Sunday supplement in six colors
bargaining with a stick of striped peppermint candy to have his
best friend stabbed in the back before morning; you see giddy
poster designs carrying on flirtations with hand-painted valentines;
you catch the love-making, overhear the intriguing, and scent the
plotting; you are an eyewitness to a slice out of the life of the
most sinister, the most artistic, and the most murderous period
of Italian history.
But by day imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, stops a hole
to keep the wind away; and the wild ass of the ninety-day tour
stamps his heedless hoofs over the spot where sleeps the dust of
departed grandeur. By day the chug of the motor boat routs out
old sleepy echoes from cracked and crannied ruins; the 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. A rollmops consists of a large dilled
cucumber, with a pickled herring coiled round it ready to strike,
in the design of the rattlesnake-and-pinetree flag of the Revolution,
the motto in both instances being in effect: "Don't monkey with
the buzz saw!" He carried his rollmops in his pocket and frequently,
in art galleries or elsewhere, would draw it out and nibble it,
while disseminating inaccuracies touching on pictures and statues
and things.
Among other places, he took us to the oldest church in Vienna.
As I now recollect it was six hundred years old. No; on second
thought I will say it must have been older than that. No church
could possibly become so moldy and mangy looking as that church
in only six hundred years. The object in this church that interested
me most was contained in an ornate glass case placed near the altar
and alongside the relics held to be sacred. It did not exactly
please me to gaze at this article; but the thing had a fascination
for me; I will not deny that.
It seems that a couple of centuries ago there was an officer in
Vienna, a captain in rank and a Frenchman by birth, who, in the
midst of disorders and licentiousness, lived so godly and so
sanctified a life that his soldiers took it into their heads that
he was really a saint, or at least had the making of a first-rate
saint in him, and, therefore, must lead a charmed life. So - thus
runs the tale - some of them laid a wager with certain Doubting
Thomases, also soldiers, that neither by fire nor water, neither
by rope nor poison, could he take harm to himself. Finally they
decided on fire for the test. So they waited until he slept - those
simple, honest, chuckle-headed chaps - and then they slipped in
with a lighted torch and touched him off.
Well, sir, the joke certainly was on those soldiers. He burned
up with all the spontaneous enthusiasm of a celluloid comb. For
qualities of instantaneous combustion he must have been the equal
of any small-town theater that ever was built - with one exit.
