Pediment (verse)
Nicholl, Louise Townsend
424 THE COMMONWEAL September 8, 1926 Then there are those old ladies whose knowledge up our normal life at...
...It took all the heart out of our sightseeing...
...424 THE COMMONWEAL September 8, 1926 Then there are those old ladies whose knowledge up our normal life at home-no children, no business, about pensions is so extensive...
...Let us admit at once that home in Malaga and Hindhead...
...Who is the Italian with whom she has long conversations every afternoon...
...To fix and save Perhaps we are not really a very remarkable group Its flowing . . . at this pension, but we have become much absorbed in By marbled motion in a frieze, each other...
...A moment ago we seemed to have an un- But not before it gives, limited appetite-now our capacity for appreciation is In unaccounted ways, exhausted, and we can only think about lunch and our A wound which will not mend...
...Probably it is because we are And only music stays...
...we know that if that strap- These dancers have been brave ping German couple have had a big morning at the Beyond their knowing...
...The other two are English We are associating with the greatest geniuses the who have been forced into exile more prosaically by world has ever known, and a scratch lot of stuffy the high cost of living...
...The best of it is that we rather enjoy this he came into money from a distant cousin just after double life, hustling from Michelangelo and the she refused him...
...If only the tall one with dark people like ourselves, who are determined to see if eyes had accepted the offer of that young subaltern they can catch the whiff of genius instead of accepting thirty years ago, she would now be living in Mayfair, it scond-hand from Berenson and John Addington the wife of a distinguished major-general...
...That may be a more raThe American lady is perhaps the most interesting tional way of life, and in the long run we would not member of our pension family...
...We study each other...
...ing herself as a mujik...
...Don't think that we have all become In eave above the architrave, friends-or even acquaintances...
...Marble to music come again, Mr...
...Are they planning an anti- Pediment Fascist coup, as I have assured myself-or is my scep- Music cannot stay, tical companion right in insisting that it is only an But there's a way Italian lesson...
...that the most high-spirited tourists end by acquiring...
...Of course Symonds...
...for we had suddenly reached the saturation point in The flying javelin is caught pictures...
...She knows more about have it otherwise-but it is not true at our pension...
...One of them is a Russian...
...Whether or not Proving that is true of the critics, it certainly is true of people That all is music in the end who live in pensions...
...mortal millions live alone...
...Incidentally, we did As statues at their play see them this morning going through the gallery Is strangely far more beautiful, with an inexorable guide...
...in Florence and that gentle guide-book exercise and furtive skimming Luchon...
...fellow-pensionnaires...
...Uffizi we shall not get much of the macaroni-but we For men to pose don't find it necessary to talk...
...we too ought to be concentrating on Botticelli's Spring, And no one knows...
...Italy than any of us, and the efficient Signora treats Here, most decidedly, we all live together...
...Why...
...since the war...
...we respect Statues to men . each other's idiosyncracies...
...but perhaps they would not have Della Robbias to the country clergyman and the old been happy-and anyway what is the use of regretting ladies...
...Poor things, they have been living in exile of other people's newspapers, is not genuine reading...
...Blunden complains that literary critics don't Statues to men, like nature poetry because they see the world exclu- And statues' shadows moving sively in terms of men and women...
...Come along," we heard More strong to pull him say, "you only have time to see the most impor- The cord of terror taut, tant pictures...
...It was no good going back now, The discus thrower really throws...
...instead of dawdling over that sentimental Madonna This sculpture lives: by Sassoferrato...
...For one thing, it makes us forget that we it now...
...There is too large Of figures poising and at ease a proportion of Anglo-Saxons for general conversa- With discs for throwing...
...perhaps What does it signify...
...tion, and we have enough imagination between us to But here today prefer private flights of fancy to feeble commonplaces Marble to music comes again, about the weather...
...They are equally at no golf, and no reading...
...her with the deference due to the doyen of the troupe...
...and they followed him with that docility Than that a statue can Be like a man...
...I have de- No, we are leading a strange life with one foot in a cided that she owned vast estates in the Caucasus and twentieth-century boardinghouse, while we drag the only escaped death during the revolution by disguis- other behind us through palaces of the renaissance...
...suddenly cut adrift from all those things that make LOUISE TOWNSEND NICHOLL...
Vol. 4 • September 1926 • No. 18
