At Least There Would Have Been But
One Of The Many Wars Of Murder And Rapine Between The Republics, And
That Would Have Been The First.
After a single experience of the eighty
tunnels on that line, with the perpetually recurring necessity of
putting down
And putting up the car-window, no army would have repeated
the invasion; and, though we might now be without that satirical old
saying, mankind would, on the whole, have been the gainer. As it was,
the enemies could luxuriously go and come in their galleys and enjoy the
fresh sea-breezes both ways, instead of stifling in the dark and gasping
for breath as they came into the light, while their train ran in and out
under the serried peaks that form the Mediterranean shore. I myself
wished to take a galley from Leghorn, or even a small steamer, but I was
overruled by less hardy but more obdurate spirits, and so we took the
Florentine express at Pisa, where we changed cars.
The Italian government had providently arranged that the car we changed
into should be standing beyond the station in the dash of an unexpected
shower, and that it should be provided with steps so high and steep,
with Italian ladies standing all over them and sticking their umbrellas
into the faces of American citizens trying to get in after them, that it
was a feat of something like mountain-climbing to reach the corridor,
and then of daring-do to secure a compartment. Though a collectivist,
with a firm belief in the government ownership of railroads everywhere,
I might have been tempted at times in Italy to abjure my creed if I had
not always reflected that the state there had just come into possession
of the roads, with all their capitalistic faults of management and
outwear of equipment which it would doubtless soon reform and repair. I
venture to suggest now, however, that its prime duty is to have
platforms level with the car-doors, as they are in England, and not to
let Italian ladies stand in the doorways with their umbrellas. I do not
insist that it shall impose silence and sobriety upon a party of young
French people in the next compartment, but I do think it should remove
those mountains back from the sea so that the trains carrying cultivated
Americans can run along the open shore the whole way to Genoa. Pending
this, it should provide strong and watchful employees to lower and raise
the windows at the mouth of each of the eighty tunnels in every car. I
do not demand that it shall change the site of the station in Genoa so
that it shall not always be the city's whole length away from the hotel
you have chosen, but I think this would be a desirable improvement,
especially if it is after dark when you arrive and raining a peculiarly
cold, disagreeable rain.
That rain was very disappointing; for, in the intervals between tunnels,
we had fancied, from the few brief glimpses we caught of the landscape,
that the April so backward elsewhere in Italy was forwarder in the
blossomed trees along the eastern Riviera; and we learned at our hotel
that the steam-heat had just been taken off because the day had been so
hot and dry, though the evening was now so cold and wet. It was fitfully
put on and off during the chilly week that ensued, though in our
fifth-story garden, to which we sometimes resorted, there was a mildness
in the air that was absent in-doors. The hotel itself was disappointing;
any hotel would be after our hotel in Leghorn; and, though there was the
good-will of former days, there was not the former effect. The corridors
crashed and clattered all day long and well into the night with the
gayety of some cheap incursion of German tourists, who seemed, indeed,
to fill the whole city with their clamor. They were given a long table
to themselves, and when they were set at it and began to ply their
knives and tongues the din was deafening. That would not have been so
bad if they had not been so plain, or if, when they happened, in a young
girl or two, to be pretty, they had not guttled and guzzled so like the
plainest of their number. One such pretty girl was really beautiful,
with a bloom perhaps already too rich, which, as she abandoned herself
to her meat and drink, reddened downward over her lily neck and upward
to her golden hair, past the brows under which her blue, blue eyes
protruded painfully, all in a frightful prophecy of what she would be
when the bud of her spring should be the full-blown cabbage-rose of her
summer.
I dare say those people were not typical of their civilization. Probably
modern enterprise makes travel easy to sorts and conditions of Germans
who once would not have dreamed of leaving home, and now tempts these
rude Teutonic hordes over or under the Alps and pours them out on the
Peninsula, far out-deluging the once-prevalent Anglo-Saxons. The first
night there was an Englishman at dinner, but he vanished after
breakfast; the next day an Italian officer was at lunch, but he came no
more; we were the only Americans, and now we had the sole society of
those German tourists. Perhaps it was national vanity, but I could not
at the moment think of an equal number of our fellow-citizens of any
condition who would not have been less molestively happy. One forgot
what one was eating, and left the table bruised as if physically beaten
upon by those sound-waves and sight-waves. But our companions must have
made themselves acceptable to the city they had come to visit; Genoa is
very noisy, and they could not be heard above the trams and omnibuses,
and in the streets they could not be seen at table; when I ventured to
note to a sacristan, here and there, that there seemed to be a great
many Germans in town, the fact apparently roused nothing of the old-time
Italian antipathy for the Tedeschi.
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