Miss Lander makes a bust--The twang of his native place--
Wholly unlike anybody else--Wise, humorous Sarah Clarke--
Back to the Gods and the Fleas--Horace Mann's statue--Miss
Bremer and the Tarpeian Rock--"I was in a state of some
little tremor"--Mrs. Jameson and Ruskin--Most thorough-going
of the classic tragedies--A well-grown calf--An adventure in
Monte Testaccio--A vision of death--A fantastic and
saturnine genius--A pitch-black place--Illuminations and
fireworks--The Faun-Enjoying Rome--First impressions--
Lalla's curses.
While my father was conscientiously making acquaintance with the
achievements of old-time art, modern artists were trying to practise
their skill on him; he had already sat to Cephas Giovanni Thompson, and
he was now asked to contribute his head to the studio of a certain Miss
Lander, late of Salem, Massachusetts, now settled, as she intended,
permanently in Rome. "When I dream of home," she told him, "it is
merely of paying a short visit and coming back here before my trunk is
unpacked." Miss Lander was not a painter, but a sculptor, and, in spite
of what my father had said against the nude in sculpture, I think he
liked clay and marble as a vehicle of art better than paint and canvas.
At all events, he consented to give her sittings. He was interested in
the independence of her mode of life, and they got on very comfortably
together; the results of his observation of her appear in the references
to Hilda's and Miriam's unhampered ways of life in The Marble Faun.
She had, as I recall her, a narrow, sallow face, sharp eyes, and a long
chin. She might have been thirty years old. Unlike Miss Harriet Hosmer,
who lived not far away, Miss Lander had no attractiveness for us
children. I have reason to think, too, that my father's final opinion of
her was not so favorable as his first one. Except photographs, no really
good likeness of my father was ever taken; the portrait painted in
Washington, in 1862, by Leutze, was the least successful of them all.
The best, in my opinion, was an exquisitely wrought miniature of him at
the age of thirty, which I kept for a long time, till it was stolen by a
friend in London in 1880.
Paul Akers, a Maine Yankee, with the twang of his native place still
strong in him after ten years in Rome, was another sculptor of our
acquaintance; he was very voluble, and escorted us about Rome, and
entertained us at his own studio, where he was modelling his best group,
"The Drowned Fisher-boy," as he called it. The figure is supposed to
be lying at the bottom of the sea, face upward, with a fragment of rock
supporting on its sharp ridge the small of the back--a most painful and
uncomfortable attitude, suggesting that even in death there could be no
rest for the poor youth. Mr. Akers was rather sharply critical of his
more famous brother-artists, such as Greenough and Gibson, and was
accused by them, apparently not wholly without justification, of
yielding too much to the influence of other geniuses in the designing
of his groups. But he was a sensible and obliging little personage, and
introduced us to the studios of several of his fellow-artists in Rome,
some of which were more interesting than his own.
Bright little Miss Harriet Hosmer, with her hands in her jacket-pockets,
and her short hair curling up round her velvet cap, struts cheerfully
forth out of the obscurity of the past in my memory; her studio, I
think, adjoined that of Gibson, of whom I remember nothing whatever. Her
most notable production at that time was a Puck sitting on a toadstool,
with a conical shell of the limpet species by way of a cap; he
somehow resembled his animated and clever creator. Miss Hosmer's face,
expressions, gestures, dress, and her manifestations in general were
perfectly in keeping with one another; there never was a more succinct
and distinct individuality; she was wholly unlike anybody else, without
being in the least unnatural or affected. Her social manner was of a
persistent jollity; but no doubt she had her grave moments or hours, a
good and strong brain, and a susceptibility to tragic conceptions, as is
shown by the noble figure of her Zenobia. This figure I saw in clay
in her studio during our second season in Rome. Miss Hosmer's talk
was quick, witty, and pointed; her big eyes redeemed her round,
small-featured face from triviality; her warm heart glowed through
all she said and did. Her studio was a contrast to the classicality of
Gibson's, whose influence, though she had studied under him during her
six years' residence in Rome, had affected her technique only, not her
conceptions or aims in art. We all liked her much. She was made known to
us, I believe, through the medium of grave, wise, humorous Sarah Clarke,
the sister of the James Freeman Clarke who married my mother to my
father, and who, twenty-two years later, read over my father the burial
service. Sarah Clarke was often abroad; she was herself an admirable
artist in water-color, and was always a dear friend of my mother's.
After we had returned to Concord, in 1860, Miss Hosmer wrote to us, and
one of her letters has been preserved; I quote it, because it is like
her:
"MY DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--It is not unlikely that you may be somewhat
surprised to hear from me; but after you have received the four dozen
letters which, sooner or later, I intend writing you, you will cease to
be so. I begin at the present moment with the first of the forty-eight,
partly for business and partly for pleasure. Reversing, then, the
order of things which some unknown but well-regulated-minded individual
considered to be correct, I will go in for pleasure first, under which
head I seek information respecting the health and well-being of all
members of your family. It seems cruel that you should go off to the
glorious Republic when there are other places in Rome besides the Piazza
Poli. Now that you are safely out of it, I must try to persuade you that
it was the most unhealthy place in the whole city, not only because
I really believe it to be so, but that malaria may not be mingled and
cherished with every remembrance of this delicious, artistic, fleay,
malarious paradise. But I suppose little short of a miracle would
transport you here again, not only because Una is probably becoming
the size of Daniel Lambert, in her native air, but because Julian is
probably weaving a future President's chair out of the rattans he is
getting at school. However that may be, the result is the same, I fear,
as to your getting back to the Gods and the Fleas; and I must look
forward to a meeting in America. Well, as that carries me over the
ocean, in my mind's eye, Mrs. Hawthorne, the business clause of my
epistle is suggested--and it is this: I have just had a letter from my
best of friends, Mr. Crow, of St. Louis [she had studied anatomy in St.
Louis before coming to Rome], who has been passing the summer in
New York and Boston, and he writes: 'They are talking in Boston of a
monument to the memory of Mr. Horace Mann, and I have said to one of the
active men engaged in it that if you could have the commission I would
subscribe handsomely towards it.' Now, it occurred to me that perhaps
you or yours might have an opportunity of saying a good word for me, in
which case I would have you know how pleased and grateful I should be.
You may not have the occasion offered you, but if it chances, I commend
myself to you distintamente, and trust to your good-nature not to
consider me pushing for having suggested it. I send this through our
well-beloved Sarah Clarke, and hope it will arrive before 1861. When
you have nothing better to do, pray give me a line, always in care of
Pakenham & Hooker. Good-bye, dear Mrs. Hawthorne--my best love to Mr.
Hawthorne and the chicks--and the best wish I can make is that you are
all as fat as yours always affectionately,
"HARRIET HOSMER."
All the influence which my father and mother possessed was given to Miss
Hosmer's cause, but some other person got the commission. I remember,
too, that my mother, at Mrs. Mann's request, was at great pains to make
drawings for the face of the statue which now confronts from the slopes
of Beacon Hill the culture and intelligence of Boston, which Horace
Mann did so much to promote. But he was not a subject which accommodated
itself readily to the requirements of plastic art. There is a glimpse of
Miss Hosmer in one of my father's diaries, which I will reproduce, for
the sake of indicating his amused and benevolent attitude towards her.
"She had on," says he, "a neat little jacket, a man's shirt-bosom, and
a cravat with a brooch in it; her hair is cut short, and curls jauntily
round her bright and smart little physiognomy; and, sitting opposite
me at table, I never should have imagined that she terminated in a
petticoat any more than in a fish's tail. However, I do not mean to
speak disrespectfully of Miss Hosmer, of whom I think very favorably;
but, it seems to me, her reform of the female dress begins with its
least objectionable part, and is no real improvement."
One evening we visited Miss Bremer, the novelist, of Sweden, who was
then near the end of her foreign travels, which had begun with her visit
to America in 1849. She had met my father in Lenox, and had written of
him in the book of her travels. She was a small woman, with a big heart
and broad mind, packed full of sense, sentiment, and philanthropy. She
had an immense nose, designed, evidently, for some much larger person;
her conversation in English, though probably correct, was so oddly
accented that it was difficult to follow her. She was a very lovable
little creature, then nearing her sixtieth year. Most of her voluminous
literary work was done. Her house in Rome was near the Capitol and the
Tarpeian Rock; and after we had forgathered with her there for a
while, she accompanied us forth--the moon being up--to see the famous
precipice. It was to this incident that we owe the scene in The Marble
Faun, the most visibly tragic in my father's writings. "The court-yard,"
he writes in his notes, "is bordered by a parapet, leaning over which
we saw a sheer precipice of the Tarpeian Rock, about the height of a
four-story house; not that the precipice was a bare face of rock, but
it appeared to be cased in some sort of cement, or ancient stone-work,
through which the primeval rock, here and there, looked grimly and
doubtfully. Bright as the Roman moonlight was, it would not show the
front of the wall, or rock, so well as I should have liked to see it,
but left it pretty much in the same degree of dubiety and half-knowledge
in which the antiquarians leave most of the Roman ruins. Perhaps this
precipice may have been the Traitor's Leap; perhaps it was the one on
which Miss Bremer's garden verges; perhaps neither of the two. At any
rate, it was a good idea of the stern old Romans to fling political
criminals down from the very height of the Capitoline Hill on which
stood the temples and public edifices, symbols of the institutions
which they sought to violate." But there was no tragic suggestion in
our little party, conducted about by the prattling, simple, affectionate
little woman, so homely, tender, and charitable. "At parting," wrote
my father, "she kissed my wife most affectionately on each cheek,
'because,' she said, 'you look so sweetly'; and then she turned towards
myself. I was in a state of some little tremor, not knowing what might
be about to befall me, but she merely pressed my hand, and we parted,
probably never to meet again. God bless her good heart, and every
inch of her little body, not forgetting her red nose, big as it is
in proportion to the rest of her! She is a most amiable little woman,
worthy to be the maiden aunt of the whole human race!"
Venerable Mrs. Jameson, author of a little library of writings on
Italian art, was likewise of our company occasionally; and she evinced
a marked liking for my father, which was remarkable, inasmuch as he was
able to keep no sort of pace with her in her didactic homilies, which
were delivered with a tranquil, ex-cathedra manner, befitting one who
was the authority on her subject; one would no more have thought of
questioning her verdicts than those of Ruskin; but I should have liked
to see the latter and her together, with a difference between them. Her
legs were less active than her mind, and most of our expeditions with
her were made in carriages, from which she dispensed her wisdom placidly
as we went along, laying the dust of our ignorance with the droppings
of her erudition, like a watering-cart. However, she so far condescended
from her altitudes as to speak very cordially of my father's books, for
which he expressed proper acknowledgment; and she had a motherly way
of holding his hand in hers when he took leave of her, and looking
maternally in his face, which made him somewhat uneasy. "Were we to meet
often," he remarked,
"I should be a little afraid of her embracing me outright--a thing to be
grateful for, but by no means to be glad of!" We drove one day to some
excavations which had just been opened near the tomb of Cecilia Metella,
outside the walls of Rome. Both Christian and Roman graves had been
found, and they had been so recently discovered that, as my father
observed, there could have been very little intervention of persons
(though much of time) between the departure of the friends of the
dead and our own visit. The large, excavated chambers were filled with
sarcophagi, beautifully sculptured, and their walls were ornamented with
free-hand decoration done in wet plaster, a marvellous testimony to the
rapid skill of the artists. The sarcophagi were filled with the bones
and the dust of the ancient people who had once, in the imperial prime
of Rome, walked about her streets, prayed to her gods, and feasted at
her banquets. My father remarked on the fact that many of the sarcophagi
were sculptured with figures that seemed anything but mournful in their
demeanor; but Mrs. Jameson said that there was almost always, in
the subject chosen, some allusion to death, instancing the story of
Meleager, an Argonaut, who, I think, slew the Calydonian boar, and
afterwards his two uncles, who had tried to get the boar's hide away
from Meleager's beloved Atalanta; whereupon the young hero was brought
to death by his mother, who in turn killed herself. It is one of the
most thoroughgoing of the classic tragedies, and was a favorite theme
for the sculptors of sarcophagi. Certainly, in the sarcophagi of the
Vatican the bas-reliefs are often scenes of battle, the rush of men and
horses, and the ground strewn with dead; and in others, a dying person
seems to be represented, with his friends weeping along the sides of the
sarcophagus; but often, too, the allusion to death, if it exists at all,
is very remote. The old Romans, like ourselves, had individual ways of
regarding the great change; according to their mood and faith, they were
hopeful or despairing. But death is death, think of it how we will.
I think it was on a previous occasion that I went with my father, afoot,
along this same mighty Appian Way, beside which rise so many rounded
structures, vast as fortresses, containing the remains of the dead of
long ago, and culminating in the huge mass of the Cecilia Metella tomb,
with the mediaeval battlements on its summit. And it was on that walk
that we met the calf of The Marble Faun: "A well-grown calf," my father
says in his notes, "who seemed frolicsome, shy, and sociable all at the
same time; for he capered and leaped to one side, and shook his head, as
I passed him, but soon came galloping behind me, and again started aside
when I looked round." How little I suspected then (or the bull-calf
either, for that matter) that he was to frolic his way into literature,
and go gambolling down the ages to distract the anxious soul of the
lover of Hilda! Another walk of ours was to the huge, green mound of the
Monte Testaccio; it was, at that period, pierced by numerous cavities,
in the dark coolness of which stores of native wines were kept; and
they were sold to customers at the rude wooden tables in front of the
excavations, in flasks shaped like large drops of water, protected with
plaited straw. When, nowadays, in New York or other cities here, I go to
an Italian restaurant, I always call for one of these flasks, and think,
as I drink its contents, of that afternoon with my father. It was the
first time I had been permitted to taste a fermented liquor. I liked it
very much, and got two glasses of it; and when we rose to depart I was
greatly perplexed, and my father was vastly tickled, to discover a lack
of coherence between my legs and my intentions. It speedily passed off,
for the wines are of the lightest and airiest description; but when, a
little later on in life, I came to read that Horatian verse describing
how, turning from barbaric splendors such as the Persians affect, he
binds his brows with simple myrtle, and sips, beneath the shadow of his
garden bower, the pure vintage of the native grape, I better appreciated
the poetry of the theme from having enjoyed that Testaccionesque
experience.
It was in Rome, too, that I first came in contact with death. It aroused
my liveliest curiosity, but, as I remember, no alarm; partly, I suspect,
because I was unable to believe that there was anything real in the
spectacle. The scene has been woven into the texture of the Italian
romance; it is there described almost as it actually presented itself
to the author's observation. A dead monk of the Capuchin order lay on a
bier in the nave of their church, and while we looked at him a stream
of blood flowed from his nostrils. We went down afterwards, I recollect,
into the vaults, and saw the fine, Oriental loam in which the body was
to lie; and it seems to me there were arches and other architectural
features composed of skulls and bones of long-dead brothers of the
order. He must have been a fantastic and saturnine genius who first
suggested this idea.
Another subterranean expedition of ours was to the Catacombs, the
midnight passages of which seemed to be made of bones, and niches
containing the dust of unknown mortality, which were duskily revealed in
the glimmer of our moccoli as we passed along in single file. Sometimes
we came to chambers, one of which had in it a bier covered with glass,
in which was a body which still preserved some semblance of the
human form. There were occasional openings in the vaulted roof of the
corridors, but for the most part the darkness was Egyptian, and for a
few moments a thrill of anxiety was caused by the disappearance either
of my sister Una or of Ada Shepard; I forget which. They were soon
found, but the guide read us a homily upon the awful peril of lifelong
entombment which encompassed us. But the air was dry and cool, and the
whole adventure, from my point of view, enjoyable.
Again, we went down a long flight of steps somewhere near the Forum,
till we reached a pitch-black place, where we waited till a guide came
up from still lower depths, down into which we followed him--each with
a moccolo--till we felt level earth or stone beneath our feet, and stood
in what I suppose is as lightless a hole as can exist in nature. It was
wet, too, and the smell of it was deadly and dismal. This, however, was
the prison in which the old Romans used to confine important prisoners,
such as Jugurtha and the Apostle Peter; and here they were strangled to
death or left to starve. It was the Mamertine Prison. I did not like it.
I also recall the opening of an oubliette in the castle of San Angelo,
which affected me like a nightmare. Before leaving Concord, in 1853, I
had once tumbled through a rotten board into a well, dug by the side of
the road ages before, and had barely saved myself from dropping to the
bottom, sixty feet below, by grabbing the weeds which grew on the margin
of the hole. I was not much scared at the moment; but the next day,
taking my father to the scene of the accident, he remarked that had I
fallen in I never could have got out again; upon which I conceived a
horror of the well which haunts me in my dreams even to this day. Only
a tuft of grass between me and such a fate! I was, therefore, far from
comfortable beside the oubliette, and was glad to emerge again into the
Roman sunshine.
One night we climbed the Pincian Hill, and saw, far out across Rome,
the outlines of St. Peter's dome in silver light. While we were thinking
that nothing could be more beautiful, all of a sudden the delicate
silver bloomed out into a golden glory, which made everybody say,
"Oh!" Was it more beautiful or not? Theoretically, I prefer the silver
illumination; but, as a matter of fact, I must confess that I liked the
golden illumination better. We were told that the wonder was performed
by convicts, who lay along the dome and applied their matches to the
lamps at the word of command, and that, inasmuch as the service was apt
to prove fatal to the operators, these convicts were allowed certain
alleviations of their condition for doing it. I suppose it is done by
electricity now, and the convicts neither are killed nor obtain any
concessions. Such are the helps and hindrances of civilization!
Shortly after this, on a cool and cloudy night, I was down in the
Piazza, del Popolo and saw the fireworks, the only other pyrotechnic
exhibition I had witnessed having been a private one in Rock Park,
which, I think, I have described. This Roman one was very different, and
I do not believe I have ever since seen another so fine. The whole front
of the Pincian was covered with fiery designs, and in the air overhead
wonderful fiery serpents and other devices skimmed, arched, wriggled,
shot aloft, and detonated. A boy accepts appearances as realities; and
these fireworks doubtless enlarged my conceptions of the possibilities
of nature, and substantiated the fables of the enchanters.
[IMAGE: THE MARBLE FAUN]
The Faun of Praxiteles, as the world knows, attracted my father, though
he could not have visited it often; for both in his notes and in his
romance he makes the same mistake as to the pose of the figure: "He has
a pipe," he says in the former, "or some such instrument of music in the
hand which rests upon the tree, and the other, I think, hangs carelessly
by his side." Of course, the left arm, the one referred to, is held
akimbo on his left hip. That my father's eyes were, however, already
awake to the literary and moral possibilities of the Faun is shown by
his further observations, which are much the same as those which appear
in the book. "The whole person," he says, "conveys the idea of an
amiable and sensual nature, easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not
incapable of being touched by pathos. The Faun has no principle, nor
could comprehend it, yet is true and honest by virtue of his simplicity;
very capable, too, of affection. He might be refined through his
feelings, so that the coarser, animal part of his nature would be
thrown into the background, though liable to assert itself at any time.
Praxiteles has only expressed the animal part of the nature by one (or,
rather, two) definite signs--the two ears, which go up in a little peak,
not likely to be discovered on slight inspection, and, I suppose, they
are covered with downy fur. A tail is probably hidden under the garment.
Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, most delicate taste, and
sweetest feeling would have dreamed of representing a faun under this
guise; and, if you brood over it long enough, all the pleasantness of
sylvan life, and all the genial and happy characteristics of the brute
creation, seem to be mixed in him with humanity--trees, grass, flowers,
cattle, deer, and unsophisticated man." This passage shows how much
my father was wont to trust to first impressions, and even more on the
moral than on the material side. He recognized a truth in the first
touch--the first thought--which he was wary of meddling with afterwards,
contenting himself with slightly developing it now and then, and
smoothing a little the form and manner of its presentation. The finest
art is nearest to the most veritable nature--to such as have the eye to
see the latter aright. Rome, like other ancient cities which have fallen
from the positive activity of their original estate, has one great
advantage over other places which one wishes to see (like London, for
instance), that the whole business of whoever goes there, who has any
business whatever, is to see it; and when the duty-sights have been
duly done, the sight-seer then first begins to live his true life in
independence and happiness, going where he lists, staying no longer than
he pleases, and never knowing, when he sallies forth in the morning,
what, or how many, or how few things he will have accomplished by
nightfall.
The duty to see is indeed the death of real vision; the official
cicerone leads you anywhere but to the place or thing that you are in
the mood to behold or understand. But with his disappearance the fun
and the pageant begin; one's eyes are at last opened, and beauty and
significance flow in through every pore of the senses. It is in this
better phase of his Roman sojourn that I picture my father; he trudges
tranquilly and happily to and fro, with no programme and no obligations,
absorbing all things with that quiet, omnivorous glance of his; pausing
whenever he takes the fancy, and contemplating for moments or minutes
whatever strikes his fancy; often turning aside from egregious
spectacles and giving his attention to apparent trifles, to the mere
passing show; pondering on the tuft of flowers in a cranny of the
Coliseum wall, on the azure silhouette of the Alban Mountains, on the
moss collected on the pavement beneath the aperture in the roof of the
Pantheon, on the picturesque deformity of old, begging Beppo on the
steps of the Piazza, d' Espagna. I am trudging joyously beside
him, hanging on to his left hand (the other being occupied with his
hook-headed cane), asking him innumerable questions, to which he
comfortably, or abstractedly, or with humorous impatience, replies; or
I run on before him, or lag behind, busy with my endless occupation of
picking up things to me curious and valuable, and filling with them my
much-enduring pockets; in this way drinking in Rome in my own way,
also, and to my boyish advantage. He tells me tales of old Rome, always
apposite to the occasion; draws from me, sometimes, my private views as
to persons, places, and scenes, and criticises those views in his own
terse, arch, pregnant way, the force and pertinency whereof are revealed
to me only in my later meditations upon them. It is only after one has
begun to deal in this way with Rome that its magic and spell begin to
work upon one; and they are never to be shaken off. Anxiety and pain may
be mingled with them, as was the case with my father before we said
our final farewell to the mighty city; but it is thereby only the more
endeared to one. Rome is one of the few central facts of the world,
because it is so much more than a fact. Byron is right--it is the city
of the soul.
On one of the last evenings of our first season we went to the
Thompsons', and were there shown, among other things, a portfolio
of sketches. There is in The Marble Faun a chapter called "Miriam's
Studio," in which occurs a reference to a portfolio of sketches by
Miriam herself; the hint for it may have been taken from the portfolio
of Mr. Thompson, though the sketches themselves were of a very different
quality and character. The latter collection pleased me, because I was
just beginning to fill an album of my own with such lopsided attempts to
represent real objects, and yet more preposterous imaginative sallies as
my age and nature suggested. My father was interested in them on account
of the spiritual vigor which belongs to the artist's first vision of
his subject. In their case, as well as in his own, he felt that it was
impossible, as Browning put it, to "recapture that first, fine, careless
rapture." But the man of letters has an advantage over the man of paint
and canvas in the matter of being able to preserve the original spirit
in the later, finished design.
Towards the close of this first season in Rome the Bryants came to town,
and the old poet, old in aspect even then, called on us; but he was not
a childly man, and we youngsters stood aloof and contemplated with awe
his white, Merlin beard and tranquil but chilly eyes. Near the end of
May William Story invited us to breakfast with him; the Bryants and Miss
Hosmer and some English people were there; and I understood nothing of
what passed except the breakfast, which was good, until, at the end of
the session, my father and Story began to talk about the superstition as
to Friday, and they agreed that, of course, it was nonsense, but that,
nevertheless, it did have an influence on both of them. It probably has
an influence on everybody who has ever heard of it. Many of us protest
indignantly that we don't believe in it, but the protest itself implies
something not unlike believing.
Finally, on the 24th of May, we left our Pincian palace, and got into
and on the huge _vettura_ which was to carry us to Florence, a week's
journey. It was to be one of the most delightful and blessed of our
foreign experiences; my father often said that he had enjoyed nothing
else so much, the vetturino (who happened to be one of the honestest and
sweetest-tempered old fellows in Italy) taking upon himself the entire
management of everything, down to ordering the meals and paying the
tolls, thus leaving us wholly unembarrassed and free from responsibility
while traversing a route always historically and generally scenically
charming. But we were destined, on the threshold of the adventure, to
undergo one of those evil quarters of an hour which often usher in a
period of special sunshine; for we were forced into a desperate conflict
with our servant-girl, Lalla, and her mother over a question of wages.
The girl had done chores for us during our residence at the Palazzo
Larazani, and had seemed to be a very amiable little personage; she
was small, slim, and smiling, and, though dirty and inefficient, was no
worse, so far as we could discover, than any other Roman servant-girl.
When we had fixed on the date of our departure, Lalla had been asked how
much warning she wanted; she replied, a fortnight; which, accordingly,
was given her, with a few days thrown in for good measure. But when the
day arrived she claimed a week's more pay, and her old mother had a bill
of her own for fetching water. According to my observation, travelling
Americans have little or no conscience; to avoid trouble they will
submit to imposition, not to mention their habit of spoiling tradesmen,
waiters, and other foreign attendants by excessive tips and payments.
But my father and mother, though apt enough to make liberal bargains,
were absolutely incorruptible and immovable when anything like barefaced
robbery was attempted upon them; and they refused to present Lalla and
her mother with a single baioccho more than was their due. Moreover, the
patrone, or proprietor, of the Palazzo had mulcted them some six scudi
for Lalla's profuse breakages of glass and crockery during our stay.
It was early morning when we set out, and only the faithful Thompsons
were there to bid us farewell. Lalla and her tribe, however, were
on hand, and violently demanded the satisfaction of their iniquitous
claims. "No!" said my father, and "No!" said my mother, like the judges
of the Medes and Persians. Thereupon the whole House of Lalla, but Lalla
and her mother especially, gave us an example of what an Italian can do
in the way of cursing an enemy. Ancient forms of malediction, which had
been current in the days of the early Roman kings, were mingled with
every damning invention that had been devised during the Middle Ages,
and ever since then; and they were all hurled at us in shrill, screaming
tones, accompanied by fell and ominous gestures and inarticulate yells
of superheated frenzy. Nothing could surpass the volubility of this
cursing, unless it were the animosity which prompted it; no crime that
anybody, since Cain slew Abel, had or could have committed deserved
a tenth part of the calamities and evil haps which this preposterous
family called down upon our heads, who had committed no crime at
all, but quite the contrary. When, in after-years, I heard Booth, as
Richelieu, threaten "the curse of Rome" upon his opponents, I shuddered,
wondering whether he had any notion what the threat meant. Through it
all my mother's ordinarily lovely and peaceful countenance expressed
a sad but unalterable determination; and my father kept smiling in a
certain dangerous way that he sometimes had in moments of great peril or
stress, but said nothing; while Mr. Thompson indignantly called upon
the cursers to cease and to beware, and my dear friend Eddy looked
distressed to the verge of tears. He squeezed my hand as I got into the
_vettura_, and told me not to mind--the Lalla people were wicked,
and their ill-wishes would return upon their own heads. A handful of
ten-cent pieces, or their Roman equivalent, would have stopped the whole
outcry and changed it into blessings; but I think my father would not
have yielded had the salvation of Rome and of all Italy depended
upon it. His eyes gleamed, as I have seen them do on one or two other
occasions only, as we drove away, with the screams pursuing us, and that
smile still hovered about his mouth. But we drove on; Gaetano cracked
his long whip, our four steeds picked up their feet and rattled our
vehicle over the Roman cobble-stones; we passed the Porta del Popolo,
and were stretching along, under the summer sunshine, upon the white
road that led to Florence. It was a divine morning; the turmoil and the
strife were soon forgotten, and for a week thenceforward there was
only unalloyed felicity before us. Poor, evil-invoking Lalla had passed
forever out of our sphere.