Friends in the House

I

THERE is always a catechism for the returned traveler. ‘What do you miss most in America?’ they asked me one afternoon. I stirred my tea, looking with vague affection around my convenient little house, and suddenly realized my lack. ‘Why,’ I said, ‘the servants, of course!’ My friends were young, vigorous, and socialistic — though they murmured sympathy with the trials of housekeeping, their eyes showed some surprise, and I thought they drew back ever so little. I imagined they praised my cake rather more than was necessary, as though to encourage me in the right way.

If they thought it was luxury and idleness I craved, they were wrong, however. I am glad I am an American woman, and capable, instead of a helpless Italian lady; I know the satisfaction of doing things and doing them well. I remember exactly how shocked I was when Lina, the maid, assured me that she could n’t let me make my own bed. Her mind was incapable of receiving the idea that a ‘Signorina’ would know how to make up a bed, and my assurance that in America all children were taught to do so met merely an incredulous stare. Furthermore, I am not lazy, nor do I even fundamentally dislike housework. On the contrary, I agree with Clemence Dane that the rhythm of beating up a cake is an excellent impetus to the flow of idea, and like D. H. Lawrence I know that nothing is so powerful a charm against melancholy as making marmalade. I love sweeping a hearth and laying the fire; I love pegging out clean clothes in a high wind; I even like polishing silver. And though it is best to pass over the daily drone of dishwashing in silence, I do believe that all of this occupation with the business of living is a pleasant and wholesome thing.

This is not to say, on the other hand, that I don’t appreciate what servants mean. That would be less than human. I know the incomparable peace of spirit which abides in the assurance that one’s shoes will always be polished and one’s dress always ready with a fresh collar. Life is, indeed, blissfully free when the only preparation for dinner is a few minutes’ conversation with the cook as to the relative merits of duck and guinea fowl. I myself find an added joy in the very routine of a wellserved household — the sound of Iolanda opening the parlor shutters early in the morning, and of Maria splashing water over the stone courtyard before the day has begun, or the knowing voice of Beppina under the window in the evening dusk entreating the hens to have eggs ready for our luncheon tomorrow. These things served to measure out the day; they gave me, idling in bed, a luxurious sense that life went on around me regularly and beautifully, as it should. But as for luxury, this spiritual kind is the only sort of which my friends could accuse me. It is in a small American apartment that one finds luxury, not in a Florentine villa, with its drafty windows, icy sheets, straw pillows, and biweekly hot water.

I am afraid my friends, however, were making even more damning criticism of me in their thoughts. They were thinking that I had been brought up a good republican, in a land where all men are born equal, and that just a taste of the privileges of classified aristocracy had been enough to make me crave the vanity of servitude. How wrong they were I knew; but I had tried before to convince them that the Italian peasant has every bit as much self-respect — which is the quality that matters, the kernel, of independence — as the American citizen. I had explained how in Italy a cook and a lady could be at ease together because neither invaded the sphere where the other was supreme. We were foreigners and we had not the conventions at our finger ends, but we were soon made to understand. There were regions, there were duties, and there were also pleasures, which were not for us. Our cook’s kind but contemptuous acceptance of the little red lettuces or the violettipped infant artichokes which we had joyfully bargained for in the city made it clear to us that marketing was unbecoming to our position. She always let us see that we had been cheated, whatever the price; and if, willfully or inadvertently, we had forgotten what we had paid, so much the worse in her estimation! It was for us to frequent the confectioner’s, to stop at Doney’s or Pieri’s for tea cakes; but vegetables were the affair of the kitchen, not the parlor.

I remember how, at last, after we had lived a long, long time on peas invariably flavored with garlic, and pink salad, and the most excellent but inevitable pasta (which, whatever its shape, had always the taste of macaroni), we determined to have a real American celebration. It was to be on St. John’s Eve, the great Florentine holiday; we told the servants they could have the whole afternoon and evening out, and made covert plans for chicken à la king, coffee with real cream, and a cake rich with butter and eggs, all to be served at a care-free table under the nespolo tree in the garden. Alas, we had reckoned without the tradition. Gina, the cook, appeared at the last minute, and, drawing herself up to a heroic pose, assured us oratorically that never would it be said of her that she went out to make festa, leaving the Signora to cook or starve! And we were served in state with thin soup, pink salad, and custard. The moral of all this is, as I might very well point out to my friends, that in a decent society the master is neither more nor less supreme than the servant: they work together, each jealous for his own business.

II

No, it is surely not because I am lazy or because I am masterly that I miss the servants. It is simply that I am lonely. I have the most baffling sense of isolation. I am free, to be sure — but I am cut off from society, from the very order of existence and the earth itself, it seems to me. Independence is mine: I can sleep all day if I like; no one will disturb me at my work with the tradition that the floor be swept every morning, and I can have my dinner at midnight. But does that compensate for the light knock at my door, and Elisa’s smiling appearance with the steaming pot of cocoa — her quick disapproving glance at the open shutters, and her report that it is a fine day, I should be up at once? Soon she will be back with the hot water; the voices I hear are those of Beppina’s cousins, who are bringing in the winter supply of oil from their farm. It is a great event, for oil is the single source of all Tuscan cookery, and Elisa tells me, her eyes shining, that this year it is of a quality truly exceptional, as bright as honey, as clear as spring water. Of course I can hardly wait to rush out and meet Giuseppe, a grave moustached man who is overwhelmed with awe at the appearance of a young American woman. He is deafened with awe, in fact —nothing that I can say penetrates until Beppina, great with pride, has repeated it once or twice in a thundering voice. For my part, I am not equal to his dialect; and yet we finally part with a handshake and a mutual interchange of compliments which makes each of us feel that he has one friend more in the world.

So it goes on. Almost impossible to work in the morning, because the windows look over the garden, where there is a continual procession of irresistible callers. Rigi, that jewel of peasants, stately and handsome as a queen, comes in with her arms full of flowers — forsythia, jasmine, wistaria, and roses all in a jumble together, though it is only just May. After a long conversation — of course there is always conversation — she goes off, equally majestic, with the garbage. Gigi, the gnome of a gardener, appears in a blue apron with a mass of tools suggesting great violence — knives, scissors, terribly sharp hooks. When I lean out of the window and ask him what is to be done about the snails, he sets his hat on the back of his head, twirls his moustache, and says in the most amiable voice, ‘Eh! We must murder them!’ The bread man trots up in his donkey cart and there is a long debate over the relative merits of round and long loaves (all equally exposed to sun and wind). The bell of the old mushroom woman brings Gina crying from the kitchen; expert discussion, mixed of politics and mushrooms, culminates in her buying half of one enormous fungus for our sauce. The gate opens to a boy with two long flasks of wine from the grapes on our own hillside. Next time it is the milkman, and then the boy from town with a limp fowl in each hand. Gina holds one of them up to the window: ‘Guarda, Signorina!’ she cries. ‘Dio santo, what a fine plump visitor for our dinner to-night! ’ Finally one abandons work — not in despair, but simply to give one’s self over wholly to the delights of the day. I have never had such a sense of moving swiftly with the stream of life as in these Florentine mornings.

III

Here in America there is nothing like that life. Nothing like Beppina, who has been in the house for twenty-five years, although she is barely forty years old. Nothing like the arguments between Gina and Sofia, our neighbor’s cook, as to which feeds her household at the least expense. Sofia has never been known to spend more than ten lire — about fifty cents — a day per person, and when the family is large she returns a considerable sum every week. But then, as Gina says with flashing eyes, if you have ever eaten Sofia’s cooking, you understand that she has nothing to boast of There is no question but that Gina is the better cook, for all she does sometimes spend sixty cents a day. She tells us that she is known in all the markets of Florence as the Great Little Cook. She is small, vigorous, and elastic; capable, intelligent, and of indomitable will.

She was engaged, I remember, for two irresistible reasons. In the first place, she assured us most impressively that she could, also, make dolci — which proved, of course, her cosmopolitan experience. And to the end Gina met our continual and unnatural fondness for desserts with an amiable if derisive lavishness; our passion for almond cake or chestnut pudding merely confirmed her opinion that we ranked, in verità, as children. While our Anglo-Saxon guests sat on the terrace and theorized benevolently about the childlike Italian character, Gina and Lina and the rest in the kitchen shook their heads with a look of ancient wisdom, and humored our extraordinary taste for sweets and playing games. (‘I ask you, I, whether it is the business of a grown man to run after a ball all day,’ Gina sniffs, tossing her head.) Gina’s second astonishing recommendation was that she had a bicycle! Every morning she would flash down the hill to market, to the astonishment and secret envy of all other women. Her motions in the kitchen are so quick that they seem Japanese. She is the terror of all the maids; only a very philosophical person like Lina can survive her bursts of temper. But is not a good cook always temperamental ?

Gina has made us understand Benvenuto Cellini; she is exactly like him, we feel — just as inventive, just as boastful, just as eloquent. Her flow of spirit is like his, and, taken down in shorthand, some of her oratory might be slipped into his autobiography without a hitch. The elation and the pride of her personality are hardly feminine; they belong, indeed, to the Renaissance. And her mind is always busy with jokes and extravagant quips — scherzi, after the mood of the Golden Age. Once she sent up a live pigeon in the dumb waiter at lunch, and after we told her about the ‘ four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,’ she seriously planned to make us such a surprise. She is a character, an irresistible personal force. It is impossible not to remember her and miss her.

Lina is different; she is a rock, a person of quiet capability. She has less verve than most Italians, but a quaint solidity, modulated by an almost English brooding humor. Inconspicuously her work is put out of the way, and one sees her sitting placidly in the sun with the baby. During the summer Gina wrote that Lina missed the baby so much that she sometimes cried — a really remarkable instance of affection, Gina pointed out, because Lina is by profession not a nurse but a housemaid.

Certainly Lina had taken the baby’s interest to her heart. With intense seriousness she used to explain to me, when he had just turned two, that he ought to be taken for long walks — two or three hours over the hills. ‘Signorina, one would take him for a frog rather than a Christian! ’ Bad enough, she thought, that he had never been swaddled properly. No wonder his shape was all wrong. And now his legs would surely never grow straight if he were n’t made to walk. In vain I reassured her that all American babies were that shape, and that it was better for their bones to sit in the sun than to walk three miles every day. To the end she stoutly rebelled at pushing him in his carriage. A big boy like that! She would die of embarrassment; everyone would think he was a sfortunato, a cripple.

Yes, Lina is determined, but she is also quiet — a rare gift in Italians. Her confidences are few. One night when I was eating dinner alone, she told me that as a child she used to keep the sheep. It was dull, she said, with no one to speak to day after day. In the spring it was nice, but at other times your feet were cold — for she always went barefoot. Neat and modern as she is now, those pastoral days seem to have left their placid mood upon her. I find myself thinking wistfully of Lina in the moments of tempestuous upheaval that are so common in American life. She is the kind of person who can quiet chaos and find one’s gloves without a word.

IV

Beppina is more simple. In the evenings one hears from the kitchen the monotone of Elisa’s voice reading the evening news to her, for Beppina was a true country girl, and can neither read nor write. In spite of this, she has a peculiarly apt mind; she can explain the obsolete terminology of a mediæval document better than any of the others, and she has a shy poetic trick of humor. ‘Oh, the beautiful knife!’ she said, smiling at my Christmas penknife. ‘If you cut yourself with that it won’t hurt!’ I am very fond of this ungainly, homely, brown woman, and it seems that now Beppina has a deep admiration for me, because she believes, in her country way, that I am in communication with the Forces.

It was all due to the worst thunderstorm anyone in Florence can remember, and the neighbor’s black cat. That was a real villain of a cat — a veritable murderer who continually plotted to sneak in during the night and slay our peaceful aristocratic Toto. Beppina was very experienced in building barricades against this creature, and one evening when I went to my bedroom I found construction in progress on the balcony. The cat was suspected of climbing up his wall, leaping on to ours, and from thence, with the help of the drain spout and the vine, making his way up to the balcony. So just beyond my window an affair was arranged to keep him from the doorway — a triumph of engineering skill. For the foundation there stood a washtub full of water; this was bridged by a chair on its side, on which stood another pail of water; then another chair upside down, and the whole topped by a delicate balance of several mops, a bamboo stick, and a few pan covers. At the slightest touch it would surely collapse; the idea was not only to keep the villain from the door, but to frighten or drown him into the bargain.

In the night violent rain wakened me. Just as I became really conscious, there was a terrible clatter. The cat had arrived! In fact, I opened my eyes to see him sitting compactly on my window sill, staring in. Of course the barricade left him no alternative but to enter that way — and how devoutly I wished that I had kept my shutters closed like a true Florentine! I thanked providence for my mosquito net, which seemed to offer at least a symbolic protection, and lay motionless, holding my breath. He did n’t come in, but sat silhouetted against the garish lightning, lashing his tail, his green eyes blazing at me. Suddenly he disappeared. At once the most ghastly thunder began breaking over the city and rolling round and round the encircling hills. Beppina put her head in to see if I was all right. I told her about the cat, and she closed the shutters without a word. Later Elisa confided to me that Beppina believed it was the Devil himself who had come to carry me off, and that the wild thunder was his rage at my refusal. I find that it does give one a certain pride to have been chosen by his Satanic Majesty. After all, who am I to know better than Beppina? The cat did look abnormally large.

V

Elisa herself was my favorite, a blonde, bright, gentle girl of nineteen. I was her favorite, too; she felt that we had much in common, because we were the youngest in the house and because we had the same name. She was always interested, always ready with the warm sympathy, condolence, horror, or amusement which my story demanded. In turn she told me about her life in the mountains, where they had nothing to eat all winter but corn meal and chestnuts — not even common black bread. In the autumn, she said, the children were sent down to the villages in the chestnut forests below; all alone they went, to board with strangers there and help in gathering the nuts. When they came home each child brought a sack of chestnuts as big as himself. And then the long winter — cold and wet and dark, where there was no electric light, nothing to do, and no one who could read! ‘In that situation,’ she summed it up succinctly, ‘sleep is a blessing.’ But now Nostro Duce has put electricity da per tutto, and besides, — that shadow of nostalgia which the Italian always cherishes for his own paese, however poor it is, flits across her face, — besides, what stories they could tell, the old ones! And what summers!

She used to beg me to come and visit her when she went home in the summer, and I wanted to go, to that little village where the young men serenaded all through the summer nights, and the churchyard was crowded with beehives. Well — gay times we have had together, Elisa and I, comparing our wardrobes and advising each other, and many deep conversations while I wrote letters and she polished the fender. I never can forget the great innocent look she would give me when I asked too difficult a question. ‘But, Signorina,’ she would say, ‘remember I am only a poor little girl from the mountains, and I have no intelligence!’

There were so many others, too: Elisa’s cousin, who brought us chestnuts and begged us to visit him during the vendemmia; the dark-eyed Argeia, who, when I turned my cup of tea into my lap, first held my dress under the fountain in the garden and then, seeing my embarrassment, kissed me. Argeia was a great friend of Elisa’s, and they used to be sent to visit each other for week-ends: suddenly, to one’s intense surprise, Argeia would sail in with the pudding at dinner, instead of Elisa, and the house would seem to be bursting with excited pleasure.

And there was Isolina, who was of such a comic figure, moving like a ship in full sail, and who so perfectly understood the struggle to learn Italian. I cannot forget the delicacy with which she explained to us that there was something indiscreet in writing pantaloni on our laundry list, since the connotation was hopelessly and intimately masculine.

And Armida, named out of Tasso like so many of the Tuscans, who had once been maid to a friend of ours. She had endured a life as obscurely tragic as the Ancient Mariner, and, like him, seemed to haunt the steps of churches, where she invariably buttonholed one to drone endlessly of life and its tribulations.

And the beautiful waitress at Ravello, who seemed to make the hot plates fly through the air, and who always, with a dazzling smile, gave the children twice as much dessert as we had indicated.

Or the cobbler, Stefano, who was also of our world. He lived in a chink in the wall and gave me lectures on political economy while I waited for the shoes which were, naturally, never ready on time. No wonder, for he had many friends, and a natural vein of philosophy; and gestures, it must be admitted, interfere to some extent with cobbling.

And then there were all the children, children more or less charming, but whom we always thought of as ours: little Bruna, who proved herself so capable at hanging out photographs, and who would drink camomile tea with our children in the kitchen; the square little contadini next door who were everlastingly shrieking; and tiny Gianantonio, only child of the woodman, who seemed always to be edging around the balcony to peep at me, his immense gray eyes on a level with my window sill.

How is it that all these people seemed not like strangers, hardly even like neighbors, but like members of one’s own family? With their gifts and their conversation and their generosity, so impulsive and yet proud, with their beauty and self-respect, — bearing themselves like kings, — they were never to be thought of as dependents or inferiors. They were valued friends.

VI

So, after my guests had long been gone, I sat in the silent house, staring at the fire. Even if one were to have servants here, it would not be the same. They, too, like my friends, would grimly demand privacy and personal independence. Privacy, indeed! I know very well that only the efforts of free individuals, working personally and independently, bring truth and beauty into this world. But such privacy is not bought at the cost of sympathy; it springs from a richness of human contacts rather than a denial of them. ‘Know thyself’ is a basic commandment, but it is surely rather by talking with the housemaid than by looking in the mirror that one moves toward that knowledge. I dare say the greatest flaw in American art is just the result of paying too much court to the mirror. Ludwig Lewisohn is, of course, right to insist that the poet ‘starts from an inner fact of his individual consciousness.’ But, like too many contemporary artists, he is misled into thinking of ‘expression’ in terms of self-expression; it is amusing to refute them with Swift’s old parable of the spider, who spun from within, darkly, and the bee, who visited the flowers and stored up ‘sweetness and light.’

It still applies, though with a difference, to-day. Well, if we had lived more with our servants, we should not be so arrogant. We might listen to Tolstoi, with his ‘Learn to make yourself akin to people — I should even like to add, feel yourself actually within them; and not with the mind alone (for that is easy), but with the heart.’ It is by some such pilgrimage in sympathy that men become larger than they are — and freer, too. ‘Do you wish to be free?’ demands Savonarola. ‘Then, above all things, love God, love your neighbor, love one another, love the commonweal; then you will have true liberty.’

My friends tell me that this interest in one’s servants is simply a remnant of feudalism, and they say that to a weak mind worn-out systems, like old clothes, are always comfortable. Are we then, just because we live in a republic of sorts, to forget Hamlet’s injunction to use our fellow men after our own honor and dignity?

But for once, I thought, reaching over to stir the fire, I am not going to drive myself on to decide the ultimate social and economic bearing of the matter. It is because we are never content unless we do so that there is no conversation in America. For apparently my theorists don’t care that their ‘feudal’ responsibility is made up as much of love as of obligation — that it is less a social system than a richness of life. Is n’t it possible that our mistake lies in thinking of people only as links in the economic system? ‘We are all souls,’ the Italians gently excuse their intimacy with gardeners and cobblers.

My mind reverted to the afternoon when the Conte called, and we returned to find Beppina deep in conversation with him. It would n’t have occurred to her to leave him waiting all alone in the parlor; modestly she did her best to entertain him. Besides, they came from the same country, they were rooted in the same soil, and there were a hundred things to speak of. They were both interested in the vintage, the marriage of Pietro’s daughter, and the new garden house of the Contessa. To be sure, the Conte was sitting, and Beppina standing — how that would have worried my socialist friends! But was n’t the point, after all, that they were talking together like brother and sister?

But why trouble to argue that there are other questions concerning the relationship of individuals in this world as important as that of equivalent incomes? I shall only say, staunchly but sadly, that in Italy my servants — and their relatives, and their friends, and their friends’ relatives — were all my friends, while here I never talk to anyone. I should like to have a conversation — just one — as nice as Elisa and I used to have, about fashions, and children, and the good life. I wish she would come in now, in the first tide of dusk, and lean out to close the shutters with that beautiful motion like flying.