Some Talk, Frankly Audible, And
Others Are Frankly Silent, But A Deep, Wide Purr, Tacit Or Explicit,
Close Upon A Muted Hymn Of Thanksgiving, In That Assemblage Of Mutually
Repellent Personalities, For The Nonce United, Would Best Denote The
Universal Content.
Hard by this tea-room there is a public elevator by which the reader
will no doubt rather ascend with me than, climb the Spanish Steps
without me; after the first time, I never climbed them.
The elevator
costs but ten centimes, and I will pay for both; there is sometimes
drama thrown in that is worth twice the money; for there is war, more or
less roaring, set between the old man who works the elevator and the
young man who sells the tickets to it. The law is that the elevator will
hold only eight persons, but one memorable afternoon the ticket-seller
insisted upon giving a ticket to a tall, young English girl who formed
an unlawful ninth. The elevator-man, a precisian of the old school,
expelled her; the ticket-seller came forward and reinstated her; again
the elder stood upon the letter of the law; again the younger demanded
its violation. The Tuscan tongue in their Roman mouths flew into
unintelligibility, while the poor girl was put into the elevator and out
of it; and the respective parties to the quarrel were enjoying it so
much that it might never have ended if she had not taken the affair into
her own hands. She finally followed the ticket-seller back to his desk,
to which he retired after each act of the melodrama, and threw her
ticket violently down. "Here is your ticket!" she said in English so
severe that he could not help understanding and cowering before it.
"Give me back my money!" He was too much stupefied by her decision of
character to speak; and he returned her centimes in silence while we got
into our cage and mounted to the top, and the elevator-man furiously
repeated to himself his side of the recent argument all the way up. This
did not prevent his touching his hat to each of us in parting, and
assuring us that he revered us; a thing that only old-fashioned Romans
seem to do nowadays, in the supposed decay of manners which the
comfortable classes everywhere like to note in the uncomfortable. Then
some ladies of our number went off on a platform across the house-tops
to which the elevator had brought us, as if they expected to go down the
chimneys to their apartments; and the rest of us expanded into the
Piazza Trinita de' Monti; and I stopped to lounge against the uppermost
balustrade of the Spanish Steps.
It is notable, but not surprising, how soon one forms the habit of this,
for, seen from above, the Spanish Steps are only less enchanting than
the Spanish Steps seen from below, whence they are absolutely the most
charming sight in the world. The reader, if he has nothing better than a
post-card (which I could have bought him on the spot for fifty a franc),
knows how the successive stairways part and flow downward to right and
left, like the parted waters of a cascade, and lose themselves at the
bottom in banks of flowers.
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