A Room With a View by E. M. Forster (top fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

The chapel was already filled with an earnest congregation, and out of them rose the voice of a lecturer, directing them how to worship Giotto, not by tactful valuations, but by the standards of the spirit.

“Remember,” he was saying, “the facts about this church of Santa Croce; how it was built by faith in the full fervour of medievalism, before any taint of the Renaissance had appeared. Observe how Giotto in these frescoes⁠—now, unhappily, ruined by restoration⁠—is untroubled by the snares of anatomy and perspective. Could anything be more majestic, more pathetic, beautiful, true? How little, we feel, avails knowledge and technical cleverness against a man who truly feels!”

“No!” exclaimed Mr. Emerson, in much too loud a voice for church. “Remember nothing of the sort! Built by faith indeed! That simply means the workmen weren’t paid properly. And as for the frescoes, I see no truth in them. Look at that fat man in blue! He must weigh as much as I do, and he is shooting into the sky like an air balloon.”

He was referring to the fresco of the Ascension of St. John. Inside, the lecturer’s voice faltered, as well it might. The audience shifted uneasily, and so did Lucy. She was sure that she ought not to be with these men; but they had cast a spell over her. They were so serious and so strange that she could not remember how to behave.

“Now, did this happen, or didn’t it? Yes or no?”

George replied:

“It happened like this, if it happened at all. I would rather go up to heaven by myself than be pushed by cherubs; and if I got there I should like my friends to lean out of it, just as they do here.”

“You will never go up,” said his father. “You and I, dear boy, will lie at peace in the earth that bore us, and our names will disappear as surely as our work survives.”

“Some of the people can only see the empty grave, not the saint, whoever he is, going up. It did happen like that, if it happened at all.”

“Pardon me,” said a frigid voice. “The chapel is somewhat small for two parties. We will incommode you no longer.”

The lecturer was a clergyman, and his audience must be also his flock, for they held prayer-books as well as guidebooks in their hands. They filed out of the chapel in silence. Amongst them were the two little old ladies of the Pension Bertolini⁠—Miss Teresa and Miss Catherine Alan.

“Stop!” cried Mr. Emerson. “There’s plenty of room for us all. Stop!”

The procession disappeared without a word.

Soon the lecturer could be heard in the next chapel, describing the life of St. Francis.

“George, I do believe that clergyman is the Brixton curate.”

George went into the next chapel and returned, saying, “Perhaps he is. I don’t remember.”

“Then I had better speak to him and remind him who I am. It’s that Mr. Eager. Why did he go? Did we talk too loud? How vexatious. I shall go and say we are sorry. Hadn’t I better? Then perhaps he will come back.”

“He will not come back,” said George.

But Mr. Emerson, contrite and unhappy, hurried away to apologize to the Rev. Cuthbert Eager. Lucy, apparently absorbed in a lunette, could hear the lecture again interrupted, the anxious, aggressive voice of the old man, the curt, injured replies of his opponent. The son, who took every little contretemps as if it were a tragedy, was listening also.

“My father has that effect on nearly everyone,” he informed her. “He will try to be kind.”

“I hope we all try,” said she, smiling nervously.

“Because we think it improves our characters. But he is kind to people because he loves them; and they find him out, and are offended, or frightened.”

“How silly of them!” said Lucy, though in her heart she sympathized; “I think that a kind action done tactfully⁠—”

“Tact!”

He threw up his head in disdain. Apparently she had given the wrong answer. She watched the singular creature pace up and down the chapel. For a young man his face was rugged, and⁠—until the shadows fell upon it⁠—hard. Enshadowed, it sprang into tenderness. She saw him once again at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, carrying a burden of acorns. Healthy and muscular, he yet gave her the feeling of greyness, of tragedy that might only find solution in the night. The feeling soon passed; it was unlike her to have entertained anything so subtle. Born of silence and of unknown emotion, it passed when Mr. Emerson returned, and she could re-enter the world of rapid talk, which was alone familiar to her.

“Were you snubbed?” asked his son tranquilly.

“But we have spoilt the pleasure of I don’t know how many people. They won’t come back.”

“… full of innate sympathy⁠ ⁠… quickness to perceive good in others⁠ ⁠… vision of the brotherhood of man⁠ ⁠…” Scraps of the lecture on St. Francis came floating round the partition wall.

“Don’t let us spoil yours,” he continued to Lucy. “Have you looked at those saints?”

“Yes,” said Lucy. “They are lovely. Do you know which is the tombstone that is praised in Ruskin?”

He did not know, and suggested that they should try to guess it. George, rather to her relief, refused to move, and she and the old man wandered not unpleasantly about Santa Croce, which, though it is like a barn, has harvested many beautiful things inside its walls. There were also beggars to avoid and guides to dodge round the pillars, and an old lady with her dog, and here and there a priest modestly edging to his Mass through the groups of tourists. But Mr. Emerson was only half interested. He watched the lecturer, whose success he believed he had impaired, and then he anxiously watched his son.

“Why will he look at that fresco?” he said uneasily. “I saw nothing in it.”

“I like Giotto,” she replied. “It is so wonderful what they say about his tactile values. Though I like things like the Della Robbia babies better.”

“So you ought. A baby is worth a