ild
remained for a while conscious of nothing at all, never dreaming that it
had in any way come in contact with that demon world imprisoned in the
stone. It lived its child life of romping and day dreams and lessons and
punishments, and, with its companions, fretted to get away from this
dreary, horrible Rome of the popes: this warm, wet place with its sordid
houses, its ruins embedded in filth and nettles; its tawdry, stuffy
churches, filled with snuffling of monks and jig-quavering of strange,
cracked, sickening-sweet voices; its whole atmosphere of decay and
sloth, as of a great marsh-pond, sprinkled with bright green weed and
starred with flaunting nauseous yellow lilies. The child wondered at
all these things: dug bits of porphyry and serpentine out of gutters,
collected pieces of potshard from the Palatine; read and re-read
the stories of shipwrecks and red Indians and volcanoes: played in
dressing-gowns and shawls, at processions of cardinals and prelates,
and, with yelling companions in pinafores and napkins, at church music,
with tremendous time-beating with rolls of paper; laughed and pouted and
quarrelled as children do; quite unconscious of being the chosen one,
the changeling, the victim of the statues. But little by little, into
its everyday life, stole strange symptoms; sometimes there would come
like a sudden stop, as of a boat caught in the rushes, a consciousness
of immobility in the midst of swirling, flowing movement, a giddy
brain-swimming feeling; and then things went on again just as before.
But the symptoms returned, and others with them. What was the matter?
A vagueness, a want; a seeking, a clinging, but seeking for, clinging
to the unknown. In the evenings of early spring, when the children had
returned from their scrambling walks, and were waiting for supper,
chattering, looking at books, or strumming tunes; this child would watch
the bank of melting colours, crimson, and smoke-purple and gold, left by
the sun behind the black dome of St. Peter's; and as the white vapours
rose from the town below and gathered on the roofs like a veil, it would
feel a vague, acheless pain within it; and at any stray, trifling word
or bar of dance music, its eyes and its whole little soul would fill
with a mist of tears. The spell cast by the statues was not idle, the
mysterious philter which they had poured into it was working throughout
that childish soul: the child was in love; in love with what it had
hated