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 "_café 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.
[Illustration: "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 prickly heat. It was
annoying to have one's first Roman impressions confused with Emmeline
and magnesia and prickly 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 scrap of grass, 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 passed it the sound of the life of the city
died indistinctly away and a silence grew up, with the smell of the sun
upon grasses and weeds, and we stopped and looked down into Cæsar'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 municipal 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 classics."
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
assertion.
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 Cannæ 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 Titus, 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 Cæsars 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.