Burnished
golden frescoes of Saint Mark's blare at you as with brazen trumpets;
every third medieval church has been turned into a moving-picture
place; and the shopkeeping parasites buzz about you in vermin
swarms and bore holes in your pocketbook until it is all one large
painful welt. The emblem of Venice is the winged lion. It should
be the tapeworm.
In Rome it appears to be a standing rule that every authenticated
guide shall be a violent Socialist and therefore rampingly
anticlerical in all his views. We were in Rome during the season
of pilgrimages. From all parts of Italy, from Bohemia and Hungary
and Spain and Tyrol, and even from France, groups of peasants had
come to Rome to worship in their mother church and be blessed by
the supreme pontiff of their faith. At all hours of the day they
were passing through the streets, bound for Saint Peter's or the
Vatican, the women with kerchiefs over their heads, the men in
their Sunday best, and all with badges and tokens on their breasts.
At the head of each straggling procession would be a black-frocked
village priest, at once proud and humble, nervous and exalted. A
man might be of any religion or of no religion at all, and yet I
fail to see how he could watch, unmoved, the uplifted faces of
these people as they clumped over the cobbles of the Holy City,
praying as they went. Some of them had been saving up all their
lives, I imagine, against the coming of this great day; but our
guide - and we tried three different ones - never beheld this sight
that he did not sneer at it; and not once did he fail to point out
that most of the pilgrims were middle-aged or old, taking this as
proof of his claim that the Church no longer kept its hold on the
younger people, even among the peasant classes. The still more
frequent spectacle of a marching line of students of one of the
holy colleges, with each group wearing the distinctive insignia
of its own country - purple robes or green sashes, or what not
- would excite him to the verge of a spasm.
But then he was always verging on a spasm anyway - spasms were his
normal state.
Chapter XX
The Combustible Captain of Vienna
Our guide in Vienna was the most stupid human being I ever saw.
He was profoundly ignorant on a tremendously wide range of subjects;
he had a most complete repertoire of ignorance. He must have spent
years of study to store up so much interesting misinformation.
This guide was much addicted to indulgence of a peculiar form of
twisted English and at odd moments given to the consumption of a
delicacy of strictly Germanic origin, known in the language of the
Teutons as a rollmops.
