses between the little restaurant and the Fountain! But I can recover nothing. The beauty and amazement that I felt then I never quite caught in Rome again. It belonged partly to my youth, perhaps, my inexperience, my readiness to be exalted. But I remember that I wondered then, as I have often wondered since, at man’s capacity to be astonished and transformed, at least for the moment, by sudden beauty.

It would be so easy, surely, for the world to have been made quite other—to be a place of common grey with trees like telegraph poles, walls of dead metal, the hills of grey ash, the fields of flaccid moth wing. There could be ugliness everywhere, no changing seasons, the yellow of a fog without its thickness.

Or, more probably, there might be this world of beauty and ourselves with no eyes to perceive it. Or, beyond that, we might perceive it and it might raise in us no sense of wonder, no desire to praise, no longing to make ourselves part of it, to contribute to it however humbly, no conviction, at sight of it, that this beauty is but the promise of some other and more lasting beauty.

There are, of course, some men and women in whom beauty raises no sense of wonder, like the young American in whose company I saw for the first time the incredible splendours of the Grand Canyon. Over the edge he peered and then said heartily, “Gee! Some ditch!” But that may have been simply his method of expressing his deep and spiritual feelings.

Had I a wish to be granted, it would be that, allowed tolerable health, I might live for ever, if only the seasons still return and the sea is alive in all its manifestations and the hills stand firm in their glory.

I have been told that this wish is a selfish one. I should pray for the betterment of man and the coming of the Kingdom of God upon earth. And so indeed I do. I have been told that I should, after two or three hundred years or so, weary of the spring and be discontented with the crocus and the summer rose. But as, with every increasing year of my life, I have loved these things the more, I think that in half a thousand years I should at last begin a little to understand them.

In any case, here, on this afternoon in Rome, I lifted up my eyes and greeted the light.

This day was towards the end of March, and I fancy that it is during the last fortnight in March and the first fortnight in April that Rome is, of all the year, at its loveliest. Then there have been days of rain and the tramontana has blown and there have even perhaps been storms of hail. The light comes, after the rain, and sweeps the Roman world into a blaze of glory. The flower beds on the Pincian exult, and all the gardeners in the Borghese Gardens work like mad. The little lake there is alive with the chattering of ducks, and the children happily defy their nurses.

On such a day what Mr. Montmorency showed me was, I suppose, above its customary self. I saw the little square as though it had been let down from heaven in a sheet. One long wall of building wore that colouring of red burnt by the sun into faded orange that is Rome’s especial contrast to the silver-grey of her tarnished stone and undying marble. You may see it, before the sun has got to work on it, in the new red buildings of the Forum Mussolini, and very ugly they are, and you may see it, after the sun has burnt it, in the wall to the left of the Trevi Fountain, and there its orange-amber colours the waters of the fountain in the evening when the lamps are lit.

At the head of the square was a little church with a faded yellow hanging in front of its door, a tower with a bell, and a kind of imitation of Michael Angelo’s ‘Moses’ (at any rate a saint with a beard) over the door.

The square was cobbled, and at the lower end of it were a stand massed with carnations, spring blossom and tulips, a number of small shops, an iron shop, a tobacconist’s and a haberdasher’s. In front of the haberdasher’s there was a shoeblack.

In the middle of the square was the Fountain.

The Fountain represented a Triton blowing his horn, and two children, each holding a fish. The figures, exquisitely carved, were of blue-grey bronze. The Triton, although his features were blurred by time, expressed magnificent joy and confidence. He seemed to be summoning with his horn all the company of gallant and triumphant men there were in the world. The carving of his back and loins was so vigorous that he appeared to be about to leap from the Fountain and stride from one end of the city to the other. The children also in their beautiful symmetry of limb and gesture expressed the climax of joy and energy. It was as though the three of them had at that moment heard news so excellent that they were transported out of themselves and could scarcely control their ecstasy. The waters of the Fountain leaped into the air as the waters of the Roman fountains so exultantly do.

It was the time between one and three, when Rome takes its siesta, so that there was no one on the move, and even the cats, who in Rome are as inevitable as night and day, sat like little cat-statues carved into forms of light by the sun.

“I think,” Mr. Montmorency said, “that this is the best Fountain in Rome. It is better than the Trevi, better than the ‘Turtles’, better than any fountain anywhere. But no one ever comes to see it, no one ever writes about it. That is perhaps because it is not by Bernini. It is certainly not by Bernini.”

“Who is it by?”

“I don’t know. I have asked, but nobody seems to know. It is not in any guidebook. I have never seen a photograph of it.”

“Why don’t you photograph it?”

“I shouldn’t care to. I might never see it again if I did.”

Anyone less like a mystic than Mr. Montmorency in his shabby grey suit and dirty collar (although mystics do have dirty collars) you’ll never see. But his voice had reverence and his mien was modest.

I wasn’t, however, giving him a thought. I was thinking to myself, ‘This is the best moment of my life. I shall never be so happy again.’ I wanted to enclose this moment in a box and carry it away with me—all of it, the light, the colour, the Fountain, the church, the cats, the flowers—and so perhaps I did, for now, after all these many years, I can unpack it all and stare—stand and stare as though I had never moved away.

Perhaps that is so, and life since then has been a dream.

“I shall come back here tomorrow,” I said.

“I don’t expect you will. You have other things to see.”

“Nothing as good as this.”

“Then don’t come back,” he said. “The second time is always a failure.”

As we walked away he said:

“If when you get back to England you find you have thirty pounds to spare, that would be better than nothing.”

(He was like a friend of mine who, once, when I lent him fifty pounds, repaid the debt in the easiest fashion. After six months he wrote: ‘I shall soon be sending you the forty pounds you lent me.’ Then six months later he wrote: ‘I haven’t forgotten the thirty pounds.’ Then, a year later: ‘The twenty pounds you so kindly lent me I’ll be sending very shortly.’)

Soon after we parted. I never saw Mr. Montmorency again.