A Voyage of Consolation Part 16

We descended next morning to realise how original we were in being in the plains of Italy in July. The Fulda people and the Miss Binghams and Mrs. Portheris had prevented our noticing it before, but in the Hotel Mascigni, Via del Tritone, we seemed to have arrived at a point of arid solitude, which gave poppa a new and convincing sense of all he was going through in pursuit of Continental culture. We sat in one corner of the "Sala di mangiari" at a small square table, and in all the length and breadth and sumptuousness of that magnificent apartment--Italian hotel dining-rooms are always florid and palatial--there was only one other little square table with a cloth on it and an appearance of expectancy. The rest were heaped with chairs, bottom side up, with their legs in the air; the chandeliers were tied up in brown holland, and through a depressed and exhausted atmosphere, suggestive of magnificent occasions temporarily in eclipse, moved, with a casual languid air, a very tall waiter and a very short one. At mysterious exits to the rear occasionally appeared the form of the _chef_ exchanging plates. It was borne in upon one that in the season the _chef_ would be remanded to the most inviolable seclusion.

"Do you suppose Pompeii will be any worse than this?" inquired the Senator.

"Talk about Americans pervading the Continent," he continued, casting his eye over the surrounding desolation. "Where are they? I should be glad to see them. Great Scott! if it comes to that, I should be glad to see a blooming Englishman!"

It wasn't an answer to prayer, for there had been no opportunity for devotion, but at that moment the door opened and admitted Mr., Mrs., and Miss Emmeline Malt, and Miss Callis. The reunion was as rapt as the Senator and Emmeline could make it, and cordial in every other respect.

Mr. Malt explained that they had come straight through from Paris, as time was beginning to press.

"We couldn't leave out Rome," he said, "on account of Mis' Malt's mother--she made such a point of our seeing the prison of Saint Paul. In her last letter she was looking forward very anxiously to our safe return to get an account of it. She's a leader in our experience meetings, and I couldn't somehow make up my mind to face her without it."

"Poppa," remarked Emmeline, "is not so foolish as he looks."

"We were just wondering," exclaimed momma, "who that table was laid for.

But we never thought of _you_. Isn't it strange?"

We agreed that it was little short of marvellous.

The tall waiter strolled up for the commands of the Malt party. His demeanour showed that he resented the Malts, who were, nevertheless, innocent respectable people. As Emmeline ordered "_cafe au lait pour tous"_ he scowled and made curious contortions with his lower jaw.

"Anything else you want?" he inquired, with obvious annoyance.

"Yes," said Miss Callis. He further expressed his contempt by twisting his moustache, and waited in silent disdain.

"I want," said Miss Callis sweetly, leaning forward with her chin artlessly poised in her hand, "to know if you are paid to make faces at the guests of this hotel."

There was laughter, above which Emmeline's crow rose loud and clear, and as the waiter hastened away, suddenly transformed into a sycophant, poppa remarked, "I see you've got those hotel tickets, too. Let me give you a little pointer. Say nothing about it until next day. They are like that sometimes. In being deprived of the opportunity of swindling us, they feel that they've been done themselves."

"Oh," said Mr. Malt, "we never reveal it for twenty-four hours. That fellow must have smelled 'em on us. Now, how were you proposing to spend the day?"

"We're going to the Forum," remarked Emmeline. "Do come with us, Mr.

Wick. We should love to have you."

"We mustn't forget the Count," said momma to the Senator.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Are you paid to make faces?"]

"What Count?" Emmeline inquired. "Did you ever, momma! Mis' Wick knows a count. She's been smarter than we have, hasn't she? Introduce him to us, Mis' Wick."

"Emmeline," said her mother severely, "you are as personal as ever you can be. I don't know whatever Mis' Wick will think of you."

"She's merely full of intelligent curiosity, Mis' Malt," said Mr. Malt, who seemed to be in the last stage of infatuated parent. "I know you'll excuse her," he added to momma, who said with rather frigid emphasis, "Oh yes, we'll excuse her." But the hint was lost and Emmeline remained.

Poppa looked in his memorandum book and found that the Count was not to arrive until 3 P.M. There was, therefore, no reason why we should not accompany the Malts to the Forum, and it was arranged.

A quarter of an hour later we were rolling through Rome. As a family we were rather subdued by the idea that it was Rome, there was such immense significance even in the streets with tramways, though it was rather an atmosphere than anything of definite detail; but no such impression weighed upon the Malts. They took Rome at its face value and refused to recognise the unearned increment heaped up by the centuries. However, as we were divided in two carriages, none of us had all the Malts.

It was warm and dusty, the air had a malarious taste. We drove first, I remember, to the American druggist's in the Piazza di Spagna for some magnesia Mrs. Malt wanted for Emmeline, who had p.r.i.c.kly heat. It was annoying to have one's first Roman impressions confused with Emmeline and magnesia and p.r.i.c.kly heat; but Mrs. Malt appeared to think that Rome attracted visitors chiefly by means of that American druggist. She said she was perfectly certain we should find an American dentist there, too, if we only took the time to look him up. I can't say whether she took the time. We didn't.

It was interesting, the Piazza di Spagna, because that is where everybody who has read "Roba di Roma" knows that the English and Americans have lived ever since the days when dear old Mr. Story and the rest used to coach it from Civita Vecchia--in hotels, and pensions, and apartments, the people in Marion Crawford's novels. We could only decide that the plain, severe, many-storied houses with the shops underneath had charms inside to compensate for their outward lack. Not a tree anywhere, not a sc.r.a.p of gra.s.s, only the lava pavement, and the view of the druggist's shop and the tourists' agency office. Miss Callis said she didn't see why man should be for ever bound up with the vegetable creation--it was like living in a perpetual salad--and was disposed to defend the Piazza di Spagna at all points, it looked so nice and expensive. But Miss Callis's tastes were very distinctly urban.

That druggist's establishment was on the Pincian Hill! It seemed, on reflection, an outrage. We all looked about us, when we discovered this, for the other six, and another of the foolish geographical illusions of the school-room was shattered for each of us. The Rome of my imagination was as distinctly seven-hilled as a quadruped is four-legged, the Rome I saw had no eminences to speak of anywhere.

Perhaps, as poppa suggested, business had moved away from the hills and we should find them in the suburbs, but this we were obliged to leave unascertained.

Through the warm empty streets we drove and looked at Rome. It was driving through time, through history, through art, and going backward.

And through the Christian religion, for we started where the pillar of Pius IX., setting forth the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, reaffirmed a modern dogma of the great church across the Tiber; and we rattled on past other and earlier memorials of that church thick-built into the Middle Ages, and of the Early Fathers, and of the very Apostles. All heaped and crowded and over-built, solid and ragged, decaying and defying decay, clinging to her traditions with both hands, old Rome jostled before us. Presently uprose a great and crumbling arch and a difference, and as we pa.s.sed it the sound of the life of the city died indistinctly away and a silence grew up, with the smell of the sun upon gra.s.ses and weeds, and we stopped and looked down into Caesar's world, which lay below us, empty. We gazed in silence for a moment, and then Emmeline remarked that she could make as good a Forum with a box of blocks.

"I shouldn't wonder but what you express the sentiments of all present," said her father admiringly. "Now is it allowable for us to go down there and make ourselves at home amongst those antique pillars, or have we got to take the show in from here?"

"No, Malt," said the Senator, helping the ladies out, "I can't say I agree with you. It's a dead city, that's what it is, and for my part I've never seen anything so impressive."

"Mr. Wick," remarked Miss Callis, "has not visited Philadelphia."

"Well, for a munic.i.p.al cemetery," returned Mr. Malt, "it's pretty uncared for. If there was any enterprise in this capital it would be suitably railed in with posts and chains, and a monument inscribed 'Here lies Rome's former greatness' or something like that. But the Italians haven't got a particle of go--I've noticed that all through."

We went down the wooden stair, a century at a step, and presently walked and talked, we seven Americans, in that elder Rome that most people know so much better than the one with St. Peter's and the Corso, because of the clinging nature of those early impressions which we construe for ourselves with painful reference to lists of exceptions. We all felt that it was a small place to have had so much to say to history, and were obliged to remind ourselves that we weren't looking at the whole of it. Poppa acknowledged that his tendency to compare it unfavourably, in spite of the verdict of history, with Chicago was checked by a smell from the Cloaca Maxima, which proved that the Ancient Romans probably enjoyed enteric and sewer gas quite as much as we do, although under names that are to be found only in dictionaries now. Mrs. Malt said the place surprised her in being so yellow--she had always imagined pictures of it to have been taken in the sunset, but now she saw that it was perfectly natural. Acting upon Mr. Malt's advice, we did not attempt to identify more than the leading features, and I remember distinctly, in consequence, that the temple of Castor had three columns standing and the temple of Saturn had eight, while of the Basilica Julia there was nothing at all but the places where they used to be. Mrs. Malt said it made her feel quite idolatrous to look at them, and for her part she couldn't be sorry they had fallen so much into decay--it was only right and proper. This launched Mr. and Mrs. Malt and my parents upon a discussion which threatened to become unwisely polemic if Emmeline had not briefly decided it in favour of Christianity.

Momma and Mrs. Malt expressed a desire above all things to see the temple and apartments of the Vestal Virgins, which Miss Callis with some surprise begged them on no account to mention in the presence of the gentlemen.

"There are some things," remarked Miss Callis austerely, "from which no respectable married lady would wish to lift the veil of the cla.s.sics."

Momma was inclined to argue the point, but Miss Callis looked so shocked that she desisted.

"Perhaps, Mrs. Wick," she said sarcastically, "you intend to go to see the Baths of Caracallus!"

To which momma replied certainly _not_, that was a very different thing.

And if I am unable to describe the Baths of Caracallus in this history, it is on account of Miss Callis's personal influence and the remarkable development of her sense of propriety.

At momma's suggestion we walked slowly all round the Via Sacra, looking steadily down at its little triangular original paving-stones, and tried to imagine ourselves the shackled captives of Scipio. If the party had not consisted so largely of Emmeline the effort might have been successful. Fragments of exhumed statuary, discoloured and featureless, stood tipped in rows along the shorn foundations and inspired in Mr.

Malt a serious curiosity.

"The ancients," said Mr. Malt with conviction, "were every bit as smart as the moderns, meaning born intelligence. Look at that ear--that ear took talent. There isn't a terra-cotta factory in the United States that could turn out a better ear to-day. But they hadn't what we call gumption, they put all their capital into one line of business, and you may be sure they swamped the market. If they'd just done a little inventing now, instead--worried out the idea of steam, or gas, or electricity--why Rome might never have fallen to this day." And no one interfered with Mr. Malt's idea that the fall of Rome was a purely commercial disaster. Doubtless it was out of regard for his feelings, but he was exactly the sort of man to compel you to prove your a.s.sertion.

We found the boundaries of the first Forum of the Republic, and poppa, pacing it in a soft felt hat and a silk duster, offered a Senatorial contrast to history. He looked round him with dignity and made the gesture which goes with his most sustained oratorical flights. "I wouldn't have backed up Cato in everything," he said thoughtfully. "No.

There were occasions on which I should have voted against the old man, and the little American school-boys of to-day would have had to decline 'Mugwumpus' in consequence." And at the thought of Cannae and Trasimene the nineteenth century Senator from Illinois fiercely pulled his beard.

We turned our pilgrim feet to where the Colosseum wheels against the sky and gives up the world's eternal supreme note of splendour and of cruelty; and along the solitary dusty Appian Way, as if it were a country lane of the time we know, came a ragged Roman urchin with a basket. Under the triumphal arch of t.i.tus, where his forefathers jeered at the Jews in manacled procession, we bargained with him for his purple plums. He had the eyes and the smile of immemorial Italy for his own, and the bones of Imperial Rome in equal inheritance, which he also wished to sell, by the way, in jagged fragments from his trouser pockets. And it linked up those early days with that particular afternoon in a curiously simple way to think that from the Caesars to King Humbert there has never been a year without just such brown-cheeked, dark-eyed, imperfectly washed little Roman boys upon the Appian Way.

CHAPTER XII.

We were too late for the hotel _dejeuner_, and had to order it, I remember, _a la carte_. That was why the Count was kept waiting. We were kept waiting, too, which seemed at the moment of more importance, since the atmosphere of the cla.s.sics had given us excellent appet.i.tes.

Emmeline decided upon ices and _pet.i.ts fours_ in the Corso for her party, after which they were going to let nothing interfere with their inspection of the prison of St. Paul; but we came back and ordered a haricot. In the cavernous recesses beyond the door which opened kitchen-ward, commands resounded, and a quarter of an hour later a boy walked casually through the dining-room bearing beans in a basket. Time went on, and the Senator was compelled to send word that he had not ordered the repast for the following day. The small waiter then made a pretence of activity, and brought vinegar and salt, and rolls and water.

"The peutates is notta-cooks," said he in deprecation, and we were distressed to postpone the Count for those peutates. But what else was possible?

The dismaying part was that after luncheon had enabled us to regard a little thing like that with equanimity, my parents abandoned it to me.

Momma said she knew she was missing a great deal, but she really didn't feel equal to entertaining the Count; her back had given out completely.

The Senator wished to attend to his mail. With the a.s.sistance of his letters and telegrams he was beginning to bear up wonderfully, and, as it was just in, I hadn't the heart to interfere. "You can apologise for us, daughter," said poppa, "and say something polite about our seeing him later. Don't let him suppose we've gone back on him in any way. It's a thing no young fellow in America would think of, but with these foreigners you never can tell."