Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  There was very little tillage, but wide stretches of grazing-land, with those lumps of turfed or naked antiquity starting out of them, and cattle, sheep, and horses feeding over them, the colts’ tails blowing picturesquely in the wind that seemed more and more opposed to our advance. It dropped, at times, where we paused to leave a passenger near one of those suburbs which the tram-lines are building up round Rome, but on our course building so slowly that our passengers had to walk rather far from the stations before they reached home. There were other pedestrians who looked rather English, especially some ladies making for the gate of a kind, sunny walled old villa, where there was a girl singing and a gardener coming slowly down to let them in. Nearer Frascati were many neat, new stone houses, where Eoman families come out to stay the spring and fall seasons, and even the summer. But these looked too freshly like the suburban cottages on a Boston trolley-line; and we perversely found our delight in a fine breadth of brown woods for the very reason of that homelikeness which gave us pause in the houses. The trees looked American; there were American wood-roads penetrating the forest’s broken and irregular extent; there was one steep-sided ravine worth any man’s American money; and the dead leaves littered the sylvan paths with an allure to the foot which it was hard for the head to resist.

  Elsewhere the tram-line that curved upward to Fras-cati was flanked, after it left the Campagna’s level, with vineyards as measureless as the olive orchards of Tivoli. There was yet, at the end of March, no sign of leaf on the newly trimmed vines, which were trained on long poles of canes brought together in peaks to support them and netting the hill-slopes with the endless succession of their tops. The eye wearied itself in following them as in following the checkered wiring of the Kentish hop-fields, and was glad to leave them for the closer-set, but never too closely set, palaces of Frascati: the sort of palaces which we call cottages in our summer cities, and the Italians call casinos from the same instinctive modesty. When we began to doubt of our destination, our car passed a long, shaded promenade, and then stopped in a cheerful square amidst hotels and restaurants, with tables hospitably spread on the sidewalks before them.

  We decided not to lunch at that early hour, but we could not keep our eyes from feasting, even at eleven o’clock in the morning, on the wonderful prospect that tempted them, on every hand, away from the more immediate affair of choosing one out of the many cabs that thronged about our arriving train. The cabs of Frascati are all finer than the cabs of Rome, and the horses are handsomer and younger and stronger; we could have taken the worst of the equipages that contested our favor and still fared well; but we chose the best — a glittering victoria and an animal of proud action, with a lustrous coat of bay. He wore a ring of joyous bells; he had, indeed, not a headstall of such gay colors as some others; but you cannot have everything, and his driver was of a mental vividness which compensated for all the color wanting in his horse’s headstall, and of a personal attraction which made us ambitious for his company on any terms. He quickly reduced us from our vain supposition that carriages in a country-place should be cheaper than in a city; because, as he proved, there were fewer strangers to hire them and they ought logically to be dearer. So far from accepting our modest standards of time and money, he all but persuaded us to employ him for the whole day instead of a few hours at a price beyond our imagination; and he only consented to compromise on a half-day at an increased figure.

  We supposed that it was the negotiation which drew and held the attention of all the leisure of Frascati, and that it was the driver and our relation to him rather than the horse and our relation to it that concentrated the public interest in us; and when we had convinced him that we had no wish but to see some of the more immediate and memorable villas, we mounted to our places in the victoria and drove out through the reluctantly parting spectators, who remained looking after us as if unable to disperse to their business or pleasure.

  Our driver decided for us to go first to the Villa Falconieri, which had lately been bought and presented by a fond subject to the German Emperor, and by him in turn bestowed on the German Academy at Rome. In the cold, clean, stony streets of Frascati, as we rattled through them, there breathed the odor of the great local industry; and the doorways of many buildings, widening almost in a circle to admit the burly tuns of wine, testified how generally, how almost universally, the vintage of that measureless acreage of grapes around the place employed the inhabitants. But there was little else to impress the observer in Frascati, and we willingly passed out of the town in the road climbing the long incline to the Villa Falconieri, with its glimpses, far and near, of woods and gardens. It was a road so much to our minds that nothing was further from us than the notion that our horse might not like it so well; but, at the first distinct rise, he stopped and wheeled round so abruptly, after first pawing the air, that there could be no doubt where the popular interest we had lately enjoyed in Frascati had really originated. Probably our horse’s distinguishing trait was known to everybody in Frascati except his driver. He, at least, showed the greatest surprise at the horse’s behavior, as unprecedented in their acquaintance, which he owned was brief, for he had bought him in Rome only the week before. With successive retreats to level ground he put him again and again at the incline, but as soon as the horse felt the ground rising under his feet he lifted them from it and whirled round for another retreat. All this we witnessed from an advantageous point at the roadside which we had taken up at his first show of reluctance; and at last the driver suggested that we should leave it and go on to the Villa Falconieri on foot. On our part, we suggested that he should attempt some other villa which would not involve an objectionable climb. He then proposed the Villa Mandragone, and the horse seemed to agree with us. As we drove again through the clean, cold, stony streets, with the rounded doorways for the wine-casks, we fancied something clearly ironical in the general interest renewed by our return. But we tried to look as if we had merely done the Villa Falconieri with unexampled rapidity, and pushed on to the Villa Mandragone, where, under the roof of interlacing ilex toughs, our horse ought to have been tempted on in a luxurious unconsciousness of anything like an incline. But he was apparently an animal which would have felt the difference between two rose-leaves and one in a flowery path, and just when we were thinking what a delightful time we were having, and beginning to feel a gentle question as to who the pathetic little cripple halting toward us with a color-box and a camp-stool might be, and whether she painted as well as a kind heart could wish, our horse stopped with the suddenness which we knew to be definite. The sensitive creature could not be deceived; he must have reached rising ground, and we sided with him against our driver, who would have pretended it was fancy.

  It was now noon, and we drove back to the piazza, agreeing upon a less price in view of the imperfect service rendered, and deciding to collect our thoughts for a new venture over such luncheon as the best hotel could give us. It was not so good a hotel as the lunch it gave. It was beyond the cleansing tide of modernity which has swept the Roman hotels, and was dirty everywhere, but with a specially dirty, large, shabby dining-room, cold and draughty, yet precious for the large, round brazier near our table which kept one side of us warm in romantic mediaeval fashion, and invited us to rise from time to time and thaw our fingers over its blinking coals. The bath in which our chicken had been boiled formed a good soup; there was an admirable pasta and a creditable, if imperfect, conception of beefsteak; and there was a caraffe of new Frascati wine, sweet, like new cider. If we could have asked more, it would not have been more than the young Italian officer who sat in the other corner with his pretty young wife, and who allowed me to weave a whole realistic fiction out of their being at Frascati so out of season.

  Just as I was most satisfyingly accounting for them, our late driver alarmed me by appearing at the door and beckoning me to the outside. The occasion was nothing worse than the presence of a man who, he said, was his brother, with a horse which, upon the same authority, was
without moral blame or physical blemish. If anything, it preferred a mountain to a plain country, and could be warranted to balk at nothing. The man, who was almost as exemplary as the horse, would assume the unfulfilled contract of the other man and horse with a slight increase of pay; and yet I had my doubts. The day had clouded, and I meekly contended that it was going to rain; but the man explicitly and the horse tacitly scoffed at the notion, and I yielded. I shall always be glad that I did so, for in the keeping of those good creatures the rest of our day was an unalloyed delight. It appeared, upon further acquaintance, that the man paid a hundred dollars for the horse; his brother had paid a hundred and twenty-five for the balker; but it was the belief of our driver that it would be worth the difference when it had reconciled itself to the rising ground of Frascati; as yet it was truly a stranger there. His own horse was used to ups and downs everywhere; they had just come from a long trip, and he was going to drive to Siena and back the next week with two ladies for passengers, who were to pay him five dollars a day for himself and horse and their joint keep. He said the ladies, whose names he gave, were from Boston; he balked at adding Massachusetts, but I am sure the horse would not; and, if I could have hired them both to carry me about Italy indefinitely, I would have gladly paid them five dollars a day as long as I had the money. The fact is, that driver was charming, a man of sense and intelligence, who reflected credit even upon his brother and his brother’s horse: one of those perfect Italian temperaments which endear their possessors to the head and heart, so that you wonder, at parting, how you are going to live without them.

  We did not excite such vivid interest in Frascati at our second start as at our first; but, as we necessarily passed over the same route again, we had the applause of the children in streets now growing familiar, and a glad welcome back from the pretty girls and blithe matrons of all ages rhythmically washing in the public laundry, who recognized us in our new equipage. The public laundry is always the gayest scene in an Italian town, and probably our adventures continued the subject of joyous comment throughout the day which was now passing only too rapidly for us. We were again on the way to the Villa Falconieri, and while our brave horse is valiantly mounting the steep to its gate this is perhaps as good a place as any to own that the Villa Falconieri and the Villa Man-dragone were the only sights we saw in Frascati. We did, indeed, penetrate the chill interior of the local cathedral, but as we did not know at the time that we were sharing it with the memory of the young Stuart pretender Charles Edward, who died in Frascati, and whose brother, Cardinal York, placed a mural tablet to him in the church, we were conscious of no special claim upon our interest. We ought, of course, to have visited the Villa Aldobrandini and the Villa Ruffinella and the Villa Graziola and the Villa Taverna, but we left all these to the reader, who will want some reason for going to Frascati in person, and to whom I commend them as richly worth crossing the Atlantic for. Doubtless from a like motive we left the ruins of Tusculum unvisited, just as at Tivoli we refrained from diverging to Hadrian’s Villa — the two things supremely worthy to be seen in their respective regions. But, if I had seen only half as much as I saw at Frascati — the Villa Falconieri, namely — I should feel forever over-enriched by the experience.

  Slowly an ancient servitor, whose family had been in the employ of the Falconieri for a century, advanced as with the burden of their united years and opened the high gate to us and delivered us over to a mild boy. He bestowed on us, for a consideration, a bunch of wild violets, and then, as if to keep us from the too abrupt sight of the repairs and changes going on near the casino, led us first to the fish-pond, in the untouched seclusion of a wooded hill, and silently showed us the magnificent view which the top commanded, if commanded is not too proud a word for a place so pathetic in its endearing neglect. It had once been the haunt of many a gay picnicking crew in hoops and bag-wigs and all the faded fashion of the past, when hosts and guests had planned a wilder escapade than the grove before the casino invited, with its tables of moss-painted marble. There would have been an academic poet, or more than one, in the company, and they would have furnished forth the prospect with phrases far finer than any I have about me, who can only say that the Cam-pagna, clothed in mist and cloud-shadowed, swam round the upland in the colors of a tropic sea.

  Our mild boy waited a decent moment, as if to let me do better, and then led down to the casino, round through a wooded valley where there were some men with fowling-pieces, whom I objected to in tones, if not in terms. “What are they shooting?” “They are shooting larks, signore.” “What a pity!” “But the larks are leaving Italy, now, and going north.” It was a reason, like many another that humanity is put to it in giving, and I do not know that I missed any larks, later, from an English meadow where I saw them spiring up in song, and glad as if none of their friends had been shot at the Villa Falconieri. In fact, I did not see those fowlers actually killing any; and I can still hope they were not very good shots.

  The workmen who were putting the place in repair were lunching near the casino, in a litter of lumber and other structural material, but the casino itself seemed as yet unprofaned by their touch. At any rate, we had it quite to ourselves, let wander at will through its cool, bare, still spaces. If there was a great deal to see, there was not much to remember, or to remember so much as the satirical frescos of Pier Leone Ghezzi, who has caricatured himself as well as others in them. They are not bitter satires, but, on the contrary, very charming; and still more charming are the family portraits frescoed round the principal room. Under one curve of the vaulted ceiling the whole family of a given time is shown, half-length but life-size, looking down pleasantly on the unexpected American guests who try to pretend they were invited, or at least came by mistaking the house for another. Better even than this most amiable circle, or half-circle, of father, mother, and daughter are the figures of friends or acquaintances or kinsfolk: figures not only life-size, but full-length, in panels of the walls, in the very act of stepping on the floor and coming forward to greet their host and hostess from the other walls. They did not visibly move during our stay, but I know they only waited for us to go; and that at night, especially when there was a moon, or none, they left their backgrounds and mingled in the polite gayeties of their period. One could hardly help looking over one’s shoulder to see if they were not following to that farthermost room called Primavera, which is painted around and aloft like a very bower of spring, with foliage and flowers covering the walls and dropping through the trellis feigned overhead. Of all the caprices of art, which in Italy so loved caprice, I recall no such pleasing playfulness as in the decoration of these rooms. If you pass through the last you may look from the spring within on no fairer spring without bordering the shores of the Campagna sea.

  It was so pathetic to imagine the place going out of the right Italian keeping that I attributed a responsive sadness to the tall, handsome, elderly woman who had allowed us the freedom of the casino. Her faded beauty was a little sallow, as the faded beauty of a Roman matron should be, and her large, dark eyes glowed from purpling shadows.

  “And the German Emperor owns it now?”

  “Yes, they say he has bought it.”

  “And the Germans will soon be coming?”

  “They say.”

  She would not commit herself but by a tone, an inflection, but we knew very well what she and the frescoed presences about us thought. I wish now I could have stayed behind and got the frescos to tell me just how far I ought recognize her sorrow in my tip, but one must always guess at these things, and I shall never know whether I rewarded the aged gatekeeper according to the century of service his generations had rendered those of the frescos.

  We were going now to the Villa Mandragone, but we had not yet the courage for the rise of ground where we had failed before, and we entreated our driver to go round some other way, if he could, and descend rather than ascend to it. He said that was easy, and it was when we came away that we passed through that ilex avenue wh
ich we had not yet penetrated in its whole length, and where we now met many foot-passengers, lay and cleric, who added to the character of the scene, and saw again the little cripple artist, now trying to seize its features, or some of them. I did not see whether she was succeeding so well as in pity she might and as I knew she did.

  In spite of our triumph with the Villa Mandragone in this second attempt, we can never think it half as charming as the Villa Falconieri. I forget what cardinal it was who built it so spacious and splendid, with three hundred and sixty-five windows, in honor of the calendar as reformed by the reigning pope, Gregory XIII. It is a palace enclosing a quadrangle of whole acres (I will not own to less), with a stately colonnade following as far round as the reader likes. When he passes through all this magnificence he will come out on a grassy terrace, with a fountain below it, and below that again the chromatic ocean of the Cam-pagna (I have said sea often enough). A weird sort of barbaric stateliness is given to the place by the twisted and tapering pillars that rise at the several corners, with colossal masques carven at the top and the sky showing through the eye-hollows, as the flame of torches must often have shown at night. But for all the outlandish suggestion of these pillars, the villa now belongs to the Jesuits, who have a college there, where only the sons of noble families are received for education. As we rounded a sunny wall in driving away, we saw a line of people, old and young of both sexes, but probably not of noble families, seated with their backs against the warm stone eating from comfortable bowls a soup which our driver said was the soup of charity and the daily dole of the fathers to such hungry as came for it. The day was now growing colder than it had been, and we felt that the poor needed all the soup, and hot, that they could get.