Europe Revised Part 18

"Finally I decided to try a little scheme of my own. I wanted to see whether I could really win their admiration for something. I picked out a medium-size painting of no particular importance and, pointing to it, said impressively: 'Here, m'sieur, is a picture worth a million dollars--without the frame!'

"'What's that?' he demanded excitedly. Then he called to his wife, who had strayed ahead a few steps. 'Henrietta,' he said, 'come back here--you're missing something. There's a picture there that's worth a million dollars--and without the frame, too, mind you!'

"She came hurrying back and for ten minutes they stood there drinking in that picture. Every second they discovered new and subtle beauties in it. I could hardly induce them to go on for the rest of the tour, and the next day they came back for another soul-feast in front of it."

Later along, that guide confided to me that in his opinion I had a keen appreciation of art, much keener than the average lay tourist. The compliment went straight to my head. It was seeking the point of least resistance, I suppose. I branched out and undertook to discuss art matters with him on a more familiar basis. It was a mistake; but before I realized that it was a mistake I was out in the undertow sixty yards from sh.o.r.e, going down for the third time, with a low gurgling cry. He did not put out to save me, either; he left me to sink in the heaving and abysmal sea of my own fathomless ignorance. He just stood there and let me drown. It was a cruel thing, for which I can never forgive him.

In my own defense let me say, however, that this fatal indiscretion was committed before I had completed my art education. It was after we had gone from France to Germany, and to Austria, and to Italy, that I learned the great lesson about art--which is that whenever and wherever you meet a picture that seems to you reasonably lifelike it is nine times in ten of no consequence whatsoever; and, unless you are willing to be regarded as a mere ignoramus, you should straightway leave it and go and find some ancient picture of a group of overdressed clothing dummies masquerading as angels or martyrs, and stand before that one and carry on regardless.

When in doubt, look up a picture of Saint Sebastian. You never experience any difficulty in finding him--he is always represented as wearing very few clothes, being shot full of arrows to such an extent that clothes would not fit him anyway. Or else seek out Saint Laurence, who is invariably featured in connection with a gridiron; or Saint Bartholomew, who, you remember, achieved canonization through a process of flaying, and is therefore shown with his skin folded neatly and carried over his arm like a spring overcoat.

Following this routine you make no mistakes. Everybody is bound to accept you as one possessing a deep knowledge of art, and not mere surface art either, but the innermost meanings and conceptions of art.

Only sometimes I did get to wishing that the Old Masters had left a little more to the imagination. They never withheld any of the painful particulars. It seemed to me they cheapened the glorious end of those immortal fathers of the faith by including the details of the martyrdom in every picture. Still, I would not have that admission get out and obtain general circulation. It might be used against me as an argument that my artistic education was grounded on a false foundation.

It was in Rome, while we were doing the Vatican, that our guide furnished us with a sight that, considered as a human experience, was worth more to me than a year of Old Masters and Young Messers. We had pushed our poor blistered feet--a dozen or more of us--past miles of paintings and sculptures and relics and art objects, and we were tired--oh, so tired! Our eyes ached and our shoes hurt us; and the calves of our legs quivered as we trailed along from gallery to corridor, and from corridor back to gallery.

We had visited the Sistine Chapel; and, such was our weariness, we had even declined to become excited over Michelangelo's great picture of the Last Judgment. I was disappointed, too, that he had omitted to include in his collection of d.a.m.ned souls a number of persons I had confidently and happily expected would be present. I saw no one there even remotely resembling my conception of the person who first originated and promulgated the doctrine that all small children should be told at the earliest possible moment that there is no Santa Claus. That was a very severe blow to me, because I had always believed that the descent to eternal perdition would be incomplete unless he had a front seat. And the man who first hit on the plan of employing child labor on night shifts in cotton factories--he was unaccountably absent too. And likewise the original inventor of the toy pistol; in fact the absentees were entirely too numerous to suit me. There was one thing, though, to be said in praise of Michelangelo's Last Judgment; it was too large and too complicated to be reproduced successfully on a souvenir postal card; and I think we should all be very grateful for that mercy anyway.

As I was saying, we had left the Sistine Chapel a mile or so behind us and had dragged our exhausted frames as far as an arched upper portico in a wing of the great palace, overlooking a paved courtyard inclosed at its farther end by a side wall of Saint Peter's. We saw, in another portico similar to the one where we had halted and running parallel to it, long rows of peasants, all kneeling and all with their faces turned in the same direction.

"Wait here a minute," said our guide. "I think you will see something not included in the regular itinerary of the day."

So we waited. In a minute or two the long lines of kneeling peasants raised a hymn; the sound of it came to us in quavering s.n.a.t.c.hes. Through the aisle formed by their bodies a procession pa.s.sed the length of the long portico and back to the starting point. First came Swiss Guards in their gay piebald uniforms, carrying strange-looking pikes and halberds; and behind them were churchly dignitaries, all bared of head; and last of all came a very old and very feeble man, dressed in white, with a wide-brimmed white hat--and he had white hair and a white face, which seemed drawn and worn, but very gentle and kindly and beneficent.

He held his right arm aloft, with the first two fingers extended in the gesture of the apostolic benediction. He was so far away from us that in perspective his profile was reduced to the miniature proportions of a head on a postage stamp; but, all the same, the lines of it stood out clear and distinct. It was his Holiness, Pope Pius the Tenth, blessing a pilgrimage.

All the guides in Rome follow a regular routine with the tourist. First, of course, they steer you into certain shops in the hope that you will buy something and thereby enable them to earn commissions. Then, in turn, they carry you to an art gallery, to a church, and to a palace, with stops at other shops interspersed between; and invariably they wind up in the vicinity of some of the ruins. Ruins is a Roman guide's middle name; ruins are his one best bet. In Rome I saw ruins until I was one myself.

We devoted practically an entire day to ruins. That was the day we drove out the Appian Way, glorious in legend and tale, but not quite so all-fired glorious when you are reeling over its rough and rutted pavement in an elderly and indisposed open carriage, behind a pair of half-broken Roman-nosed horses which insist on walking on their hind legs whenever they tire of going on four. The Appian Way, as at present const.i.tuted, is a considerable disappointment. For long stretches it runs between high stone walls, broken at intervals by gate-ways, where votive lamps burn before small shrines, and by the tombs of such ill.u.s.trious dead as Seneca and the Horatii and the Curiatii. At more frequent intervals are small wine groggeries. Being built mainly of Italian marble, which is the most enduring and the most unyielding substance to be found in all Italy--except a linen collar that has been starched in an Italian laundry--the tombs are in a pretty fair state of preservation; but the inns, without exception, stand most desperately in need of immediate repairing.

A cow in Italy is known by the company she keeps; she rambles about, in and out of the open parlor of the wayside inn, mingling freely with the patrons and the members of the proprietor's household. Along the Appian Way a cow never seems to care whom she runs with; and the same is true of the domestic fowls and the family donkey. A donkey will spend his day in the doorway of a wine shop when he might just as well be enjoying the more sanitary and less crowded surroundings of a stable. It only goes to show what an a.s.s a donkey is.

Anon, as the fancy writers say, we skirted one of the many wrecked aqueducts that go looping across country to the distant hills, like great stone straddlebugs. In the vicinity of Rome you are rarely out of sight of one of these aqueducts. The ancient Roman rulers, you know, curried the favor of the populace by opening baths. A modern ruler could win undying popularity by closing up a few.

We slowed up at the Circus of Romulus and found it a very sad circus, as such things go--no elevated stage, no hippodrome track, no centerpole, no trapeze, and only one ring. P. T. Barnum would have been ashamed to own it. A broken wall, following the lines of an irregular oval; a cabbage patch where the arena had been; and various tumble-down farmsheds built into the shattered masonry--this was the Circus of Romulus. However, it was not the circus of the original Romulus, but of a degenerate successor of the same name who rose suddenly and fell abruptly after the Christian era was well begun. Old John J. Romulus would not have stood for that circus a minute.

No ride on the Appian Way is regarded as complete without half an hour's stop at the Catacombs of Saint Calixtus; so we stopped. Guided by a brown Trappist, and all of us bearing twisted tapers in our hands, we descended by stone steps deep under the skin of the earth and wandered through dim, dank underground pa.s.sages, where thousands of early Christians had lived and hid, and held clandestine worship before rude stone altars, and had died and been buried--died in a highly unpleasant fashion, some of them.

The experience was impressive, but malarial. Coming away from there I had an argument with a fellow American. He said that if we had these Catacombs in America we should undoubtedly enlarge them and put in band stands and lunch places, and altogether make them more attractive for picnic parties and Sunday excursionists. I contended, on the other hand, that if they were in America the authorities would close them up and protect the moldered bones of those early Christians from the vulgar gaze and prying fingers of every impious relic hunter who might come along. The dispute rose higher and grew warmer until I offered to bet him fifty dollars that I was right and he was wrong. He took me up promptly--he had sporting instincts; I'll say that for him--and we shook hands on it then and there to bind the wager. I expect to win that bet.

We had turned off the Appian Way and were crossing a corner of that unutterably hideous stretch of tortured and distorted waste known as the Campagna, which goes tumbling away to the blue Alban Mountains, when we came on the scene of an accident. A two-wheeled mule cart, proceeding along a crossroad, with the driver asleep in his canopied seat, had been hit by a speeding automobile and knocked galley-west. The automobile had sped on--so we were excitedly informed by some other tourists who had witnessed the collision--leaving the wreckage bottom side up in the ditch. The mule was on her back, all entangled in the twisted ruination of her gaudy gear, kicking out in that restrained and genteel fashion in which a mule always kicks when she is desirous of protesting against existing conditions, but is wishful not to damage herself while so doing. The tourists, aided by half a dozen peasants, had dragged the driver out from beneath the heavy cart and had carried him to a pile of mucky straw beneath the eaves of a stable. He was stretched full length on his back, senseless and deathly pale under the smeared grime on his face. There was no blood; but inside his torn shirt his chest had a caved-in look, as though the ribs had been crushed flat, and he seemed not to breathe at all. Only his fingers moved. They kept twitching, as though his life was running out of him through his finger ends. One felt that if he would but grip his hands he might stay its flight and hold it in.

Just as we jumped out of our carriage a young peasant woman, who had been bending over the injured man, set up a shrill outcry, which was instantly answered from behind us; and looking round we saw, running through the bare fields, a great, bulksome old woman, with her arms outspread and her face set in a tragic shape, shrieking as she sped toward us in her ungainly wallowing course. She was the injured man's mother, we judged--or possibly his grandmother.

There was nothing we could do for the human victim. Our guides, having questioned the a.s.sembled natives, told us there was no hospital to which he might be taken and that a neighborhood physician had already been sent for. So, having no desire to look on the grief of his mother--if she was his mother--a young Austrian and I turned our attention to the neglected mule. We felt that we could at least render a little first aid there. We had our pocket-knives out and were slashing away at the twisted maze of ropes and straps that bound the brute down between the shafts, when a particularly shrill chorus of shrieks checked us. We stood up and faced about, figuring that the poor devil on the muck heap had died and that his people were bemoaning his death. That was not it at all. The entire group, including the fat old woman, were screaming at us and shaking their clenched fists at us, warning us not to damage that harness with our knives. Feeling ran high, and threatened to run higher.

So, having no desire to be mobbed on the spot, we desisted and put up our knives; and after a while we got back into our carriage and drove on, leaving the capsized mule still belly-up in the debris, lashing out carefully with her skinned legs at the trappings that bound her; and the driver was still p.r.o.ne on the dunghill, with his fingers twitching more feebly now, as though the life had almost entirely fled out of him--a grim little tragedy set in the edge of a wide and aching desolation! We never found out his name or learned how he fared--whether he lived or died, and if he died how long he lived before he died. It is a puzzle which will always lie unanswered at the back of my mind, and I know that in odd moments it will return to torment me. I will bet one thing, though--n.o.body else tried to cut that mule out of her harness.

In the chill late afternoon of a Roman day the guides brought us back to the city and took us down into the Roman Forum, which is in a hollow instead of being up on a hill as most folks imagine it to be until they go to Rome and see it; and we finished up the day at the Golden House of Nero, hard by the vast ruins of the Coliseum. We had already visited the Forum once; so this time we did not stay long; just long enough for some ambitious pickpocket to get a wallet out of my hip pocket while I was pushing forward with a flock of other human sheep for a better look at the ruined portico wherein Mark Antony stood when he delivered his justly popular funeral oration over the body of the murdered Caesar.

I never did admire the character of Mark Antony with any degree of extravagance, and since this experience I have felt actually bitter toward him.

The guidebooks say that no visitor to Rome should miss seeing the Golden House of Nero. When a guidebook tries to be humorous it only succeeds in being foolish. Practical jokes are out of place in a guidebook anyway.

Imagine a large, old-fashioned brick smokehouse, which has been struck by lightning, burned to the roots and buried in the wreckage, and the site used as a pasture land for goats for a great many years; imagine the debris as having been dug out subsequently until a few of the foundation lines are visible; surround the whole with distressingly homely buildings of a modern aspect, and stir in a miscellaneous seasoning of beggars and loafers and souvenir venders--and you have the Golden House where Nero meant to round out a life already replete with incident and abounding in romance, but was deterred from so doing by reason of being cut down in the midst of his activities at a comparatively early age.

In the presence of the Golden House of Nero I did my level best to recreate before my mind's eye the scenes that had been enacted here once on a time. I tried to picture this moldy, knee-high wall, as a great glittering palace; and yonder broken roadbed as a splendid Roman highway; and these American-looking tenements on the surrounding hills as the marble dwellings of the emperors; and all the broken pillars and shattered porticoes in the distance as arches of triumph and temples of the G.o.ds. I tried to convert the cl.u.s.tering mendicants into barbarian prisoners clanking by, chained at wrist and neck and ankle; I sought to imagine the pestersome flower venders as being vestal virgins; the two unkempt policemen who loafed nearby, as centurions of the guard; the pa.s.sing populace as grave senators in snowy togas; the flaunting underwear on the many clotheslines as silken banners and gilded trappings. I could not make it. I tried until I was lame in both legs and my back was strained. It was no go.

If I had been a poet or a historian, or a person full of Chianti, I presume I might have done it; but I am no poet and I had not been drinking. All I could think of was that the guide on my left had eaten too much garlic and that the guide on my right had not eaten enough. So in self-defense I went away and ate a few strands of garlic myself; for I had learned the great lesson of the proverb:

When in Rome be an aroma!

Chapter XXII

Still More Ruins, Mostly Italian Ones

When I reached Pompeii the situation was different. I could conjure up an illusion there--the biggest, most vivid illusion I have been privileged to harbor since I was a small boy. It was worth spending four days in Naples for the sake of spending half a day in Pompeii; and if you know Naples you will readily understand what a high compliment that is for Pompeii.

To reach Pompeii from Naples we followed a somewhat roundabout route; and that trip was distinctly worth while too. It provided a most pleasing foretaste of what was to come. Once we had cleared the packed and festering suburbs, we went flanking across a terminal vertebra of the mountain range that sprawls lengthwise of the land of Italy, like a great spiny-backed crocodile sunning itself, with its tail in the Tyrrhenian Sea and its snout in the Piedmonts; and when we had done this we came out on a highway that skirted the bay.

There were gaps in the hills, through which we caught glimpses of the city, lying miles away in its natural amphitheater; and at that distance we could revel in its picturesqueness and forget its bouquet of weird stenches. We could even forget that the automobile we had hired for the excursion had one foot in the grave and several of its most important vital organs in the repair shop. I reckon that was the first automobile built. No; I take that back. It never was a first--it must have been a second to start with.

I once owned a half interest in a sick automobile. It was one of those old-fashioned, late Victorian automobiles, cut princesse style, with a plaquette in the back; and it looked like a cross between a fiat-bed job press and a tailor's goose. It broke down so easily and was towed in so often by more powerful machines that every time a big car pa.s.sed it on the road it stopped right where it was and nickered. Of a morning we would start out in that car filled with high hopes and bright antic.i.p.ations, but eventide would find us returning homeward close behind a bigger automobile, in a relationship strongly suggestive of the one pictured in the well-known Nature Group ent.i.tled: "Mother Hippo, With Young." We refused an offer of four hundred dollars for that machine. It had more than four hundred dollars' worth of things the matter with it.

The car we chartered at Naples for our trip to Pompeii reminded me very strongly of that other car of which I was part owner. Between them there was a strong family resemblance, not alone in looks but in deportment also. For patient endurance of manifold ills, for an inexhaustible capacity in developing new and distressing symptoms at critical moments, for cheerful willingness to play foal to some other car's dam, they might have been colts out of the same litter. Nevertheless, between intervals of breaking down and starting up again, and being helped along by friendly pa.s.ser-by automobiles, we enjoyed the ride from Naples. We enjoyed every inch of it.

Part of the way we skirted the hobs of the great witches' caldron of Vesuvius. On this day the resident demons must have been stirring their brew with special enthusiasm, for the smoky smudge which always wreathes its lips had increased to a great billowy plume that lay along the naked f.l.a.n.g.es of the devil mountain for miles and miles. Now we would go puffing and panting through some small outlying environ of the city.

Always the princ.i.p.al products of such a village seemed to be young babies and macaroni drying in the sun. I am still reasonably fond of babies, but I date my loss of appet.i.te for imported macaroni from that hour. Now we would emerge on a rocky headland and below us would be the sea, eternally young and dimpling like a maiden's cheek; but the crags above were eternally old and all gashed with wrinkles and seamed with folds, like the jowls of an ancient squaw. Then for a distance we would run right along the face of the cliff. Directly beneath us we could see little stone huts of fishermen clinging to the rocks just above high-water mark, like so many gray limpets; and then, looking up, we would catch a glimpse of the vineyards, tucked into man-made terraces along the upper cliffs, like bundled herbs on the pantry shelves of a thrifty housewife; and still higher up there would be orange groves and lemon groves and dusty-gray olive groves. Each succeeding picture was Byzantine in its coloring. Always the sea was molten blue enamel, and the far-away villages seemed crafty inlays of mosaic work; and the sun was a disk of hammered Grecian gold.

A man from San Francisco was sharing the car with us, and he came right out and said that if he were sure heaven would be as beautiful as the Bay of Naples, he would change all his plans and arrange to go there. He said he might decide to go there anyhow, because heaven was a place he had always heard very highly spoken of. And I agreed with him.

The sun was slipping down the western sky and was laced with red like a bloodshot eye, with a Jacob's Ladder of rainbow shafts streaming down from it to the water, when we turned inland; and after several small minor stops, while the automobile caught its breath and had the heaves and the asthma, we came to Pompeii over a road built of volcanic rock.

I have always been glad that we went there on a day when visitors were few. The very solitude of the place aided the mind in the task of repeopling the empty streets of that dead city by the sea with the life that was hers nearly two thousand years ago. Herculaneum will always be buried, so the scientists say, for Herculaneum was snuggled close up under Vesuvius, and the hissing-hot lava came down in waves; and first it slugged the doomed town to death and then slagged it over with impenetrable, flint-hard deposits. Pompeii, though, lay farther away, and was entombed in dust and ashes only; so that it has been comparatively easy to unearth it and make it whole again. Even so, after one hundred and sixty-odd years of more or less desultory explorations, nearly a third of its supposed area is yet to be excavated.

It was in the year 1592 that an architect named Fontana, in cutting an aqueduct which was to convey the waters of the Sarno to Torre dell'

Annunziata, discovered the foundations of the Temple of Isis, which stood near the walls on the inner or land side of the ancient city. It was at first supposed that he had dug into an isolated villa of some rich Roman; and it was not until 1748 that prying archaeologists. .h.i.t on the truth and induced the Government to send a chain gang of convicts to dig away the acc.u.mulations of earth and tufa. But if it had been a modern Italian city that was buried, no such mistake in preliminary diagnosis could have occurred. Anybody would have known it instantly by the smell. I do not vouch for the dates--I copied them out of the guidebook; but my experience with Italian cities qualifies me to speak with authority regarding the other matter.

Afoot we entered Pompeii by the restored Marine Gate. Our first step within the walls was at the Museum, a comparatively modern building, but containing a fairly complete a.s.sortment of the relics that from time to time have been disinterred in various quarters of the city. Here are wall cabinets filled with tools, ornaments, utensils, jewelry, furniture--all the small things that fulfilled everyday functions in the first century of the Christian era. Here is a kit of surgical implements, and some of the implements might well belong to a modern hospital. There are foodstuffs--grains and fruits; wines and oil; loaves of bread baked in 79 A. D. and left in the abandoned ovens; and a cheese that is still in a fair state of preservation. It had been buried seventeen hundred years when they found it; and if only it had been permitted to remain buried a few years longer it would have been sufficiently ripe to satisfy a Bavarian, I think.

Grimmer exhibits are displayed in cases stretched along the center of the main hall--models of dead bodies discovered in the ruins and perfectly restored by pouring a bronze composition into the molds that were left in the hardened pumice after the flesh of these victims had turned to dust and their bones had crumbled to powder. Huddled together are the forms of a mother and a babe; and you see how, with her last conscious thought, the mother tried to cover her baby's face from the killing rain of dust and blistering ashes. And there is the shape of a man who wrapped his face in a veil to keep out the fumes, and died so. The veil is there, reproduced with a fidelity no sculptor could duplicate, and through its folds you may behold the agony that made his jaw to sag and his eyes to pop from their sockets.

Nearby is a dog, which in its last spasms of pain and fright curled up worm fashion, and buried its nose in its forepaws and kicked out with its crooked hind legs. Plainly dogs do not change their emotional natures with the pa.s.sage of years. A dog died in Pompeii in 79 A. D.

after exactly the same fashion that a dog might die to-day in the pound at Pittsburgh.

From here we went on into the city proper; and it was a whole city, set off by itself and not surrounded by those jarring modern incongruities that spoil the ruins of Rome for the person who wishes to give his fancy a slack rein. It is all here, looking much as it must have looked when Nero and Caligula reigned, and much as it will still look hundreds of years hence, for the Government owns it now and guards it and protects it from the hammer of the vandal and the greed of the casual collector.