After That We Were Not So Much
Surprised As Grieved To Find That Our Elderly Chambermaid Had Profited
By Our Absence To Gather All The Coals Out Of Our One Stove Into Two
_Scaldini,_ Which Were Bristling Before Her Where She Knelt When We
Opened The Door Upon Her.
She apologized, but still she carried away the
coals, and we were left to rekindle the zeal of our stove as best we
could.
It was not a large stove, and it seemed to feel its inadequacy to
the office of taking the chill off that vast, dim room, where it
cowered, dark and low upon the floor, with a yearning, upward stretch of
its pipe lost in space before it reached the lowermost goddess in the
allegory frescoed on the ceiling. If it had been a white porcelain
stove, that might have helped, but it was of a gloomy earthen color that
imparted no more cheer than warmth.
We rebuilt our fire, after many repeated demands for kindling, which had
apparently to be sawed and split in a distant wood-yard before we could
get it, and then the long, arctic night set in, unrelieved by the noisy
gayeties of the cafe across the way. These burst from time to time the
thin film of sleep which formed like a coating of ice over the
consciousness, and then one could only get up and put more wood into the
despairing stove and more clothes on the beds. Well for us that we had
thought to bring all our travelling rugs with us in straps, instead of
abandoning them with our other baggage in the station till next day!
But, even with these heaping the hotel blankets and com-forters, we
shivered, and a superannuated odor that had lurked in the recesses of
those rooms, to which the sun or wind had never pierced, grew with the
growing cold, and haunted the night like something palpable as well as
sensible - the materialization of smells dead and buried there long ago.
It was wonderful how little way the electric bulb shed its beams in that
naughty air; it would not even light the page which at one time was
opened in the vain hope that the author would help the benumbing cold to
bring torpor if not slumber to the weary brain.
It is really impossible to say where or how we breakfasted, but it was
somehow managed, and then search was made by the swiftest conveyance for
the hotel which we had heard of outside the city, as helping make
Leghorn the watering-place it is for Italians in the summer, and in the
winter as being steam-heated and appointed with every modern comfort for
the passing or sojourning stranger. It was all that and more, and only
for the fear that I should seem to join it in advertising its merits I
should like to celebrate it by name. But perhaps it is as well not; if I
did, all my readers would swarm upon that hotel, and there would be no
room for me, who hope some day to go back there and spend an old age of
luxurious leisure. There was not only steam-heat in the public rooms of
the ground floor, but there was furnace heat in all the corridors, and
there were fireplaces in certain chambers, which also looked out on the
sea, to Corsica and Elba and other isles of it, and would be full of sun
as soon as the cold rain closed a fortnight's activity. That which
diffused a blander atmosphere than steam or radiator, register and
hearth, however, was the kind will, the benevolent intelligence, which
imagined us, and which would not then let us go. We had become not only
agnostic as respected the possibility of warmth in Leghorn, we were open
sceptics, aggressive infidels. But the landlord himself followed us from
one room to another, lighting fires here and there on the hearth, making
us feel the warm air rising from the furnace, calling us to witness by
palpation the heat of the radiators, soothing our fears, and coaxing our
unfaith. His wife joined him in Italian and his son in English, and, if
I do not say that these amiable people were worthy all the prosperity
which was not then apparent in their establishment, may I never be
comfortably lodged or fed again. Our daily return for what we got was a
poor twelve francs each; but fancy a haughty American landlord caressing
us with such sweet and reassuring civility for any sum of money! Those
gentle people made themselves our friends; there was nothing they would
not do, or try to do, for us, in the vast, pink palace where we were
never twenty guests together, and mostly eight or ten, with the run of a
reading-room where there were the latest papers and periodicals from
London and Paris, and with a kitchen whence we were served the best
luncheons and dinners we ate in Europe.
The place had the true out-of-season charm. There were two stately
dining-rooms besides the one where we dined, and there were pleasant
spaces where we had afternoon tea or after-dinner coffee, and from which
a magnificent stairway ascended to the upper halls, and a quiet lift
waited our orders, with the landlord or his son to take us up; and so
lonely and quiet and gentle, with porters and chambermaids speaking
beautiful Tuscan, and watchful attendants everywhere prophesying and
fulfilling our wants. It was a keeping to make the worst believe in
their merit, and we were not the worst. Outside, the environment
flattered or rewarded us with a garden of laurel and other evergreens,
and with flower-beds where the annuals were beginning to show the
gardener's designs in their sprouting seeds. Beyond these ample villa
bounds a tram-car murmured to and from the well-removed city, and beyond
its track lay a line of open-air theatres and variety shows and bathing
establishments, as at our own Atlantic City, but here in enduring
masonry instead of the provisional wood of our summer architecture.
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