THE BORDERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN
There are few stretches of roadway in Italy that wind through finer
scenery than that panorama which spreads out along the highway between
Florence and Siena. The pedestrian, however, finds small opportunity to
contemplate the landscape, for his progress is beset with strange
perils. Each peasant of this section possesses a yoke of white oxen, a
bovine type indigenous to the Apennine region, the distinguishing
feature of which is the length of the horns, measuring often six and
even seven feet from tip to tip. Now meet two such beasts, yoked
together, and it is a wide highway that leaves you room to pass.
Moreover, their drivers being invariably sound asleep, the animals
wander at sweet will about the right of way, tossing their heads toward
the passer-by. When one considers that every twenty or twenty-five acres
through this territory constitutes a farm, that every farmer has his
pair of oxen, and that he does his best to lay out his work in such a
manner as to give him the greatest possible amount of time on the road,
leaving real labor to his wife and daughters, it is easily understood
that to make one’s way on foot, requires no mean amount of vigilance,
nimbleness, and endurance.
Nor is that all. On every highway of Europe the wayfarer must be always
on the alert for the sound of an automobile horn. Continental chauffeurs
have small respect for foot-travelers, and the pedestrian who does not
heed their imperative honk is quite apt to come into collision with a
touring-car moving at its highest rate of speed. Now the first note of
protest of an over-burdened ass bears a similarity to the toot of an
automobile horn that can scarcely be accounted for under the head of
coincidences. Moreover, the time ensuing between the first and second
notes is quite long enough for a car to shoot around a corner, send the
unobserving wanderer skyward, and disappear into the gasoline-saturated
Beyond. In consequence, my journey from Florence to Siena was no
pleasure stroll; for when I was not vaulting roadside hedges before
oncoming oxen, I was crouching on the edge of the highway, peering
anxiously round a turn of the route until a second asinine vocable broke
on my ear.
He who would obtain an exact idea of the ensemble of the city of Siena
has but to dump a spoonful of sugar on a well-heaped dish of rice. Some
of the grains remain at the very top of the heap, others cling
tenaciously to the sides as if fearful of falling to the bottom into the
dish itself. For rice, read a rocky hill; for sugar, houses; for dish, a
broad, fertile valley in which space is unlimited, and the visualization
of Siena is complete. Except in that small quarter on the flat summit of
the hill it is one of those up-and-down towns in which streets should be
fitted with ladders; where every householder is in imminent danger, each
time he steps out of doors, of falling into the next block, should he
inadvertently lose his grip on the façade of his dwelling. I scaled the
city without being reduced to the indignity of making the ascent on
hands and knees; but more than once I kept my place only by clutching at
the flanking buildings.
How little the knowledge of the world among the masses of Italy has
increased, since the days of Columbus, was suggested during my evening
in the perennial inn at the summit of the town. Engaged in a game of
“dama” (checkers) with the innkeeper’s small daughter, I strove at the
same time to satisfy the curiosity of the host himself and a band of
strolling musicians, of whom a blind youth accompanied both game and
conversation on a soft-voiced violin.
“When you go to America,” asked the innkeeper, pointing out a move to my
opponent, “you get clear out of sight of land, non è vero?”
I admitted that such experiences were common.
“Ah, I once thought of going to America,” he cried, turning to impress
upon the attentive audience his fearlessness in having dared to conceive
so intrepid a venture, “until they told me that. But you wouldn’t catch
_me_ on a boat that went clear out of sight of land. I don’t mind a trip
from Genoa to Naples, or even to Bastia, where you always have the coast
alongside; but when you leave the land and jump out into the universe,
steering by the stars and going—La Santissima Vergine knows where—ah,
not for me! Why, suppose the captain loses his way when the stars move?
You come to the edge of the world and over you go. Ugh!”
The audience shuddered in sympathy, and the blind youth drew forth from
his instrument a wail such as might have risen from the victims of so
dreadful a fate.
By the time a new topic had been broached the hostess wandered in and
sat down before the register in which I had written my autobiography.
Her eyes fell on the figures indicating my age.
“Aha!” she cried, jabbing the number with a stubby forefinger and
winking good-humoredly, “soldiering _is_ hard work, to be sure. I don’t
blame you a bit. Officers _are_ hard masters.”
I had too often been accused of running away to escape military service
to be at all put out by this familiar accusation.
“Many a boy I know,” went on the woman, “has run away to America just
before he reached his majority and the beginning of his three years in
the army. How strange you Americans should fly over here to Italy for
the same reason!”
“You bet _I_ don’t blame them,” growled the innkeeper.
“But military service is not required in America,” I protested.
“Eh!” cried my hearers, in chorus.
“We don’t have to be soldiers in America,” I repeated.
“What!” shouted the host, “you have no army?”
“Yes; but the soldiers are hired, as for any other trade.”
“But who makes them go?” demanded the blind musician.
“No one. They are paid to go.”
The audience puzzled for several moments over this strange arrangement.
Suddenly the landlady burst out laughing.
“You think to fool us!” she cried. “How, if nobody makes them go, can
there be soldiers to pay?”
“Aye! That’s it!” roared the host.
“They want to go,” I explained.
“Want to be soldiers!” bellowed the innkeeper. “What nonsense! Who wants
to be a soldier and work three years for nothing?”
“But you don’t understand. Those who want to be soldiers are paid
wages.”
“Ah!” cried the musician, with a sudden burst of inspiration, “when your
name is drawn, you pay a man to go for you?”
“No; the government pays him. Our names are not drawn.”
“How much money the king must spend, paying all the soldiers,” mused my
opponent.
“Ah! They are a strange people, the Americans,” sighed the host, and he
cast upon me a glance that seemed to say, “and liars, too, very often.”
[Illustration: Selling the famous long-horned cattle of Siena outside
the walls]
[Illustration: Italian peasants returning from market-day in the
communal village]
Weeks before, I had given up all hope of making clear to Italians our
military system. The institution of compulsory service has been so woven
into their picture of life since infancy that barely a man of them has
the power of imagining an existence without this omnipresent fate
hanging over his head. Whatever may be the attitude of the educated
Italian towards it, military service is regarded by the laboring class
as a curse from which there is no escape. We are accustomed to say that
nothing is sure but death and taxes. The Italian would include
conscription.
Two days after leaving Siena, I turned out in the early morning from
Viterbo, just fifty miles north of Rome. Strange to say, in measure as I
approached the capital the less inhabited became the countryside. For
hours beyond Viterbo the highway wound over low mountains between
whispering forests, in utter solitude. Where the woods ended, stretched
many another weary mile with never a hut by the wayside. Only an
occasional shepherd, clad in sheepskins, sat among his flocks on a
hillside, and gave life to a landscape that suggested the wilds of
Wyoming or the vast steppes of Siberia.
The sun was touching the western horizon as I traversed a rugged
village, but with Rome so close at hand I pressed on. The hamlet,
however, appeared to be the last habitation of man along the highway.
The sun sank in an endless morass, amid the whispering of great fields
of reeds and grasses, and the dismal croaking of frogs. Twilight faded
to black night. Far off, ahead, the reflection of the Eternal City
lighted up the sky; yet hours of tramping seemed to bring the glow not a
yard nearer.
Forty-one miles I had covered when three hovels rose up by the wayside.
One was an inn, but the keeper growled out some protest and slammed the
door in my face. I took refuge and broke an all-day fast in a wine-shop
patronized by traveling teamsters, one of whom offered me a bed on his
load of straw in the adjoining stable.
He rose at daybreak, and for the first few miles the dawdling pace of
his mules was fully fast enough for my maltreated legs. Little by little
I forged ahead. The deserted highway led across a bleak moorland,
rounded a slight eminence, and brought me face to face with the once
center of the civilized world.
To the right and left, on low hills, stood large modern buildings, from
which the mass of houses sloped down and covered the intervening plains,
broken only by the Tiber winding its way through the dull, grey stretch
of habitations. Here and there a dome or steeple reflected the morning
sun, but towering high above the mass, dwarfing all else by comparison,
stood the vast dome of St. Peter’s. Close before me began an unbroken
suburb on both sides of the route; suggesting that the modern Roman
builds only as far from the center of the city as his view of it remains
unimpaired. Countless multitudes have caught their first glimpse of Rome
from this low hilltop. Before the days of railways, pilgrims journeyed
from Civita Vecchia, on the coast, by this same road—millions of them on
foot, and entered the city by this massive western gateway. Through the
portal poured a steady stream of peasants, on wagons, carts, donkeys,
and afoot, checked by officers of the octroi, who ran long lances
through bales and baskets of farm produce. I joined the surging bedlam
and was swept within the walls.
Early that afternoon I made my way across the Tiber and through the
narrow streets of the Borgo to the square before St. Peter’s. About the
papal residence the carriages of le beau monde kept up continual
procession. I threaded my way towards the entrance to the Vatican
galleries, though with little hope that one who had been taken for a
beggar in the miserable villages of the Apennines could get beyond the
door. At the base of the stairway a Swiss guard, resplendent in that red
and yellow uniform which Michael Angelo is accused of having
perpetrated, raised his javelin and accosted me in German:—
“Sorry, Landsmann, but the galleries are just closing; it is one
o’clock.”
Taking the speech as a polite way of saying that tramps were not
admitted, I turned away. Another glance, however, showed that visitors
really were leaving, and a “hist” from behind called me back. The guard,
glancing around to see if he were observed by the other servants of the
Holy Father, leaned on his lance and inquired in a low voice:—
“How’s business on the road these days?”
He had, it turned out, once been a penniless wanderer in nearly every
corner of the continent. For some time we chatted in the jargon of “the
road,” that language made up of a mixture of slang and gestures that one
can learn only by tramping the highways of Europe. The guard smiled
reminiscently at each mention of the rendezvous of vagrants to the
north, and, having heard such bits of news from the field of action as I
could give him, carefully outlined for me the various “grafts” of the
Roman fraternity. A companion in office called to him from the top of
the steps and he hurried away with the parting injunction:—
“Come to-morrow, mein Lieber, early, if you want to see the galleries.”
When I had inspected the interior of St. Peter’s I sought out the
rendezvous to which the guard had directed me. A dozen birds of passage
around the wine-tables greeted my entrance in several languages:—
“Ha! En voilà un de plus!”
“Woher, Landsmann? Was gibt’s neues?”
“Y que tal la carretera, hombre?”
“Madre di dio, amico, che fa caldo! Vuoi bere?”
I sipped the glass of wine offered by the Italian—to have drunk it all
would have been “bad form”—and sat down to give an account of myself.
“Aber du bist kein Deutscher?” cried a grizzled vagabond, when I had
finished.
“Amerikaner,” I replied.
“American!” shouted the band, in a chorus in which European tongues ran
riot, “Why, there is another American knocking about town. He’ll drop in
before long; meanwhile, have a drink.”
I waited impatiently, for months had passed since I had spoken with a
fellow countryman. In the course of a half-hour there strolled in a
swarthy specimen of the genus vagabundus, attired in a ragged misfit.
“Ach! Du Amerikaner!” cried the chorus. “Here is a countryman of yours.”
I accosted the newcomer. “How are you, Jack?”
He took place on a bench, stared at me a moment, and demanded, in
Italian:—
“What country are you from?”
“Dei Stati Uniti,” I replied. “But they told me you were an American,
too.”
“Certainly I am an American!” he shouted, indignantly. “I come from
Buenos Ayres.”
It had been my custom to ramble at random through the cities of Europe,
visiting the points of special interest as I chanced upon them. The
topography of Rome, however, is not of the simplest, and, having picked
up a guidebook for a few soldi in a second-hand stall, I set out
dutifully to follow its lead through the city. It was a work in Italian,
published for the use of Roman Catholic pilgrims. For two days it led me
a merry chase among the churches and chapels of Rome, calling attention
here to the statue of a saint, the bronze foot of which had been kissed
into a shapeless mass by devout _pellegrini_; there to a shrine in which
was enclosed the second bone of the third finger of the right hand of
some martyr or pope, or a splinter of the true cross that had
miraculously found its way to Rome. But as I hurried from chapel to
church and from church to chapel I became suspicious of the profound
silence of the book’s author, a Father Guiseppe Somebody, on the subject
of the monuments of ancient Rome. Having therein more interest than in
martyrs’ bones and kissed statues, I sat down on the steps of the
forty-ninth church, and turned over the leaves in search of reference to
the old-time edifices. Page after page the nomenclature of churches and
chapels continued, interspersed with descriptions of more finger-bones
and splinters; but, up to the last leaf, not a word of ante-Christian
Rome and its ruins. On the final page, in a footnote, the devout author
expressed himself as follows:—
“There are in Rome, besides all the blessed relics and holy places we
have pointed out to the pilgrim, certain ruins and monuments of the days
previous to the coming of Our Holy Saviour. The Faithful, however, will
take care not to defile themselves by visiting these remnants of unholy
pagan and heathen Rome.”
I sold the “Pilgrims’ Guide” for the price of a bottle of wine and set
out to explore the city after my own fashion.
Cæsar, for some reason, has not seen fit to inform posterity whether he
patronized the “Colosseum Tonsorial Parlors,” or carried his own razor.
If he sallied forth for his daily scrape, times were different then;
for, had the conqueror of the Gauls had at hand such barbers as modern
Rome harbors he would certainly have turned Vercingetorix over to their
tender mercies instead of subjecting him to the mild punishment of an
underground dungeon.
There was a shop not far from the wayfarers’ retreat in the Borgo.
Recalling painful experiences elsewhere in the peninsula, I avoided it
as long as possible, but there came a day when I must sneak inside and
take a seat. That, to begin with, was a mere chair, a decidedly rickety
one that squeaked and writhed under me as if afraid, like myself, of the
scowling proprietor, who stropped his razor in the far corner. By and by
he laid the weapon aside, and picking up a small milk-pan, retreated to
the back of the room. The only mirror in the establishment being some
five inches square, there was no means of knowing what game he indulged
in during a prolonged absence.
I had all but fallen asleep, stretched like a suspension bridge between
the chair and the wooden box that did duty as foot-rest, when the
barber, approaching stealthily, slapped me suddenly and emphatically on
the point of the chin with the brush of a defunct or bankrupt
billposter. The blow was nothing compared with the temperature of the
splash of lather that accompanied it. The cold chills set the ends of my
toes tingling. There ensued a lathering of which no American so
fortunate as to have spent all his days in the land of his first
milk-bottle can form a conception. From ear to ear, from Adam’s apple
well up my nostrils, that icy lather was slapped and rubbed in with the
paste-brush and the rasp-like palm of the manipulator, until my first
notion that this thorough soaping was to lighten the work with the razor
was succeeded by the fear that my torturer had decided to dispense with
that instrument entirely. When he had covered all my face but one eye,
the barber laid aside his brush, strolled to the door, and stood with
his arms akimbo, evidently to give his biceps time to recover from their
strenuous exertions.
A fellow-townsman sauntered by, and the two fell into a discussion that
involved, not the batting averages of the major league, but the advance
of a half-cent a liter in the price of wine. The lye on my face began to
draw and tingle, the chair groaned under me, and still the dispute raged
at the door. Fortunately, the townsman was called away before it was
settled. The barber gazed after his retreating form, hummed an opera air
in sotto voce, and glanced at the sky for signs of a storm. Then he
turned slowly around, stared frowningly at me for several moments in an
effort to recall how a man all soaped and ready for the razor had gotten
into his establishment, and, with a sigh of regret at the task before
him, hunted up the razor, stropped it again as if it had lain unused for
six months, and fell to. A hack at one side of my face razed at least a
dozen hairs. The torturer changed his mind concerning the point of
attack and transferred his efforts to the other side—with no gratifying
success, however. He began once more, this time at the point of the
chin, worked his way upward by a series of cuts and slashes, and, having
removed from my face most of the skin, a fair share of the lather, and
even some of the stubble, stepped back to survey his handiwork.
“Here, you’re not finished!” I cried, pointing to my upper lip.
“What! Shave your lip?”
“Certainly.”
“But why?”
“Because I want it shaved.”
“Santissima Madonna!” he gasped, making several passes before a chromo
print of the Virgin on the back wall. “Here is a man who wants the upper
lip of a woman!”
However, having called the Lady’s attention to his innocence, he shaved
the lip and relieved an anxiety under which I had labored since entering
the shop. For, many a barber of Italy had refused point-blank to
undertake any such unprecedented defilement of the human face, and
driven me forth with a nascent moustache in spite of my protests.
Nearly a week after my arrival in the capital I turned southward again,
on the highway to Naples. For three days the route led through a
territory packed with ragged, half-starved people, who toiled
incessantly from the first peep of the sun to the last waver of
twilight, and crawled away into some foul hole during the hours of
darkness. The inhabitants of this famished section bore little
resemblance to the people of the north. Shopkeepers snarled at their
customers, the “shortchange racket” was always in evidence, false coins
of the smallest denomination abounded—fancy “shoving the queer” with
nickels—and, had not my appearance been quite in keeping with that of
the natives, I should certainly have won the attention of those who live
by violence.
There were other difficulties unknown in the north. The language changed
rapidly. The literary tongue, spoken in Florence and Siena, was almost
foreign here. A word learned in one hamlet was incomprehensible in
another a half-day distant. The villages, almost without exception, were
perched at the summits of the most inaccessible hills, up which each
day’s walk ended with a weary climb by steep paths of rubble that rolled
underfoot.
I found lodging at the wayside only on my fourth day out of Rome, in a
building that was one-fourth inn and three-fourths stable. The keeper,
his wife, and a litter of children had scarcely enough wardrobe between
them to have completely clothed the smallest urchin. All were
barefooted, their feet spread out nearly as wide as they were long, the
thick callous of the soles split and cracked up the sides like the hoofs
of horses that had long gone unshod. The wife and several of her brood
lay on a heap of chaff in a corner of the room reserved for humans. The
father sat on a stool, bouncing the _bambino_ up and down on his
unspeakable feet; another child squatted on the top of the four-legged
board that served as table and, in awe of the new arrival, alternately
handled his toes and thrust his fingers in his mouth.
“You have lodgings for travelers?” I inquired.
“Yes,” growled the proprietor.
“How much for a bed?”
“Two cents.”
I was skeptical and demanded to see the lodging that could be had at
such a price.
“Giovanni!” bawled the head of the charming band, “bring in the bed!”
A moth-eaten youth threw open the back door and fired at my feet a dirty
grain-sack, filled with crumpled straw that peeped out here and there.
When I had smoked a final pipe, the father bawled once more to his
first-born and motioned to me to take up my bed and walk. I followed the
youth across a stable yard towards a wing of the building, picking my
way between the heaps of offal by the light of the feeble torch he
carried. Giovanni waded inside, pointed out to me a long, narrow manger
of slats, and fled, leaving me alone with the problem of how to repose
nearly six feet of body on three feet of stuffed grain-sack. I tried
every combination that ingenuity and some not entirely different
experiences could suggest, but concluded at last to sleep on the bare
slats and use the sack as a pillow.
I had just begun to doze, when an outer door opened and let in a great
draught of night air, closely followed by a flock of sheep that quickly
filled the stable to overflowing. Some of the animals attempted to
overflow into the manger, sprang back when they found it already
occupied, and made known their discovery to their companions by a long
series of “baas.” The information awakened a truly Italian curiosity.
The sheep organized a procession and the whole band filed by the manger,
every animal poking its nose through the slats for a sniff. This
formality over, each of the flock expressed a personal opinion of my
presence in trembling, nerve-racking bleats, which discussion had by no
means ended, when the youth came to inform me that it was morning and
carried off my bed, fearful, no doubt, of my absconding with that
valuable ameublement.
In spite of the bruises on the salient points of my anatomy, I plodded
on at a good pace, hoping, with this early start, to reach Naples before
the day was done. Two pairs of gendarmes, who halted me for long
interviews, made the attempt useless, however; and I was still in the
country when the gloom, settling down like fog, drove into the highway
bands of fatigued humans and four-footed beasts, toiling homeward. The
route descended, the intervening fields between squalid villages grew
shorter and shorter, finally giving way entirely to an unbroken row of
stone houses that shut in the highway. The bands of homing peasants
increased to a stream of humanity against which I struggled to make my
way.
Swept into the backwater of the human current, I cornered a workman and
inquired for Naples.
“Napoli! Ma! _This_ is Napoli!” he bellowed, shoving me aside.
I plunged on, certain that a descending road must lead to the harbor and
its sailors’ lodgings. Ragged, sullen-visaged laborers, now and then an
unsoaped female, swept against me. Donkeys laden and unladen protested
against the goads of their cursing masters. Heavy ox-carts, massive
wagons, an occasional horseman, fought their way up the acclivity, amid
a bedlam of shrill shouts, roaring oaths, the strident yee-hawing of
asses, the rumble of wheels on cobblestones, the snap of whips, the
resounding whack of cudgels; and before and behind a bawling multitude
filled the scene that resembled nothing more nearly than the hurried
flight of its diabolical inhabitants from that inferno which the
Florentine has pictured. It was long after my first inquiry for “Napoli”
that I reached level streets and was dragged into a dismal hovel by a
boarding-house runner. Fifty-five days had passed since my departure
from Paris, thirty-four of which had been spent in walking.
If there is a spot of similar size in the civilized world that houses
more rascals, knaves, and degenerates than Naples, it has successfully
hidden its iniquities. The struggle for existence in this densely packed
section of the peninsula has driven its lower classes in one of two
directions: they have become stolid, unthinking brutes or incorrigible
rogues. Even those who, by day, are employed at professions considered
honorable and remunerative among us, spend their nights and idle hours
as agents of every species of business and deception to be found in
congested centers. Every steamship office, every restaurant, every
hotel, shop, gambling den, or house of prostitution has its scores of
“runners” to entice the stranger or unwary citizen within its doors. We
have “runners” in America, but these procurers that fight for a meager
percentage in Naples are not merely the dregs of city life; even the man
who has left his telegraph instrument or bookkeeper’s stool during the
afternoon prowls through the dark streets in quest of a stray soldo. The
barber roams at large to drag into his shop those whose faces show need
of his services; the merchant stands before his door and bawls and
beckons to the passing throng like a side-show barker; the ticket-agent
tramps up and down the wharves striving to sell passage, at regular
price if necessary; at an exorbitant one if possible. To cheat is second
nature to the Neapolitan of the masses. He cheats his playmates as a
boy, cheats the shopkeeper at every opportunity, enters business as a
man intending to cheat, and sticks to that intention with a persistence
worthy a better cause to the end of his days—to be cheated by the
undertaker and the priest at the finale of his life of deception and
fraud. Yet this same Naples, corrupt, Machiavelian, is, with its
environs, the breeding-ground of the vast majority of Italians who
emigrate to America.
As is usual among poverty-stricken people, gambling is the principal
vice of the southern Italian. Cards and dice are not unknown, but the
game that is dearest to the heart of the Neapolitan is _mora_, the
counting of fingers. The sharp call of “cinque! tre! otto! tre! dieci!”
raised a never-ending hubbub in my lodging house. The sums of money
hazarded were not fabulous; but had there been fortunes at stake the
game could not have been more fiercely contended. Each player, at the
beginning of the contest, jabbed his sheath-knife into the bottom of the
table within easy reach of his hand, and at every dispute waved it
threateningly above his head. A quarrel, one evening, went beyond the
point of vociferations. One player emerged from the contest with a slash
from nose to chin, and another with an ugly cut in the abdomen. But so
ordinary an occurrence was this in the house that a half-hour later the
game was raging as loudly as before.
One fine morning, soon after my arrival in Naples, I awoke to find
myself the possessor of just twenty francs. Thus far I had been a
tourist; for, if I had spent sparingly, I had given my attention to
sightseeing rather than to searching for employment. Having squandered
in un-riotous living the money intended for photographing, the time had
come when I must earn both the living and the photographs.
It had been my intention to ship as a sailor from Naples to some point
of the near east. The cosmopolitan dock loafers assured me, however,
that there was but one port on the Mediterranean in which I might hope
to sign on, and that was Marseilles. The information had come too late,
for the fare to Marseilles as a deck passenger—and that included no food
en route—was twenty-five francs. To be left stranded in Naples, however,
was a fate to be dreaded. I determined to take passage as far as
possible, namely, to Genoa, and to make my way as best I could from
there to the great French port.
By playing rival runners against each other, I reduced the regular fare
of twelve francs to nine francs and a cigar, the stogie being the
commission of the runner. With a day left at my disposal I ruined my
misused shoes among the lava-beds of Vesuvius, slept on a park bench to
save the price of a lodging, and was rowed out to the _Lederer Sandor_,
a miserable cargo-steamer hailing from Trieste. She did not sail until a
full twenty-four hours after the time set, and my stock of bread and
dried codfish gave out while we were but halfway to Genoa. I had noted,
however, that, the ship’s business being chiefly the carrying of
freight, little watch was kept on the passengers. Upon arrival in the
birthplace of Columbus, therefore, I purchased a second stock of
provisions and returned on board, for it was cheaper to hire a boatman
to row me out to the ship than to pay lodgings in the city. Among a
score of through passengers my presence on board attracted no attention
and, knowing that the Sandor was to continue along the Riviera, I was
still seated on one of her hatches when she sailed out of Genoa at noon.
We cast anchor next morning at St. Maurizio and, in the early afternoon,
steamed on towards Nice. As we slipped by gleaming Monte Carlo, and I
was beginning to congratulate myself on having made my way thus far in
spite of a flat purse, the first mate, a native of Trieste, sought me
out on deck.
“What is your name?” he asked, in Italian, waving in his hand a bundle
of tickets, each of which bore the signature of its purchaser.
Plainly my ruse was discovered; but, hoping to confuse the discoverer, I
answered in English. But to no avail. For this young man, who swore at
the sailors in German and cursed longshoremen impartially in Italian and
French, spoke English almost without an accent. I had barely mentioned
my name when he burst out in my own tongue:—
“What are you doing on board? Your ticket is only to Genoa.”
“Yes!” I stammered, “but I want to get to Marseilles and I haven’t the
price.”
“No fault of ours, is it?” demanded the officer. “Your ticket reads
Genoa. You will have to pay the price from Genoa to Nice.”
“Haven’t got the half of it,” I protested.
The mate stared at me a moment in silence and hurried away to attend to
more pressing affairs. Whether he forgot my existence purposely or by
accident, I know not; he was busy on the bridge until our arrival at
Nice and, by dropping over the bow to the wharf as dusk fell, I dodged
the vigilant eyes of both ship and custom officers and hurried away,
once more in “la belle France.”
[Illustration: Italian peasants returning from the vineyards to the
village]
[Illustration: A factory of red roof-tiles near Naples. The girl works
from daylight to dark for sixteen cents]
I rose next morning with a one-franc piece in silver and a five-franc
note, both in Italian currency. The silver passed as readily as a French
coin and, fancying the paper would be as eagerly accepted, I did not
trouble to change it into coin of the republic before setting out on the
hundred and fifty mile tramp to Marseilles. The last sou of the silver
piece had been spent when I arrived at Cannes in the evening. I turned
in at an auberge of the famous spa and tendered an Italian note in
payment for a lodging.
“Non d’un chien! We don’t take Italian paper!” cried the aubergiste,
with great vehemence. “Ça ne vaut rien du tout.”
I visited several other inns and such shops as were still open, but the
note I could not pass, even at a discount. I found myself in the
paradoxical situation of being penniless with money in my pocket. A
chill wind blew in from the Mediterranean. I sat down on a step out of
range of the village lights, but soon fell to shivering and rose to
wander on. Down on the sandy beach in front of the principal street were
drawn up several rowboats. I peered from behind the nearest building
until the two officers who patroled the water front had reached the far
end of their beats and, scurrying down to the beach, dropped into the
shadow of the first skiff. Most of the boats were tightly covered with
boards or tarpaulins but, creeping on hands and knees from one to
another, I found two with coverings that had openings in them large
enough to admit a lean and hungry mortal. In the first into which I
thrust my head I made out the forms of two gamins, sound asleep. The
second was uninhabited. I squirmed my way in and found inside a bed of
dirty, but warm reed mats.
Scarcely had I fallen asleep when I was awakened by the chatter of
hoarse voices and looked up to see an angry face peering at me through
the opening.
“Eh! Dis donc, toi!” growled the possessor of the face. “Qu’est-ce que
tu fais dans mon lit?”
“Ton lit,” I answered, sleepily. “If I got here first, how does it come
to be your bed?”
“Hein!” snarled the face. “Ç ’a été mon coucher ces trois mois. Bouge
toi de là, sinon—” and he drew a finger suggestively across his throat.
At this display of emotion one of his companions outside pulled the
speaker away and thrust his own face in at the opening.
“Mais, dis donc, mon vieux!” he murmured. “You don’t mean to rob three
poor devils of the bed they have slept in for weeks, quoi?”
I admitted the injustice of such action and crawled out to join the
three crouching figures in the shadow of the craft.
“Where do you come from?” whispered one of them.
“From Nice. I am on the road.”
“Quoi!” cried the three, in suppressed chorus, “on the road! Then why
don’t you go to the gendarmerie?” and they pointed away across the beach
to a lighted window.
“They’ll give you a bed for three nights,” went on one of the trio;
“we’ve been stowed away there as many times as the law allows or we
wouldn’t make our nests here.”
I crouched out of sight until the patrol had passed once more and dashed
across the sand towards the lighted window. A door stood ajar; inside,
an officer, armed in a way more fitting to a chief of brigands than to
the guardian of a peaceful watering-place, leaned back in his chair,
puffing at a long Italian cigar.
“Bien! Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” he demanded, laying the stogie on the table
edge and surveying me leisurely from head to foot.
I waved the five-franc piece in the air. “I’m a sailor, walking to
Marseilles, and the innkeepers won’t accept this.”
“Ça!” he cried contemptuously, after examining the bill under the light;
“Why, that’s Italian. No good at all! Why do you come to the gendarmerie
so late? We can’t let vagabonds into the Asile de Nuit at this hour.”
“The Asile de Nuit!” I protested. “I’m not looking for the Asile, but
for an inn; and I don’t see that I’m a vagabond, with a five-franc
note—”
“That’s no good,” he finished, “perhaps not, legally, but—Where are your
papers?”
I handed over the consular letter and the cattle-boat discharge. The
officer studied them a moment as if English were not unknown to him and
fell into a reverie.
“American, eh?” he mused, when his dream had ended; “Sailor? Hum! Well,
go sit out in the hall until I am relieved and I’ll take you to the
Asile.”
I sat down against the wall on the flagstone of the entry and fell into
a doze from which I was awakened by the entrance of another gendarme, in
full armament like his colleague. The latter stepped out a moment later,
growled a “viens,” and hurried off through the deserted streets, his
sword rattling noisily on the pavement in the silence of the night. I
marched close at his heels, wondering what was in store for me; for,
though I had often heard roadsters mention the vagabond quarters which
every city of France maintains, I knew nothing of the institutions at
first hand.
Five minutes’ walk brought us to a small brick building, at the door of
which the gendarme drew out a bunch of gigantic keys and entered. The
first door led into a hallway along which the officer walked some ten
feet and, with more rattling of keys, opened a second that led into
nothing, so far as I could see, but Stygian darkness.
“Voilà!” he shouted, pushing me past him through the door; “Te voilà à
l’Asile de Nuit.”
“But where do I sleep?” I demanded. The darkness was absolute and, at my
first step inside the door, I bumped against what appeared to be the
edge of a heavy table.
“Hein! Diable! Sleep on the shelf,” snapped the gendarme; then,
comprehending that I was unfamiliar with the architectural arrangements
of an Asile de Nuit, he struck a match and by its brief flicker I caught
a glimpse of the night asylum of Cannes.
It was a room about twenty feet long and seven wide, with a single,
strong-barred window at the end facing the street. The entire length of
the room ran a sloping wooden shelf, six feet wide and some four feet
above the floor at the highest edge, with an alleyway a foot wide
between it and the wall behind me. The ledge was occupied by about
fifteen as sorry specimens of humanity as it had as yet been my lot to
see in one collection. They were packed like spoons, with nothing
between their bodies and the twenty-foot bed but their own rags; and
each of the fifteen braced his feet against a board projecting some four
inches above the lower end of the shelf as if his life depended on
keeping in that position.
As the wavering light of the match fell on their faces, a chorus of
surly growls burst from the lips of the speakers, and increased to
shouts and curses when the gendarme crowded a knee between two of the
prostrate forms and exerted his strength to push more closely together
the two divisions of the company thus formed.
“Sacré bleu, vous!” he bellowed. “Bougez vous, donc! Here ’s a comrade.
Do you want all the Asile to yourselves, non de Dieu!” “Crowd in there,”
he commanded, pushing me towards the six-inch space which he had opened
between two of the sleepers. I crowded in, as per order, but did not
succeed in widening the space to any appreciable extent. The gendarme
went out, slammed and locked both doors, and left me to listen to the
growls and oaths that by no means decreased at his exit. The planks, for
all I know, may have been soft enough; with all my struggling I could
not force the slumberers far enough apart to reach the shelf; and I
spent the night lying with one shoulder and one hip on each of my
nearest companions, who alternated in turning over and pushing me back
and forth between them like a piece of storm-tossed wreckage on the open
sea.
The king of theatrical costumers, striving to dress unconventionally the
beggar chorus of a comic opera, could have created nothing to equal the
garments of the gathering of tramps from the four corners of Europe that
slid off the shelf with the advent of daylight, and fell to brushing and
rearranging their rags as if some improvement in appearance could result
from such industry. Instinct is so strong in man that, were his only
covering a fig-leaf, he would doubtless give it a shake and a pull upon
arising, if only in memory of days when his attire was less abbreviated.
I rubbed my eyes and waited for some of my companions to make the first
move towards the door. But their toilet finished, they sat down one by
one on the edge of the shelf as if the desire to get outside the
building was the furthest from their thoughts, and fell to exchanging
their troubles in at least four languages.
I rose and, climbing over a forest of legs to the door, grasped the knob
and was about to give it a yank, when the exit of the officer the night
before, with the clang of heavy bolts shot home, came back to memory. I
sat down again with the others, and following their example, filled my
pipe, as the only consolation left me. Nor was one of these outcasts,
who told of days of fasting and the bitter pangs of hunger, without his
supply of the soothing weed.
Traffic was already beginning in the street outside. Now and then some
facetious passer-by stopped to peer through the bars at us and to sneer:
“Bah! Messieurs les vagabonds. Sales bêtes!” Others carried their
jocosity so far as to toss pebbles and clods of earth in through the
grating; to which treatment my companions in misery were powerless to
reply, except by spitting out viciously at their tormentors and
promising them a summary vengeance when once they were released.
An hour after daylight a gendarme came to unlock the doors. I pushed out
with the rest and set off in the direction of Marseilles. I had not gone
five paces, however, when I heard a shout behind me:
“Eh, toi! Où est-ce que tu vas comme ça?”
I turned around in surprise.
“Come along here, you,” roared the officer, and with the rest I filed
back to the gendarmerie, the butt of the derisive grimaces of passing
urchins.
At headquarters each of us was registered again, as we had been the
night before, after which we were permitted to go our several ways.
There was no means of changing my wealth into French coin until the
banks opened, two hours later. Scorning to delay so long, I turned away
breakfastless to the westward, convinced that some village banker would
come to my assistance by the time France was wide awake. But at high
noon I was still plodding on, dizzy with hunger and the fatigue of
climbing a low, uninhabited spur of the Alps that stretches down to the
Mediterranean west of Cannes, with that infernal Italian note still in
my pocket. At four in the afternoon I reached the village of Fréjus. A
merchant, whom I ran to earth after a long search, agreed to accept the
likeness of Vittore Emanuele at a half-franc discount; and I sat down on
the village green with an armful of bread and dried herring—my first
meal in twenty-eight hours.
I paid, that night, for a flea-bitten lodging in Le Puget, but concluded
next day that the three francs remaining could be better invested in
food than in sleeping-quarters. When darkness again overtook me,
therefore, I applied for accommodations at the gendarmerie of Cuers. The
village was too small to boast an Asile de Nuit, but after long argument
I induced the rustic in charge of the town hall to allow me to occupy
the solitary cell which the hamlet reserved for the incarceration of its
felons. It was a three-cornered hole under the stairway leading to the
upper story, and I spent the night in durance vile; for the rustic, for
some reason unknown, insisted on locking me in.
Next day I pressed steadily onward through a hungry Sunday of pouring
rain, the mud of the highway oozing in through the expanding holes of my
dilapidated shoes. From time to time a facetious innkeeper peered out
through the downpour to shout: “Hé donc, toi! You don’t know it’s
raining, perhaps?” But bent on reaching Marseilles before my last
coppers had been scattered, I dared not linger to give answer.
Late Sunday evening is an inconvenient hour to look for the municipal
officers of an unimportant French village. Back of the central _place_
of Le Beausset I found the hôtel de ville, a decrepit, one-story
building; but I knocked at the back door, the entrée des vagabonds, for
some time in vain. A passing villager advised me to “go right in.” I
opened the door accordingly and stepped inside, only to be driven out
again by a series of feminine shrieks before I had an opportunity to
make out, in a badly-lighted kitchen, the exact source of the uproar. I
sat down in the rain outside the door that had been slammed and bolted
behind me and waited.
When the last café had ceased its shouting, another villager, half in
uniform, pushed past me and knocked for admittance. Certain that he was
a gendarme, I followed him inside. At the back of the room, over a stove
from which rose tantalizing odors, stood two women who, catching sight
of me, deluged the officer with a flood of words.
“Here, mon vieux,” he snapped, whirling upon me, “what do you mean by
marching into my house and frightening my women out of their wits?”
I excused my conduct on the ground of advice too hastily taken. The
gendarme scowled over my papers, tucked them away in a greasy cupboard
behind the stove, and turned with me out into the night. The Asile was
not far distant, and it was unoccupied. The officer set a candle-end on
a beam and, bidding me not to set the place on fire and to exchange the
key for my papers in the morning, departed. I burrowed deep into the
straw with which the shelf was covered and fell to sleep in my
water-soaked garments.
Short rations and plank beds had left me in no condition to cover in a
single day the thirty-five miles between Le Beausset and Marseilles. I
found my legs giving way when darkness caught me some distance from the
harbor and, having no hope of finding a better lodging, sat down against
a tree on an outer boulevard. A bitter wind blew, for it was the last
day of October and well north of Naples. In the far west of my own
country, however, I had learned a trick of great value “on the road.” It
is, that a coat thrown over the head is far more protection while
sleeping out of doors than when worn in the usual manner. I was,
therefore, unmolested as long as the night lasted, no doubt because
passers-by saw in my huddled form only a grain-sack dropped by the
wayside.