Roman Holidays, and Others Part 6

Do I linger in this study of simple character because I feel myself unequal to the ecstasies which the frescos of Raphael and his school in that pleasure dome demanded of me? Something like that, I suppose, but I do not pride myself on my inability. It seemed to me that the coloring of the frescos had lost whatever tenderness it once had; and that what was never meant to be matter of conscious perception, but only of the vague sense which it is the office of decoration to impart, had grown less pleasing with the pa.s.sage of time. There in the first hall was the story of Cupid and Psyche in the literal ill.u.s.tration of Apuleius, and there in another hall was Galatea on her sh.e.l.l with her Nymphs and Tritons and Amorini; and there were Perseus and Medusa and Icarus and Phaeton and the rest of them. But, if I gave way to all the frankness of my nature, I should own the subjects fallen silly through the old age of an outworn life and redeemed only by the wonderful skill with which they are rendered. At the same time, I will say in self-defence that, if I had a very long summer in which to keep coming and dwelling long hours in the company of these frescos, I think I might live back into the spirit which invented the fables, and enjoy even more the amusing taste that was never tired of their repet.i.tion. Masterly conception and incomparable execution are there in histories which are the dreams of worlds almost as extinct as the dead planets whose last rays still reach us and in whose death-glimmer we can fancy, if we will, a unity of life with our own not impossible nor improbable. But more than some such appeal the Raphaels and the Giulio Romanos of the Farnesina hardly make to the eye untrained in the art which created them, or unversed in the technique by which they will live till the last line moulders and the last tint fades.

We came out and stood a long time looking up in the pale afternoon light at the beautiful face of the tenderly aging but not yet decrepit casino.

It was utterly charming, and it prompted many vagaries which I might easily have mistaken for ideas. This is perhaps the best of such experiences, and, after you have been with famous works of art and have got them well over and done with, it is natural and it is not unjust that you should wish to make them some return, if not in kind, then in quant.i.ty. You will try to believe that you have thought about them, and you should not too strictly inquire as to the fact. It is some such forbearance that accounts for a good deal of the appreciation and even the criticism of works of art.

IX. DRAMATIC INCIDENTS

If the joke of the door-keeper at the Farnesina was not so delicate in any sense as some other jokes, it had, at least, the merit of being voluntary. In fact, it is the only voluntary joke which I remember hearing in the Tuscan tongue from the Roman mouth during a stay of three months in the Eternal City. This was very disappointing, for I had always thought of the Italians as gay and as liking to laugh and to make laugh. In Venice, where I used to live, the gondoliers were full of jokes, good, bad, and indifferent, and an infection of humor seemed to spread from them to all the lower cla.s.ses, who were as ready to joke as the lower cla.s.ses of Irish, and who otherwise often reminded one of them. The joking habit extended as far down as Florence, even as Siena, and at Naples I had found cabmen who tempered their predacity with _bonhomie._ But the Romans were preferably serious, at least with the average American, though, if I had tried them in their English instead of my Italian, it might have been different. At times I thought, they felt the weight of being Romans, as it had descended to them from antiquity, and that the strain of supporting it had sobered them. In any case, though there was shouting by night, and some singing of not at all the Neapolitan quality and still less the Neapolitan quant.i.ty, there was no laughing, or, as far as I could see, smiling by day.

Yet one day there was a tragedy in front of the hotel next ours which would have made a dog laugh, as the saying is, unless it was a Roman dog. It was a quarrel, more or less murderous, between a fat, elderly man and an agile stripling of not half his age or girth, of whom the tumult about them permitted only fleeting glimpses. By these the elder seemed to be laboriously laying about him with a five-foot club and the younger to be making wild dashes at him and then escaping to the skirts of the cabmen, mounted and dismounted, who surrounded them. Now and then a cabman drove out of the mellee very excitedly, and then turned and drove excitedly back into the thick of it. All the while the dismounted cabmen pressed about the combatants with their hands on one another's backs and their heads peering carefully over one another's shoulders.

On the very outermost rim of these, more careful than any, was one of those strange images whom you see about Italian towns in couples, with red-braided swallowtail coats and c.o.c.ked hats, those carabinieres --namely, who are soldiers in war and policemen in times of peace. Any spectator from a foreign land would have thought it the business of such an officer of the law to press in and stop the fighting; but he did not so interpret his duty. He gingerly touched the shoulders next him with the tips of his fingers, and now and then lifted himself on the tips of his toes to look if the fight had stopped of itself or not.

At last the fat, elderly man, whom his friends--and all the throng except that one wicked youth seemed his friends--were caressing in untimely embraces and coaxing in tones of tender entreaty, burst from them, and, aiming at the head of his enemy, flung his club, to the imminent peril of all the bystanders, and missed him. Then he frankly put himself in the hands of his friends, who lifted him into a cab, where one of them mounted with him and stayed him on the seat, while the cabman drove rapidly away. The wicked youth had vanished in unknown s.p.a.ce; but the carabiniere, attended by a group of admirers, marched boldly up the middle of the street, and the crowd, with whatever reluctance, persuaded itself to disperse, though the cabmen, to the number of ten or twenty, continued to drive around in concentric circles and irregular ellipses. In five minutes not an eye-witness of the fray remained, such being the fear of the law, not so much in those who break it as in those who see it broken, and who dread incurring the vengeance of the culprit, if he is acquitted, or of his family if he is convicted on their testimony. The quarrel had gone on a full quarter of an hour, but the concierge of the hotel in front of which it had raged professed to have known nothing of it, having, he said, been in-doors all the time. A cabman whom we eliminated from the hysterical company of his fellows and persuaded to drive us away to see a church attempted to ignore the whole affair when asked about it. With difficulty he could be made to recollect it, and then he dismissed it as a trifle. "Oh," he said, "chiacchiere di donnicciuole," which is something like "Clatter of little old women," a thing not worth noticing. He had, if we could believe him, not cared to know how it began or ended, and he would not talk about it.

Later, still interested by the action of the carabiniere in guarding the public security in his own person, I asked an Italian gentleman, who owned to have seen the affair, why the officer did not break through the crowd and arrest the fighters. "They had knives," he explained, and it seemed a good reason for the carabiniere's forbearance, as far as it went; but I thought of the short work the brute locust of an Irish policeman at home would have made of the knives. My friend said he had himself gone to one of the munic.i.p.al police who was looking on at a pleasant remove and said, "Those fellows have knives; they will kill each other," and the munic.i.p.al policeman had answered, with the calm of an antique Roman sentinel on duty in time of earthquake, "Let them kill."

I could not approve of so much impartiality, but afterward it seemed to me I had little to be proud of in the shorter and easier method of our own police, as contrasted with the caution of that Roman carabiniere who left the combatants to the mild might of their friends' moral suasion.

It was better that the youth should escape, if he did, without a vexatious criminal trial; he may have been no more to blame than the other, who, I learned, had been carried off, in the honorable manner I saw, to a doctor and had his stab looked to. It was not dangerous, and the whole affair ended so. Besides, as I learned, still longer afterward, when it was quite safe for a cabman from the same stand to speak, the combatants were not Romans, but peasants from the Campagna, who had come in with their market-carts and had become heated with the bad spirits which the peasants have the habit of drinking five or six gla.s.ses of when they visit Rome. "What we call benzine," my cabman explained. "We Romans," he added from a moral height, "drink only a gla.s.s or two of wine, and we never carry knives."

He may have been right concerning the peacefulness of the Romans and their sobriety, and I am bound to say that I never saw any other violent scene during my stay. Sometimes I heard loud quarrelling among our cabmen, and sometimes I was the subject of it, when one driver s.n.a.t.c.hed me, an impartial prey, from another. But the bad feeling, if there was really any, quickly pa.s.sed, and some other day I fell to the cabman who had been wronged of me. I had not always the fine sense of being booty which I had one day on coming out of a church and blundering toward the wrong cab. Then the driver whom I had left waiting at the door seized me from the very cab of an unjust rival with the indignant cry, "E roba mia!" (He's my stuff!). It was not quite the phrase I would have chosen, but I had no quarrel, generally speaking, with the cabmen of Rome. To be sure, they have not a rubber tire among them, and their dress leaves much to be desired in professional uniformity. Not one of them looks like a cabman, but many of them in picturesqueness of hats and coats look like brigands. I think they would each prefer to have a fur-lined overcoat, which the Roman of any cla.s.s likes to wear well into the spring; but they mostly content themselves with an Astrakhan collar, more or less mangy. For the rest, some of them will point out the objects of interest as you pa.s.s, and they are proud to do so; they are not extortionate, and, if you overpay them ever so little (which is quite worth while), they will not stand upon a matter of lawful fare. A two-cent tip contents them, one of four cents makes them your friends for life; as for a five-cent tip, I do not know what it does, but I advise the reader when he goes to Rome to try it and see.

One fine thing is that the cabmen are in great superabundance in Rome, and the number of barrel-ribbed, ewe-necked, and broken-kneed horses is in no greater proportion than in Paris. Still, the average is large, though, if you will go to the stand, you may select any horse you please without offence. It was a cheerful sight, verging upon gayety, to see every morning the crowd of cabs at our stand and to hear the drivers'

talk, sometimes rising into protest and mutual upbraiding. But one Thursday morning, the brightest of the spring, a Sunday silence had fallen on the place, and a Sabbath solitude deepened to the eye the mystery that had first addressed itself to the ear. Then, suddenly, we knew that we were in the presence of that Italian conception of a general strike which interprets itself as a _sciopero._ It is saying very little of that two days' strike to say that it was far the most impressive experience of our Roman winter; in some sort it was the most impressive experience of my life, for I beheld in it a reduced and imperfect image of what labor could do if it universally chose to do nothing. The dream of William Morris was that a world which we know is pretty much wrong could be put right by this simple process. The trouble has always been to get all sorts of labor to join in the universal strike, but in the Italian _sciopero_ of four years ago the miracle was wrought from one end of the peninsula to the other.

In the Roman strike of last April a partial miracle of the same nature was ill.u.s.tratively wrought, with the same alarming effect on the imagination.

As with the national strike, the inspiration of the Roman strike came from the government's violent dealing with a popular manifestation which only threatened to be mischievous. A stone-mason was killed by falling from a scaffolding, and his funeral was attended by so many hundreds, amounting to thousands, of workmen that the police conceived, not quite unjustifiably, that it was to be made the occasion of a demonstration, especially as the proposed route of the procession lay through the Piazza di Venezia, under the windows of the Austrian Emba.s.sy, Austria being always a red rag to the Italian bull and peculiarly irritating through the reservation of the Palazzo Venezia to the ancient enemy at the cession of Venice to Italy. The mourners were therefore forbidden to pa.s.s that way, and the police forces were drawn up in the Piazza Gesu, before the Jesuit church, with a strong detachment of troops to support them. Their wisdom in all this was very questionable after what followed, for the mourners insisted on their rights and would go no way but through the Piazza di Venezia. When the dispute was at its height two wagons laden with bricks appeared on the scene. The mourners swarmed upon them, broke the bricks into bats, and hurled them at the police.

They had apparently the simple-hearted expectation that the police would stand this indefinitely, but the brickbats hurt, and in their paroxysms of pain the sufferers began firing their revolvers at the mourners. Four persons were killed, with the usual proportion of innocent spectators.

At night the labor unions met, and the _sciopero_ was proclaimed as an expression of the popular indignation; but the police had been left with the victory. Whether it was not in some sort a defeat I do not know, but a retired English officer, whom I had no reason to think a radical, said to me that he thought it a great mistake to have let the police oppose the people with firearms. Soldiers should alone be used for such work; they alone knew when to fire and when to stop, and they never acted without orders. In fact, the troops supporting the police took no part in the fray, as the workmen's press recognized with patriotic rejoicing.

The next morning a signal silence prevailed throughout the city, where not a wheel stirred or the sound of a hoof broke the hush of the streets. We had noted already that there were seven Sundays every week in Rome, as was fit in the capital of the Christian religion, but this Thursday was of an intenser Sabbath stillness than any first day of the week that we had yet known. There was the clack of pa.s.sing feet in the street under our windows, but we looked out upon a yawning void where the busy cabs had cl.u.s.tered, and the cabmen had socially chaffed and quarrelled, and entreated the stranger in the cabman's superst.i.tion that a stranger never knows when he wants a cab. Now he could have walked all over Rome without being once invited to drive. Except for here and there a private carriage, or the coupe evidently of a doctor, the streets were empty, and the tourists had to join the citizens in their pedestrian exercise.

The shopkeepers had been notified to close their places of business on the tacit condition of having their windows broken for non-compliance, but in the early forenoon they were still slowly and partially putting up their shutters. You could get in through the darkened doors up till noon; after that it was more and more difficult. But it would be hard to say how far and how deep the _sciopero_ went. In our hotel we knew of it only the second day through the failure of the morning rolls, for there had been no baking overnight. Most of the in-door service was of Swiss or other foreign extraction, and the mechanism of our comfort, our luxury, was operated as usual. Our floor _facchino,_ or porter, went to the meeting of the unions in the evening, being an Italian. Otherwise the strike fell especially on the helpless and guiltless foreigner, who might be, and very often was, in sympathy with the strikers. He had to walk to the ruins, the galleries, the gardens, the churches, if he wanted anything of them; he could not get a carriage even from a stable.

Between the hotels and the station the omnibus traffic was suspended.

The railroads being national, push-carts manned by the government employes carried the baggage to and fro, but if one wanted to arrive or depart one had to do it on foot. Tragical scenes presented themselves in relation to this fact. In the afternoon, as I walked up the street toward the great railroad station, I saw coming down the middle of it a strange procession of ladies and gentlemen of every age, gray-haired elders and children of tender years, mixed with porters and push-carts, footing it into the region of the fashionable hotels. They were all laden according to their strength, and people who had never done a stroke of work in their lives were actually carrying their own hand-bags, rugs, and umbrella-cases. It was terrible.

It was terrible for what it was, and terrible for what it suggested, if ever that poor dull beast of labor took the bit permanently into its teeth, or, worse yet, hung back in the breeching and inexorably balked.

What would then become of us others, us ladies and gentlemen who had never done a stroke of work and never wished to do one? Should we be forced to the hard necessity of beginning? Could we remain in the comfortable belief that we gave work, or must we be made to own distastefully that it had always been given to us? Should we be able to flatter ourselves with the notion that we had once had dependents because we had money, or should we realize that we had always been dependents because of our having money?

These were the hateful doubts which the Roman strike suggested to the witness, or, at least, one of the witnesses, who has here the pleasure of unburdening himself upon the reader. Yet there was something amusing in the situation; there was a joke--that rarest of all things in Rome--latent in it, which one suspected only from the amiable, the all-but-smiling behavior of the strikers. There was not the slightest disorder during the two days that the strike lasted. When it was called off at a meeting of the unions on Sat.u.r.day night, one of the seven Sundays of the Roman week dawned upon an activity at the neighboring cab-stand no peacefuller and not much gayer than the silence and solitude of the mornings previous. As for the general effect in the city, you would hardly have known that particular Sunday from those which had gone by the names of Friday and Sat.u.r.day. Throughout Italy there is now a Sunday-closing law whose effect in a land once of joyous Sabbaths strikes some such chill to the heart as pierces it in Boston on that day, or in the farther eastern or western avenues of New York, when the Family Entrances are religiously locked.

The Italian state has, in fact, so far taken the matter in charge as to have established a secular holiday, coming once a week, which has almost disestablished the holidays of the Church, formerly of much more frequent occurrence. This secular holiday, which every workman has a right to, he may neither give nor sell to his master. He may not even loaf it away in the place where he works, lest he should be clandestinely employed. He must go out of the shop or house or factory or foundry, and spend his ten hours where he cannot be suspected of employing them in productive industry for hire. This law has been enacted in accordance with the will of the unions and no doubt in correction of great abuses. Neither masters nor men now recognize the old-fashioned _festa_ as they once did. Whether the men like the new holiday so well, I did not get any of them explicitly to say. Of course, they cannot all take it at once; they must take it turn about, and they may not find their enforced leisure so lively as the old voluntary saints' days, when their comrades were resting, too. As for the masters, one of the employers of labor, whom I found filling his man's place, would merely say: "It is the new law. No doubt we shall adjust ourselves to it." He did not complain.

X. SEEING ROME AS ROMANS SEE US

Shortly after our settlement in the Eternal City, which has so much more time to be seen than the so-journer has to see it, I pleased myself with the notion of surprising it by visiting in a studied succession the many different piazzas. This, I thought, would acquaint me with the different churches, and on the way to them I should make friends with the various quarters. Everything, old or new, would have the charm of the unexpected; no lurking ruin would escape me; no monument, whether column or obelisk, statue, "storied urn or animated bust" or mere tablet, would be safe from my indirect research. Before I knew it, I should know Rome by heart, and this would be something to boast of long after I had forgotten it.

I could not say what suggested so admirable a notion, but it may have been coming by chance one day on the statue of Giordano Bruno, and realizing that it stood in the Campo di Fieri, on the spot where he was burned three hundred years ago for abetting Copernicus in his sacrilegious system of astronomy, and for divers other heresies, as well as the violation of his monastic vows. I saw it with the thrill which the solemn figure, heavily draped, deeply hooded, must impart as mere mystery, and I made haste to come again in the knowledge of what it was that had moved me so. Naturally I was not moved in the same measure a second time. It was not that the environment was, to my mind, unworthy the martyr, though I found the market at the foot of the statue given over, not to flowers, as the name of the place might imply, but to such homely fruits of the earth as potatoes, carrots, cabbages, and, above all, onions. There was a placidity in the simple scene that pleased me: I liked the quiet gossiping of the old market-women over their baskets of vegetables; the confidential fashion in which a gentle crone came to my elbow and begged of me in undertone, as if she meant the matter to go no further, was even mattering. But the solemnity of the face that looked down on the scene was spoiled by the ribbon drawn across it to fasten a wreath on the head, in the effort of some mistaken zealot of free thought to enhance its majesty by decoration. It was the moment when the society calling itself by Giordano Bruno's name was making an effort for the suppression of ecclesiastical instruction in the public schools; and on the anniversary of his martyrdom his effigy had suffered this unmeant hurt. In all the churches there had been printed appeals to parents against the agnostic attack on the altar and the home, and there had been some of the open tumults which seem in Rome to express every social emotion. But the clericals had triumphed, and an observer more anxious than I to give a mystical meaning to accident might have interpreted the disfiguring ribbon over Bruno's bronze lips as a new silencing of the heretic.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 31 THE CARNIVAL (AS IT ONCE WAS)]

I certainly did not construe it so, and, if my notion of serially visiting the piazzas of Rome was not prompted by my chance glimpse of the Campo di Fiori, it was certainly not relinquished because of any mischance in my meditated vision of it. I had merely reflected that I could not hope to carry out my scheme without greater expense both in time and money than I could well afford, for, though cabs in Rome are swift and cheap, yet the piazzas are many and widely distributed; and I finally decided to indulge myself in a novelty of adventure verging close upon originality. It had always seemed to me that the happy strangers mounted on the tiers of seats that rise from front to back on the motor-chariots for seeing New York and looking down, even from the lowest place, on the life of our streets had a peculiar, almost a bird's-eye view of it which I might well find the means of a fresh impression. But I never had the courage, for reasons which I have not the courage to give, though the reader can perhaps imagine them. In Rome I did not feel that the like reasons held; of all the unknown, I was one of the most unknown; by me n.o.body would be put to the shame of recognizing an acquaintance on the benches of the like chariot, or forced to the cruelty of cutting him in my person. When once I had fully realized this, it was only a question of the time when I should yield to the temptation which renewed itself as often as I saw the stately automobile pa.s.sing through the storied streets, with its English legend of "Touring Rome" inscribed on the back of the rear seat. There remained the question whether I should go alone or whether I should ask the countenance of friends in so bold an enterprise. When I suggested it to some persons of the more courageous s.e.x, they did not wait to be asked to go with me; they instantly entreated to be allowed to go; they said they had always wished to see Rome in that way; and we only waited to be chosen by the raw and bl.u.s.tery afternoon which made us its own for the occasion.

It was the eve of the last sad day of such shrunken and faded carnival as is still left to Rome, and there were signs of it in the straggling groups of children in holiday costume, and in here and there a pair of young girls in a cab, safely masked against identification and venting, in the sense of wild escape, the joyous spirits kept in restraint all the rest of the year. Already in the Corso, where our touring-car waited for us at the first corner, a great cafe was turning itself inside out with a spread of chairs and tables over the sidewalk, which we found thronged on our return with spectators far outnumbering the merrymakers of the carnival. Our car was not nearly so packed, and when we mounted to the benches we found that the last and highest of them was left to the sole occupancy of a young man, well enough dressed (his yellow gloves may have been more than well enough) and well-mannered enough, who continued enigmatical to the last. There was a German couple and there were some French-speaking people; the rest of us were bound in the tie of our common English. The agent of the enterprise accompanied us, an international of undetermined race, and beside the chauffeur sat the middle-aged, anxious-looking Italian who presently arose when we made our first stop in the Piazza Colonna and harangued us in three languages--successively, of course--concerning the Column of Marcus Aurelius. He did not use the megaphone of his American confrere; and from the shudder which the first sound of his voice must have sent through a less fastidious substance than mine I perceived that an address by megaphone I could not have borne; to that extreme of excess even my modernism could not go. As it was, there was an instant when I could have wished to be on foot, or even in a cab, with a red Baedeker in my hand; and yet, as the orator went on, I had to own that he was giving me a better account of the column than I could have got for myself out of the guide-book. He spoke first in French, with an Italian accent and occasionally an Italian idiom; then he spoke in English, and then in a German which suffered from his knowledge of English.

He sat down, looking rather spent with his effort, and on the way to our next stop, at the Temple of Neptune, the agent examined us upon our necessities in the article of language. He himself spoke such good English that we could not do otherwise than declare that we could get on perfectly with an address in French. The German pair, perhaps from patriotic grudge, denied a working knowledge of the unfriendly tongue.

The solitary on the back seat, being asked in his turn, graciously answered, "Toutes les langues me sont egales," and thereafter we suffered with the orator only through French and German.

The reply which decided the matter launched us upon yet wider conjecture regarding the unknown: was he a retired courier, a concierge out of place, a professor of languages on his holiday, or merely an amateur of philological studies? His declared proficiency was manifested in unexpected measure as we drove away from the Temple of Neptune on through the narrow street leading to it. Every motor has its peculiar note, and our car had something like the scream of a wild animal in pain, such as might have justly alarmed a stouter spirit than that of the poor little cab-horse which we encountered at the corner of this street. It reared, it plunged; when our chauffeur held us in it still backed and filled so dangerously that the mother and children overflowing the cab followed the example of the driver in spilling to the ground. Then our good international, the agent, jumped down and, mounting to the coachman's seat, took the reins and urged the horse forward, while its driver pulled it by the bridle. All was of no effect till the solitary of the back seat rose in his place and shouted to the frightened creature in choice American: "What d' you mean, there? Come on! Come on, you fool!" Then, as if it had been an "impenitent mule" in some far-distant Far-Western incarnation, this Eoman cab-horse recognized the voice of authority; it nerved itself against the imaginary danger, and came steadily forward; our agent regained his place, and we moved shriekingly on to the next object of interest. It was not quite the note blown from level tubes of bra.s.s in the progress of a conqueror, but we did not lack the cheers of a disinterested populace, which at several points impartially applauded our orator's French and German versions of his not always tacit Italian.

Our height above the cheers helped preserve us from the sense of anything ironical in them, and there was an advantage in the outlook from our elevation which the wayfarer in cab or on foot can only imagine. No such wayfarer can realize the vast scope and compa.s.s of our excursion, which was but one of two excursions made on alternate afternoons by the Touring-Rome wagons. It included, perhaps not quite in the following order, after the Temple of Neptune, such objects of prime importance as the Palazzo Madama, where Catharine de' Medici once dwelt and where the Italian Senate now holds its sessions; the Fountain of Trevi, the Pantheon, the Piazza Navona, the new Palace of Justice and the Cavour monument beyond the Tiber, the Castle of Sant' Angelo, the Vatican and St. Peter's, the Janiculum and the Garibaldi monument on it, and the stupendous prospect of the city from that supreme top, the bridge that Horatius held in Macaulay's ballad, the island in the Tiber formed after the expulsion of the Tarquins by the river sand and drift catching on the seed-corn thrown into the stream from the fields consecrated to Mars, the Temple of Fortune, the once-supposed House of Rienzi, and the former Temple of Vesta; the Palatine Hill and the Aventine Hill, the Circus Maximus, the Colosseum, the Campidoglio, the Theatre of Marcellus, the worst slum in Rome, where the worst boy in Rome, flown with Carnival, will try to board your pa.s.sing car; back to Piazza Colonna through Piazza Monte Citerio, where the Italian House of Deputies meets in the plain old palace of the same name.

The mere mention of these storied places will kindle in the reader's fancy a fire which he will feel all the need of if ever he verifies my account of them in touring Rome on so cold an afternoon as that of our excursion. The wind rose with our ascent of every elevation, if it did not fall with our return to a lower level; on the Janiculum it blew a blizzard in which the incongruous ilexes and laurels bowed and writhed, and some groups of almond-trees in their pale bloom on a distant upland mocked us with a derisive image of spring. At the foot of the steps to the Campidoglio, where some of our party dismounted to go up and view the statue of Marcus Aurelius, it was so cold that nothing but the sense of a strong common interest prevented those who remained from persuading the chauffeur to go on without the sight-seers. But we forbore, both because we knew we were then very near the end of our tour, and because we felt it would have been cruel to abandon the lady who had got out of the car only by turning herself sidewise and could not have made her way home on foot without sufferings which would justly have brought us to shame. Certain idle particulars will always cling to the memory which lets so many enn.o.bling facts slip from it; and I find myself helpless against the recollection of this poor lady's wearing a thick motoring-veil which no curiosity could pierce, but which, when she lifted it, revealed a complexion of heated copper and a gray mustache such as nature vouchsafes to few women.

The crowd, which thickened most in the Piazza di Venezia, had grown more and more carnivalesque in attire and behavior. We had been obliged to avoid the more densely peopled streets because, as our international explained, if the car had slowed at any point the revellers would have joined our excursion of their own initiative and accompanied us to the end in overwhelming numbers. They wellnigh blocked the entrance of the Corso when we got back to it, and the cafe where we had agreed to have tea was so packed that our gay escapade began to look rather gloomy in the retrospect. But suddenly a table was vacated; a waiter was caught, in the vain attempt to ignore us, and given such a comprehensive order that we could see respect kindling in his eyes, and before we could reasonably have hoped it be spread before us tea and bread and b.u.t.ter and tarts and little cakes, while scores of hungry spectators stood round and flatteringly envied us. In this happy climax our adventure showed as a royal progress throughout. We counted up the wonders of our three hours' course in an absolutely novel light; and we said that touring Rome was a thing not only not to be despised, but to be forever proud of.

For myself, I decided that if I were some poor hurried fellow-countryman of mine, doing Europe in a month and obliged to scamp Rome with a couple of days, I would not fail to spend two of them in what I must always think of as a triumphal chariot. I resolved to take the second excursion, not the next day perhaps, but certainly the day after the next, and complete the most compendious impression of ancient, mediaeval, and modern Rome that one can have; but the firmest resolution sometimes has not force to hold one to it. The second excursion remains for a second sojourn, when perhaps I may be able to solve the question whether I was moved by a fine instinct of proportion or by mere innate meanness in giving our orator at parting just two francs in recognition of his eloquence. No one else, indeed, gave him anything, and he seemed rather surprised by my tempered munificence. It might have been mystically adjusted to the number of languages he used in addressing us; if he had held to three languages I might have made it three francs; but now I shall never be certain till I take the second excursion with a company which imperatively requires English as well as French and German, and with no solitary in yellow gloves to whom all languages are alike.

To this end I ought to have thrown a copper coin into the Fountain of Trevi as we pa.s.sed it. You may return to Rome without doing this, but it is well known that if you do it you are sure to come back. The Fountain of Trevi is alone worth coming back for, and I could not see that it poured scanter streams than it formerly poured over br.i.m.m.i.n.g brinks or from the clefts of the artificial rocks that spread in fine disorder about the feet of its sea-G.o.ds and sea-horses; but they who mourn the old papal rule accuse the present Italian government of stinting the supply of water. To me there seemed no stint of water in any of the fountains of Rome. In some a mere wasteful spilth seems the sole design of the artist, as in the Fontana Paolina on the Janiculum, where the cold wash of its deluge seemed to add a piercing chill to our windy afternoon. The other fountains have each a quaint grace or absolute charm or pleasing absurdity, whether the waters shower over groups of more or less irrelevant statuary in their basins or spout into the air in columns unfurling flags of spray and keeping the pavement about them green with tender mould. The most sympathetic is the Fountain of the Triton, who blows the water through his wreathed horn and on the coldest day seems not to mind its refluent splash on his mossy back; in fact, he seems rather to like it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 32 THE FOUNTAIN OF TREVI]

He is one of many tritons, rivers, sea-G.o.ds, and aqueous allegories similarly employed in Rome and similarly indifferent to what flesh and blood might find the hardship of their calling. I had rashly said to myself that their respective fountains needed the sun on them to be just what one could wish, but the first gray days taught me better. Then the thinly clouded sky dropped a softened light over their glitter and sparkle and gave them a spirituality as much removed from the suggestion of physical cold as any diaphanous apparition would suggest. Then they seemed rapt into a finer beauty than that of earth, though I will not pretend that they were alike beautiful. No fountain can be quite ugly, but some fountains can be quite stupid, like, for instance, those which give its pretty name to the Street of the Four Fountains and which consist of two extremely plain Virtues and two very dull old Rivers, diagonally dozing at each other over their urns in niches of the four converging edifices. They are not quite so idiotic under their disproportionate foliage as the conventional Egyptian lions of the Fountain of Moses, with manes like the wigs of so many lord chancellors, and with thin streams of water drooling from the tubes between their lips. But these are the exceptional fountains; there are few sculptured or architectural designs which the showering or spouting water does not retrieve from error; and in Rome the water (deliciously potable) is so abundant that it has force to do almost anything for beauty, even where, as in the Fontana Paolina, it is merely a torrent tumbling over a facade. It is lavished everywhere; in the Piazza Navona alone there are three fountains, but then the Piazza Navona is very long, and three fountains are few enough for it, even though one is that famous Fountain of Bernini, in which he has made one of the usual rivers--the Nile, I believe--holding his hand before his eyes in mock terror of the ungainly facade of a rival architect's church opposite, lest it shall fall and crush him. That, however, is the least merit of the fountain; and without any fountain the Piazza Navona would be charming; it is such a vast lake of sunshine and is so wide as well as long, and is so mellowed with such rich browns and golden grays in the n.o.ble edifices.

I do not know, now, what all the edifices are, but there are churches, more than one, and palaces, and the reader can find their names in any of the guidebooks. If I were buying piazzas in Rome I should begin with the Navona, but there are enough to suit all purses and tastes. The fountains would be thrown in, I suppose, along with the churches and palaces; but I really never inquired, and, in fact, not having carried out my plan of visiting them all, I am in no position to advise intending purchasers. What I can say is that if you are in a hurry to inspect, that kind of property, and in immediate need of a piazza, you cannot do better than take the wagon for touring Rome. In two days you can visit every piazza worth having, including the Piazza di Spagna, where there is a fountain in the form of a marble galley in which you can embark for any fairyland you like, through the Via del Babuino and the Piazza del Popolo. Come to think of it, I am not so sure but I would as soon have the Piazza del Popolo as the Piazza Navona. If the fountains are not so fine, they are still very fine, and the Pincian Hill overtops one side of the place, with foliaged drives and gardened walks descending into it.

Everything of importance that did not happen elsewhere in Rome seems to have happened in the Piazza del Popolo, and I may name as a few of its attractions for investors the facts that it was here Sulla's funeral pyre was kindled; that Nero was buried on the left side of it, and out of his tomb grew a huge walnut-tree, the haunt of demoniacal crows till the Madonna appeared to Paschal II. and bade him cut it down; that the arch-heretic Luther sojourned in the Augustinian convent here while in Rome; that the dignitaries of Church and State received Christina of Sweden here when, after her conversion, she visited the city; that Lucrezia Borgia celebrated her betrothal in one of the churches; that it used to be a favorite place for executing brigands, whose wives then became artists' models, and whose sons, if they were like Cardinal Antonelli, became princes of the Church. So I learn from Hare in his _Walks in Rome,_ and, if he enables me to boast the rivalry of the Piazza Navona in no such array of merits, still I will not deny my love for it. Certainly it was not a favorite place for executing brigands, but the miracle which saved St. Agnes from, cruel shame was wrought in the vaulted chambers under the church of her name there, and that is something beyond all the wonders of the Piazza del Popolo for its pathos and for its poetry. But, if the Piazza Navona had no other claim on me, I should find a peculiar pleasure in the old custom of stopping the escapes from its fountains and flooding with water the place I saw flooded with sun, for the patricians to wade and drive about in during the very hot weather and eat ices and drink coffee, while the plebeians looked sumptuously down on them from the galleries built around the lake.

XI. IN AND ABOUT THE VATICAN

[Ill.u.s.tration: 33 COLONNADE AND FOUNTAIN AT ST. PETER'S]

It would be a very bold or very incompetent observer of the Roman situation who should venture upon a decided opinion of the relations of the monarchy and the papacy. You hear it said with intimations of special authority in the matter, that both king and pope are well content with the situation, and it is clearly explained how and why they are so; but I did not understand how or why at the moment of the explanation, or else I have now forgotten whatever was clear in it. I believe, however, it was to the effect that the pope willingly remained self-prisoned in the Vatican because, if he came out, he might not only invalidate a future claim upon the sovereign dignity which the Italian occupation had invaded, but he might incur risks from the more unfriendly extremists which would at least be very offensive. On his part, it was said that the king used the embarra.s.sment occasioned by the pope's att.i.tude as his own defence against the anti-Clericals, who otherwise would have urged him to far more hostile measures with the Church. The king and the pope were therefore not very real enemies, it was said by those who tried to believe themselves better informed than others.

To the pa.s.sing or tarrying stranger the situation does not offer many dramatic aspects. When you are going to St. Peter's, if you will look up at the plain wall of the Vatican palace you will see two windows with their shutters open, and these are the windows of the rooms where Pius X. lives, a voluntary captive; the closed blinds are those of the rooms where Leo XIII. died, a voluntary captive. Whatever we think of the wisdom or the reason of the papal protest against the occupation of the States of the Church by the Italian people, these windows have their pathos. The pope immures himself in the Vatican and takes his walks in the Vatican gardens, whose beauty I could have envied him, if he had not been a prisoner, when I caught a glimpse of them one morning, with the high walls of their privet and laurel alleys blackening in the sun.

But otherwise the severest Protestant could not cherish so unkind a feeling toward the gentle priest whom all men speak well of for his piety and humility. It is a touching fact of his private life that his three maiden sisters, who wish to be as near him as they can, have their simple lodging over a shop for the sale of holy images in a street opening into the Piazza of St. Peter's. We all know that they are of a Venetian family neither rich nor great; their pride and joy is solely in him, as it well might be, and it is said that when they come to hear him in some high function at the Sistine Chapel their rapture of affection and devotion is as evident as it is sweet and touching.