The Wheat Princess. Jean Webster
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slight smile crept over Sybert’s sombre face.
‘I could suggest a number.’
The young painter brought a reproachful gaze to bear upon him.
‘Ah,’ he agreed, ‘and I can imagine the direction they’d take! Miss Copley,’ he added, turning to Marcia, ‘let me tell you of the thing I saw the other day on the Roman Campagna: a sight which was enough to make a right-minded man sick. I saw—’ there was a tragic pause—a McCormick reaper and binder!’
Sybert uttered a short laugh.
‘I am glad that you did; and I only wish it were possible for one to see more.’
‘Man! Man! You don’t know what you are saying!’ Paul cried. There were tears in his voice. ‘A McCormick reaper, I tell you, painted red and yellow and blue—the man who did it should have been compelled to drink his paint.’
Marcia laughed, and he added disgustedly: ‘The thing sows and reaps and binds all at once. One shudders to think of its activities—and that in the Agra Romana, which picturesque peasants have spaded and planted and mowed by hand for thousands of years.’
‘Not, however, a particularly economical way of cultivating the Campagna,’ Sybert observed.
‘Economical way of cultivating the Campagna!’ Dessart repeated the words with a groan. ‘Is there no place in the world sacred to beauty? Must America flood every corner of the habitable globe with reapers and sewing-machines and trolley-cars? The way they’re sophisticating these adorably antique peasants is criminal.’
‘That’s the way it seems to me,’ Marcia agreed cordially. ‘Uncle Howard says they haven’t enough to eat; but they certainly do look happy, and they don’t look thin. I can’t help believing he exaggerates the trouble.’
‘An Italian, Miss Copley, who doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from, will lie on his back in the sunshine, thinking how pretty the sky looks; and he will get as much pleasure from the prospect as he would from his dinner. If that isn’t the art of being happy, I don’t know what is. And that is why I hate to have Italy spoiled.’
‘Well, Dessart, I fancy we all hate that,’ Sybert returned. ‘Though I am afraid we should quarrel over definitions.’ He stretched out his hand toward the west, where the plain joined the sea by the ruins of Ostia and the Pontine Marshes. It was a great, barren, desolate waste; unpeopled, uncultivated, fever-stricken.
‘Don’t you think it would be rather a fine thing,’ he asked, ‘to see that land drained and planted and lived on again as it was perhaps two thousand years ago?’
Marcia shook her head. ‘I should rather have it left just as it is. Possibly a few might gain, but think of the poetry and picturesqueness and romance that the many would lose! Once in a while, Mr. Sybert, it seems as if utility might give way to poetry—especially on the Roman Campagna. It is more fitting that it should be desolate and bare, with only a few wandering shepherds and herds, and no buildings but ruined towers and Latin tombs—a sort of burial-place for Ancient Rome.’
‘The living have a few rights—even in Rome.’
‘They seem to have a good many,’ Dessart agreed. ‘Oh, I know what you reformers want! You’d like to see the city full of smoke-stacks and machinery, and the Campagna laid out in garden plots, and everybody getting good wages and six per cent. interest; with all the people dressed alike in ready-made clothing instead of peasant costume, and nobody poor and nobody picturesque.’
Sybert did not reply for a moment, as with half-shut eyes he studied the distance. He was thinking of a ride he had taken three days before. He had gone out with a hunting-party to one of the great Campagna estates, owned by a Roman prince whose only interest in the land was to draw from it every possible centesime of income. They had stopped to water their horses at a cluster of straw huts where the farm labourers lived, and Sybert had dismounted and gone into one of them to talk to the people. It was dark and damp, with a dirt floor and rude bunks along the sides. There, fifty human beings lived crowded together, breathing the heavy, pestilential air. They had come down to bands from their mountain homes, searching for work, and had sold their lives to the prince for thirty cents a day.
The picture flashed across him now of their pale, apathetic faces, of the dumb reproach in their eyes, and for a second he felt tempted to describe it. But with the reflection that neither of the two before him would care any more about it than had the landlord prince, he changed his expression into a careless shrug.
‘It will be some time before we’ll see that,’ he answered Dessart’s speech.
‘But you’d like it, wouldn’t you?’ Marcia persisted.
‘Yes; wouldn’t you?’
‘No,’ she laughed, ‘I can’t say that I should! I decidedly prefer the peasants as they are. They are far more attractive when they are poor, and since they are happy in spite of it, I don’t see why it is our place to object.’
Sybert eyed the pavement impassively a moment: then he raised his head and turned to Marcia. He swept her a glance from head to foot which took in every detail of her dainty gown, her careless grace as she leaned against the balustrade, and he made no endeavour to conceal the look of critically cold contempt in his eyes. Marcia returned his glance with an air of angry challenge; not a word was spoken, but it was an open declaration of war.
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