Which other races have
always regarded as unbeautiful and unornamental, and make a cunning
little companion of it and spend hours stroking its fleece. This
particular mole belonging to the stout middle-aged lady in question
was one of the largest moles and one of the curliest I ever saw.
It was on the side of her nose.
You see a good deal of mole culture going on here. Later, with
the reader's permission, we shall return to Paris and look its
inhabitants over at more length; but for the time being I think
it well for us to be on our travels. In passing I would merely
state that on leaving a Paris hotel you will tip everybody on the
premises.
Oh, yes - but you will!
Let us move southward. Let us go to Sunny Italy, which is called
Sunny Italy for the same reason that the laughing hyena is called
the laughing hyena - not because he laughs so frequently, but because
he laughs so seldom. Let us go to Rome, the Eternal City, sitting
on her Seven Hills, remembering as we go along that the currency
has changed and we no longer compute sums of money in the franc
but in the lira. I regret the latter word is not pronounced as
spelled - it would give me a chance to say that the common coin of
Italy is a lira, and that nearly everybody in Rome is one also.
Chapter VII
Thence On and On to Verbotenland
Ah, Rome - the Roma of the Ancients - the Mistress of the Olden
World - the Sacred City! Ah, Rome, if only your stones could speak!
It is customary for the tourist, taking his cue from the guidebooks,
to carry on like this, forgetting in his enthusiasm that, even if
they did speak, they would doubtless speak Italian, which would
leave him practically where he was before. And so, having said
it myself according to formula, I shall proceed to state the actual
facts:
If, coming forth from a huge and dirty terminal, you emerge on a
splendid plaza, miserably paved, and see a priest, a soldier and
a beggar; a beautiful child wearing nothing at all to speak of,
and a hideous old woman with the eyes of a Madonna looking out of
a tragic mask of a face; a magnificent fountain, and nobody using
the water, and a great, overpowering smell - yes, you can see a
Roman smell; a cart mule with ten dollars' worth of trappings on
him, and a driver with ten cents' worth on him; a palace like a
dream of stone, entirely surrounded by nightmare hovels; a new,
shiny, modern apartment house, and shouldering up against it a
cankered rubbish heap that was once the playhouse of a Caesar, its
walls bearded like a pard's face with tufted laurel and splotched
like a brandy drunkard's with red stains; a church that is a dismal
ruin without and a glittering Aladdin's Cave of gold and gems and
porphyry and onyx within; a wide and handsome avenue starting from
one festering stew of slums and ending in another festering stew
of slums; a grimed and broken archway opening on a lovely hidden
courtyard where trees are green and flowers bloom, and in the
center there stands a statue which is worth its weight in minted
silver and which carries more than its weight in dirt - if in
addition everybody in sight is smiling and good-natured and happy,
and is trying to sell you something or wheedle you out of something,
or pick your pocket of something - you need not, for confirmatory
evidence, seek the vast dome of St. Peter's rising yonder in the
distance, or the green tops of the cedars and the dusky clumps of
olive groves on the hillsides beyond - you know you are in Rome.
To get the correct likeness of Naples we merely reduce the priests
by one-half and increase the beggars by two-thirds; we richen the
color masses, thicken the dirt, raise the smells to the Nth degree,
and set half the populace to singing. We establish in every second
doorway a mother with her offspring tucked between her knees and
forcibly held there while the mother searches the child's head for
a flea; anyhow, it is more charitable to say it is a flea; and we
add a special touch of gorgeousness to the street pictures.
For here a cart is a glory of red tires and blue shafts, and green
hubs and pink body and purple tailgate, with a canopy on it that
would have suited Sheba's Queen; and the mule that draws the cart
is caparisoned in brass and plumage like a circus pony; and the
driver wears a broad red sash, part of a shirt, and half of a pair
of pants - usually the front half. With an outfit such as that,
you feel he should be peddling aurora borealises, or, at the very
least, rainbows. It is a distinct shock to find he has only chianti
or cheeses or garbage in stock.
In Naples, also, there is, even in the most prosaic thing, a sight
to gladden your eye if you but hold your nose while you look on
it. On the stalls of the truckvenders the cauliflowers and the
cabbages are racked up with an artistic effect we could scarcely
equal if we had roses and orchids to work with; the fishmonger's
cart is a study in still life, and the tripe is what artists call
a harmonious interior.
Nearly all the hotels in Italy are converted palaces. They may
have been successes as palaces, but, with their marble floors and
their high ceilings, and their dank, dark corridors, they distinctly
fail to qualify as hotels.
