"Mamma," said Isabel, as we gathered in the hotel vestibule for the
start to Pompeii, "is really not fit to undertake it."
"You'll excuse me, Aunt Caroline," remarked the Senator, "but your
complexion isn't by any means right yet. It's a warm day and a long
drive. Just as likely as not you'll be down sick after it."
"Stuff!" said Mrs. Portheris. "I thank my stars _I_ have got no
enfeebled American constitution. I am perfectly equal to it, thank you."
"It's most unwise," observed Mr. Mafferton.
"Darned--I mean extremely risky," sighed Dicky.
Mrs. Portheris faced upon them. "And pray what do _you_ know about it?"
she demanded.
Then momma put in her oar, taking most unguardedly a privilege of
relationship. "Of course, you are the best judge of how you feel
yourself, Aunt Caroline, but we are told there are some steps to ascend
when we get there--and you know how fleshy you are."
In the instant of ominous silence which occurred while Mrs. Portheris
was getting her chin into the angle of its greatest majesty, Mr.
Mafferton considerately walked to the door. When it was accomplished
she looked at momma sideways and down her nose, precisely in the manner
of the late Mr. Du Maurier's ladies in _Punch_, in the same state of
mind. She might have sat or stood to him. It was another ideal realised.
"That is the latest, the very latest Americanism which I have observed
in your conversation, Augusta. In your native land it may be admissible,
but please understand that I cannot permit it to be applied to me
personally. To English ears it is offensive, very offensive. It is also
quite improper for you to assume any familiarity with my figure. As you
say, _I_ may be aware of its corpulence, but nobody else--er--can
possibly know anything about it."
Momma was speechless, and, as usual, the Senator came to the rescue. He
never will allow momma to be trampled on, and there was distinct
retaliation in his manner. "Look here, aunt," he said, "there's nothing
profane in saying you're fleshy when you _are_, you know, and you don't
need to remove so much as your bonnet strings for the general public to
be aware of it. And when you come to America don't you ever insult
anybody by calling her corpulent, which is a perfectly indecent
expression. Now if you won't go back to bed and tranquillise your
mind--on a plain soda----"
"I won't," said Mrs. Portheris.
"De carriages is already," said the head porter, glistening with an
amiability of which we all appreciated the balm. And we entered the
carriages--Mrs. Portheris and the downcast Isabel and Mr. Mafferton in
one, and momma, poppa, Dicky, and I in the other. For no American would
have been safe in Mrs. Portheris's carriage for at least two hours, and
this came home even to Mr. Dod.
"Never again!" exclaimed momma as we rattled down among the narrow
streets that crowd under the Funicular railway. "Never again will I call
that woman Aunt Caroline."
"Don't call her fleshy, my dear, that's what really irritated her,"
remarked the Senator. The Senator's discrimination, I have often
noticed, is not the nicest thing about him.
Hours and hours it seemed to take, that drive to Pompeii. Past the
ambitious confectioner with his window full of cherry pies, each cherry
round and red and shining like a marble, and the plate glass dry-goods
store where ready-made costumes were displayed that looked as if they
might fit just as badly as those of Westbourne Grove, and so by degrees
and always down hill through narrower and shabbier streets where all the
women walked bareheaded and the shops were mostly turned out on the
pavement for the convenience of customers, and a good many of them went
up and down in wheelbarrows. And often through narrow ways so
high-walled and many-windowed that it was quite cool and dusky down
below, and only a strip of sun showed far up along the roofs of one
side. Here and there a wheelbarrow went strolling through these streets
too, and we saw at least one family marketing. From a little square
window a prodigious way up came, as we passed, a cry with custom in it,
and a wheelbarrow paused beneath. Then down from the window by a long,
long rope slid a basket from the hands of a young woman leaning out in
red, and the vendor took the opportunity of sitting down on his barrow
handle till it arrived. Soldi and a piece of paper he took out of the
basket and a cabbage and onions he put in, and then it went swinging
upwards and he picked up his barrow again, and we rattled on and left
him shouting and pushing his hat back--it was not a soft felt but a
bowler--to look up at the other windows. In spite of the bowler it was a
picturesque and Neapolitan incident, and it left us much divided as to
the contents of the piece of paper.
"My idea is," said the Senator, "that the young woman in the red jersey
was the hired girl and that note was what you might call a clandestine
communication."
"Since we are in Naples," remarked Mr. Dod, "I think, Senator, your
deduction is correct. Where we come from a slavey with any self-respect
would put her sentiments on a gilt-edged correspondence card in a
scented envelope with a stamp on the outside and ask you to kindly drop
it into the pillar box on your way to business; but this chimes in with
all you read about Naples."
"Perfectly ridiculous!" said momma. "Mark my words, that note was either
a list of vegetables wanted, or an intimation that if they weren't going
to be fresher than the last, that man needn't stop for orders in
future. And in a country as destitute of elevators as this one is I
suppose you couldn't keep a servant a week if you didn't let her save
the stairs somehow. But I must say if I were going to have cabbage and
onions the same day I wouldn't like the neighbours to know it."
I entirely agreed with momma, and was reflecting, while they talked of
something else, on the injustice of considering ours the sentimental
sex, when the Senator leaned forward and advised me in an undertone to
make a note of the market basket.
"And take my theory to account for the piece of paper," said he; "your
mother's may be the most likely, but mine is _what the public will
expect_."
And always the shadows of the narrow streets crooked in the end into a
little plaza full of sun and beggars, and lemonade stands, and hawkers
of wild strawberries, and when the great bank of a flower-stall stood
just where the shadow ended sharply and the sun began, it made something
to remember. After that our way lay through a suburban parish _fête_,
and we pursued it under strings and strings of little glass lanterns,
red, and green, and blue, that swung across the streets; and there were
goats and more children, and momma vainly endeavoured to keep off the
smells with her parasol. Then a region of docks and masts rising
unexpectedly, and many little fish shops, and a glitter of scales on the
pavement, and disconnected coils of rope, and lounging men with
earrings, and unkempt women with babies, and above and over all the
warm scent, standing still in the sun, of hemp, and tar, and the sea.
"The city," said the Senator, casting his practised eye on a piece of
dead wall that ran along the pavement, "is evidently in the turmoil of a
general election, though you mightn't notice it. It's the third time
I've seen those posters '_Viva il Prefétto!_' and '_Viva L'opposizione!_
That seems to be about all they can do, just as if we contented ourselves
with yelling ''Rah for Bryan!' 'One more for McKinley!' I must say if they
haven't any more notion of business than that they don't either of 'em
deserve to get there."
"In France," observed Mr. Dod, "they stick up little handbills addressed
to their '_chers concitoyens_' as if voters were a lot of baa-lambs and
willie-boys. It makes enervating reading."
"Young man," said poppa in a burst of feeling, "they say the American
eagle might keep her beak shut with advantage, more than she does; but I
tell you," and the Senator's hand came down hard on Dicky's knee, "a
trip around Europe is enough to turn her into a singing bird, sir, a
singing bird."
I don't get my imagination entirely from momma.
"_Viva il Prefétto! Viva L'opposizione!_" poppa repeated pityingly, as
another pair of posters came in sight. "Well, it won't ever do the
Government of Italy any good, but I guess I'm with the _Opposizione_."
The road grew emptier and sandy white, and commerce forsook it but for
here and there a little shop with fat yellow bags, which were the
people's cheeses, hanging in bladders at the door. Crumbled gateways
began to appear, and we saw through them that the villa gardens inside
ran down and dropped their rose leaves into the blue of the
Mediterranean. We met the country people going their ways to town; they
looked at us with friendly patronage, knowing all about us, what we had
come to see, and the foolishness of it, and especially the ridiculous
cost of _carozza_ that take people to Pompeii. And at last, just as the
sun and the jolting and the powdery white dust combined had instigated
us all to suggest to the Senator how much better it would have been to
come by rail, the ponies made a glad and jingling sweep under the
acacias of the Hôtel Diomede, which is at the portals of Pompeii.
It seemed a casual and a cheerful place, full of open doors and
proprietary Neapolitans who might have been brothers and sisters-in-law,
whose conversation we interrupted coming in. There had been domestic
potations; a very fat lady, with a horn comb in her hair, wiped liquid
rings off the table with her apron, removing the glasses, while a
collarless male person with an agreeable smile and a soft felt hat
placed wooden chairs for us in a row. Poppa knows no Italian, but they
seemed to understand from what he said that we wanted things to drink,
and brought us with surprising accuracy precisely what each of us
preferred, lemonade for momma and me, and beverages consisting largely,
though not entirely, of soda water for the Senator and Mr. Dod. While
we refreshed ourselves, another, elderly, grizzled, and one-eyed, came
and took up a position just outside the door opposite and sang a song of
adventurous love, boxing his own ears in the chorus with the liveliest
effect. A further agreeable person waited upon us and informed us that
he was the interpreter, he would everything explain to us, that this was
a beggar man who wanted us to give him some small money, but there was
no compulsion if we did not wish to do so. I think he gave us that
interpretation for nothing. The fat lady then produced a large fan which
she waved over us assiduously, and the collarless man in the soft hat
stood by to render aid in any further emergency, smiling upon us as if
we were delicacies out of season. Poppa bore it as long as he could, and
we all made an unsuccessful effort to appear as if we were quite
accustomed to as much attention and more in the hotels of America; but
in a very few minutes we knew all the disadvantages of being of too much
importance. Presently the one-eyed man gave way to a pair of players on
the flute and mandolin.
"Look here," said poppa at this, to the interpreter, "you folks are
putting yourselves out on our account a great deal more than is
necessary. We are just ordinary travelling public, and you don't need to
entertain us with side shows that we haven't ordered any more than if we
belonged to your own town. See?" But the interpreter did not see. He
beckoned instead to an engaging daughter of the fat lady, who approached
modestly with a large book of photographs, which she opened before the
Senator, kneeling beside his chair.
"Great Scott!" exclaimed poppa, "I'm not a crowned head. Rise, Miss
Diomede."
Removing his cigar, he assisted the young lady to her feet and led her
to a sofa at the other end of the room, where, as they turned over the
photographs together, I heard him ask her if she objected to tobacco.
"You may go," said momma to the interpreter, "and explain the scenes.
Mr. Wick will enjoy them much more if he understands them." The freedom
from conventional restraint which characterises American society very
seldom extends to married gentlemen.
We had to wait twenty minutes for the other party, on account of their
British objection to anybody's dust. Even Mr. Mafferton looked quelled
when they arrived, and Isabel quite abject, while Mrs. Portheris wore
that air of justification which no circumstance could impair, which was
particularly her own. She would not sit down. "It gives these people a
claim on you," she said. "I did not come here to run up an hotel bill,
but to see Pompeii. Pompeii I demand to see." The players on the flute
and mandolin looked at Mrs. Portheris consideringly and then strolled
away, and the guide, with a sorrowful glance at the landlady, put on his
hat. "I can explain you everything," he said with an inflection that
placed the responsibility for remaining in ignorance upon our own heads,
but Mrs. Portheris waved him away with her fan. "No," she said. "I beg
that this man shall not be allowed to inflict himself upon our party.
I particularly desire to form my own impression of the historic city,
that city that did so much for the reputation of Sir Henry Bulwer
Lytton. Besides, these people mount up ridiculously, and with servants
at home on half wages, and Consols in the state they are, one is really
compelled to economise."
[Illustration: "I'm not a crowned head!"]
It was difficult to protest against Mrs. Portheris's regulations, and
impossible to contravene them, so I have nothing to report of that guide
but his card, which bore the name "Antonio Plicco," and his memory,
which is a blank.
There was an ascent, and Mrs. Portheris mounted it proudly. I pointed
out to poppa half-way up that his esteemed relative hadn't turned a
hair, but he was inclined to be incredulous; said you couldn't tell what
was going on in the Department of the Interior. The Senator often uses a
political reference to carry him over a delicate allusion. Flowering
shrubs and bushes lined the path we climbed, silent in the sunshine,
dustily decorative, and at the top the turning of a key let us into a
strange place. Always a strange place, however often the guide-books
beat their iterations upon it, a place that leaps at imagination,
peering into other days through the mists that lie between, and blinds
it with a rush of light--the place where they have gathered together
what was left of the dead Pompeiians and their world. There they lay
before us for our wonderment as they ran, and tripped, and struggled,
and fell in the night of that day when they and the gods together were
overwhelmed, and they died as they thought in the end of time. And
through an open door Vesuvius sent up its eternal gentle woolly curl
again the daylight sky, and vineyards throve, and birds sang, and we,
who had survived the gods, came curious to look. The figures lay in
glass cases, and Dicky remarked, with unusual seriousness, that it was
like a dead-house.
"Except," said poppa, "that in this mortuary there isn't ever going to
be anybody who can identify the remains. When you come to think of
it--that's kind of hard."
"No chance of Christian burial once you get into a museum," said Dick
with solicitude.
"I should like," remarked Mrs. Portheris, polishing her _pince nez_ to
get a better view of a mother and daughter lying on their faces. "I
should like to see the clergyman who would attempt it. These people were
heathen, and richly deserved their fate. Richly!"
Momma looked at her husband's Aunt Caroline with indignant scorn. "Do
you really think so?" she asked, but we could all see that her words
were a very inadequate expression for her emotions. Mrs. Portheris drew
all the guns of her orthodoxy into line for battle. "I am surprised----"
she began, and then the Senator politely but firmly interfered.
"Ladies," he said, "'_De mortuis nisi bonum_,' which is to say it isn't
customary to slang corpses, especially, as you may say, in their
presence. I guess we can all be thankful, anyhow, that heathen nowadays
have got a cooler earth to live on," and that for the moment was the end
of it, but momma still gazed commiseratingly at the figures, with a
suspicious tendency to look for her handkerchief.
"It's too terrible," she said. "We can actually see their _features_."
"Don't let them get on your nerves, Augusta," suggested poppa.
"I won't if I can help it. But when you see their clothes and their hair
and realise----"
"It happened over eighteen hundred years ago, my dear, and most of them
got away."
"That didn't make it any better for those who are now before us," and
momma used her handkerchief threateningly, though it was only in
connection with her nose.
"Well now, Augusta, I hate to destroy an illusion like that, because
they're not to be bought with money, but since you're determined to work
yourself up over these unfortunates, I've got to expose them to you.
They're not the genuine remains you take them for. They're mere
worthless imitations."
"Alexander," said momma suspiciously, "you never hesitate to tamper with
the truth if you think it will make me any more comfortable. I don't
believe you."
"All right," returned the Senator; "when we get home you ask Bramley. It
was Bramley that put me on to it. Whenever one of those Pompeii fellows
dropped, the ashes kind of caked over him, and in the course of time
there was a hole where he had been. See? And what you're looking at is
just a collection of those holes filled up with composition and then dug
out. Mere holes!"
"The illusion is dreadfully perfect," sighed momma. "Fancy dying like a
baked potato in hot ashes! Somehow, Alexander, I don't seem able to get
over it," and momma gazed with distressed fascination at the grim form
of the negro porter.
"We've got no proper grounds for coming to that conclusion either,"
replied poppa firmly. "Just as likely they were suffocated by the gas
that came up out of the ground."
"Oh, if I could think that!" momma exclaimed with relief. "But if I find
you've been deceiving me, Alexander, I'll never forgive you. It's _too_
solemn!"
"You ask Bramley," I heard the Senator reply. "And now come and tell me
if this loaf of bread somebody baked eighteen hundred and twenty
something years ago isn't exactly the same shape as the Naples bakers
are selling right now."
"Daughter," said momma as she went, "I hope you are taking copious
notes. This is the wonder of wonders that we behold to-day." I said I
was, and I wandered over to where Mrs. Portheris examined with Mr.
Mafferton an egg that was laid on the last day of Pompeii. Mrs.
Portheris was asking Mr. Mafferton, in her most impressive manner, if it
was not too wonderful to have positive proof that fowls laid eggs then
just as they do now; and I made a note of that too. Dicky and Isabel
bemoaned the fate of the immortal dog who still bites his flank in the
pain extinguished so long ago. I hardly liked to disturb them, but I
heard Dicky say as I passed that he didn't mind much about the humans,
they had their chance, but this poor little old tyke was tied up, and
that on the part of Providence was playing it low down.
Then we all stepped out into the empty streets of Pompeii and Mr.
Mafferton read to us impressively, from Murray, the younger Pliny's
letter to Tacitus describing its great disaster. The Senator listened
thoughtfully, for Pliny goes into all kinds of interesting details. "I
haven't much acquaintance with the classics," said he, as Mr. Mafferton
finished, "but it strikes me that the modern New York newspaper was the
medium to do that man justice. It's the most remarkable case I've
noticed of a good reporter _born before his time_."
"A terrible retribution," said Mrs. Portheris, looking severely at the
Tavern of Phoebus, forever empty of wine-bibbers. "They worshipped
Jupiter, I understand, and other deities even less respectable. Can we
wonder that a volcano was sent to destroy them! One thing we may be
quite sure of--if the city had only turned from its wickedness and
embraced Christianity, this never would have happened."
Momma compressed her lips and then relaxed them again to say, "I think
that idea perfectly ridiculous." I scented battle and hung upon the
issue, but the Senator for the third time interposed.
"Why no, Augusta," he said, "I guess that's a working hypothesis of Aunt
Caroline's. Here's Vesuvius smokin' away ever since just the same, and
there's Naples with a bishop and the relics of Saint Januarius. You can
read in your guide-book that whenever Vesuvius has looked as if he meant
business for the past few hundred years, the people of Naples have
simply called on the bishop to take out the relics of Saint Januarius
and walk 'em round the town; and that's always been enough for Vesuvius.
Now the Pompeii folks didn't know a saint or a bishop by sight, and
Jupiter, as Aunt Caroline says, was never properly qualified to
interfere. That's how it was, I _presume_. I don't suppose the people of
Naples take much stock in the laws of nature; they don't have to, with
Januarius in a drawer. And real estate keeps booming right along."
"You have an extraordinary way of putting things," remarked Mrs.
Portheris to her nephew. "Very extraordinary. But I am glad to hear that
you agree with me," and she looked as if she did not understand momma's
acquiescent smile.
We went our several ways to see the baths, and the Comic Theatre, the
bakehouse and the gymnasium; and I had a little walk by myself in the
Street of Abundance, where the little empty houses waited patiently on
either side for those to return who had gone out, and the sun lay full
on their floors of dusty mosaic, and their gardens where nothing grew.
It seemed to me, as it seems to everybody, that Pompeii was not dead,
but asleep, and her tints were so clear and gay that her dreams might be
those of a ballet-girl. A solitary yellow dog chased a lizard in the
sun, and the pebbles he knocked about made an absurdly disturbing noise.
Beyond the vague tinted roofless walls that stretched over the pleasant
little peninsula, the blue sea rippled tenderly, remembering much
delight, and the place seemed to smile in its sleep. It was easy to
understand why Cicero chose to have his villa in the midst of such
light-heartedness, and why the gods, perhaps, decided that they had lent
too much laughter to Pompeii. I made free of the hospitality of
Cornelius Rufus and sat for a while in his _exedra_, where he himself,
in marble on a little pillar in the middle of the room, made me as
welcome as if I had been a client or a neighbour. We considered each
other across the centuries, making mutual allowances, and spent the most
sociable half-hour. I take a personal interest in the city's disaster
now--it overwhelmed one of my friends.