Roman Holidays And Others. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ stood at the foot of such a public staircase. I had no wish to climb it, but I found it more charming even than I remembered. All the way to the top it was banked on either side with glowing masses of flowers and fruits and the spectacular vegetables of the South, and between these there were series of people, whom I tacitly delegated to make the ascent for me, passing the groups bargaining at the stalls. Nothing could have been better; nothing that I think of is half so well in New York, where the markets are on that dead level which in the social structure those above it abhor; though there are places on the East River where we might easily have inclined markets.

      Other associations of that far past awoke with my identification of the hotel where we had stayed at the end of the Villa Nazionale. In those days the hotel was called, in appeal to our patriotism, more flattered then than now in Europe, Hotel Washington; but it is to-day a mere pension, though it looks over the same length of palm-shaded, statue-peopled garden. The palms were larger than I remembered them, and the statues had grown up and seemed to have had large families since my day; but the lovely sea was the same, with all the mural decorations of the skyey horizons beyond, dim precipices and dreamy island tops, and the dozing Vesuvius mistakable for any of them. At one place there was a file of fishermen, including a fisherwoman, drawing their net by means of a rope carried across the carriage-way from the seawall, with a splendid show of their black eyes and white teeth and swarthy, bare legs, and always there were beggars, both of those who frankly begged and those who importuned with postal-cards. This terrible traffic pervades all southern Europe, and everywhere pesters the meeting traveller with undesired bargains. In its presence it is almost impossible to fit a scene with the apposite phrase; and yet one must own that it has its rights. What would those boys do if they did not sell, or fail to sell, postal-cards. It is another aspect of the labor problem, so many-faced in our time. Would it be better that they should take to open mendicancy, or try to win the soft American heart with such acquired slang as “Skiddoo to twenty-three”? One who had no postal-cards had English enough to say he would go away for a penny; it was his price, and I did not see how he could take less; when he was reproached by a citizen of uncommon austerity for his shameless annoyance of strangers, I could not see that he looked abashed—in fact, he went away singing. He did not take with him the divine beauty of the afternoon light on the sea and mountains; and, if he was satisfied, we were content with our bargain.

      In fact, it would be impossible to exaggerate in the praise of that incomparable environment. At every hour of the day, and, for all I know, the night, it had a varying beauty and a constant loveliness. Six days out of the week of our stay the sunshine was glorious, and five days of at least a May or September warmth; and though one day was shrill and stiff with the tramontana, it was of as glorious sunshine as the rest. The gale had blown my window open and chilled my room, but with that sun blazing outside I could not believe in the hurricane which seemed to blow our car up the funicular railway when we mounted to the height where the famous old Convent of San Martino stands, and then blew us all about the dust-clouded streets of that upland in our search for the right way to the monastery. It was worth more than we suffered in finding it; for the museum is a record of the most significant events of Neapolitan history from the time of the Spanish domination down to that of the Garibaldian invasion; and the church and corridors through which the wind hustled us abound in paintings and frescos such as one would be willing to give a whole week of quiet weather to. I do not know but I should like to walk always in the convent garden, or merely look into it from my window in the cloister wall, and gossip with my fellow-friars at their windows. We should all be ghosts, of course, but the more easily could the sun warm us through in spite of the tramontana.

      I do not know that Naples is very beautiful in certain phases in which Venice and Genoa are excellent. Those cities were adorned by their sons with palaces of an outlook worthy of their splendor. But in the other Italian cities the homes of her patricians were crowded into the narrow streets where their architecture fails of its due effect. It is so with them in Naples, and even along the Villa Nazionale, where many palatial villas are set, they seclude themselves in gardens where one fancies rather than sees them. These are, in fact, sometimes the houses of the richest bourgeoisie—bankers and financiers—and the houses which have names conspicuous in the mainly inglorious turmoil of Neapolitan history help unnoted to darken the narrow and winding ways of the old city. A glimpse of a deep court or of a towering facade is what you get in passing, but it is to be said of the sunless streets over which they gloom that they are kept in a modern neatness beside which the dirt of New York is mediaeval. It is so with most other streets in Naples, except those poorest ones where the out-door life insists upon the most intimate domestic expression. Even such streets are no worse than our worst streets, and the good streets are all better kept than our best.

      I am not sure that there are even more beggars in Naples than in New York, though I will own that I kept no count. In both cities beggary is common enough, and I am not noting it with disfavor in either, for it is one of my heresies that comfort should be constantly reminded of misery by the sight of it—comfort is so forgetful. Besides, in Italy charity costs so little; a cent of our money pays a man for the loss of a leg or an arm; two cents is the compensation for total blindness; a sick mother with a brood of starving children is richly rewarded for her pains with a nickel worth four cents. Organized charity is not absent in the midst of such volunteers of poverty; one day, when we thought we had passed the last outpost of want in our drive, two Sisters of Charity suddenly appeared with out-stretched tin cups. Our driver did not imagine our inexhaustible benovelence; he drove on, and before we could bring him to a halt the Sisters of Charity ran us down, their black robes flying abroad and their sweet faces flushed with the pursuit. Upon the whole it was very humiliating; we could have wished to offer our excuses and regrets; but our silver seemed enough, and the gentle sisters fell back when we had given it.

      That was while we were driving toward Posilipo for the beauty of the prospect along the sea and shore, and for a sense of which any colored postal-card will suffice better than the most hectic word-painting. The worst of Italy is the superabundance of the riches it offers ear and eye and nose—offers every sense—ending in a glut of pleasure. At the point where we descended from our carriage to look from the upland out over the vast hollow of land and sea toward Pozzuoli, which is so interesting as the scene of Jove's memorable struggle with the Titans, and just when we were really beginning to feel equal to it, a company of minstrels suddenly burst upon us with guitars and mandolins and comic songs much dramatized, while the immediate natives offered us violets and other distracting flowers. In the effect, art and nature combined to neutralize each other, as they do with us, for instance, in those restaurants where they have music during dinner, and where you do not know whether you are eating the chef-d'oeuvre of a cook or a composer.

      It was at the new hotel which is evolving itself through the repair of the never-finished and long-ruined Palace of Donn' Anna, wife of a Spanish viceroy in the seventeenth century, that our guide stopped with us for that cup of tea already mentioned. We had to climb four nights of stairs for it to the magnificent salon overlooking the finest postal-card prospect in all Naples. We lingered long upon it, in the balcony from which we could have dropped into the sunset sea any coin which we could have brought ourselves to part with; but we had none of the bad money which had been so easily passed off upon us. This sort rather abounds in Naples, and the traveller should watch not only for false francs, but for francs of an obsolete coinage which you can know by the king's head having a longer neck than in the current pieces. At the bookseller's they would not take a perfectly good five-franc piece because it was so old as 1815; and what becomes of all the bad money one innocently takes for good? One fraudulent franc I made a virtue of throwing away; but I do not know what I did with a copper refused by a trolley conductor as counterfeit. I could not take the affair seriously, and perhaps I gave that copper in charity.

      As we drove hotelward through the pink twilight we met many carriages of people who looked rich and noble, but whether they were so I do not know. I only know that old ladies who regard the world severely from their coaches behind the backs of their perfectly appointed coachmen and footmen ought to be both, and that old gentlemen who frown over their white mustaches have no right to their looks if they are neither. It was, at any rate, the hour of the fashionable СКАЧАТЬ