How it rains, and rains, and rains in Rome, when it once sets in for the winter! And there is health in this rain, and not altogether because it washes out and cleanses the filthy streets of Rome, but it somehow seems to purify the atmosphere in and around Rome, and everywhere up and down the Tiber.
The Roman fever is nothing more or less than the fever and ague of the Mississippi valley, and the mud lakes near Mexico City. A man who has had the ague in the llnited States or Mexico, is very likely to take this fever in Rome; and when he does take it, and after the first bad attack of the fever, he will readily see the relation between the two.
Murietta was almost well again. The fever had gone; the chill had left his bones and flesh sore, as if he had been on a long journey; but his head was clear, and he knew what was the matter, and knew perfectly well what to do.
One of the little countesses carried a prescription to a druggist on the Corso; and in a few days the artist had beaten his fever, and in another week was beginning to think of finding his way out on the sunny side of the hills of Rome.
But how it did rain! The narrow streets of Rome were one moving mass of umbrellas. The Tiber came booming up through the streets, and flood wood came down from the mountains in great rafts. The river seemed to be banked up from the sea. In fact it was a little sea of itself.
Murietta had painted no more. He could not or he would not touch his brush in all this time that he had sat there in his little room over his little stove so like an open pickle jar, and all the time mistaking the pretty sisters one for the other, and all the time telling one part of a story to this one and then a bit of it to this other, and so on, till they really thought that his mind was out of joint.
The artist had but one conception in his mind. He could think of but one thing. Even here in eternal Rome, with the flower of his art before him, the best results of all the last five centuries, he saw nothing but this one face. He would not paint that any more.
Back behind the door, with a shawl thrown over it by the thoughtful and gentle sisters, stood his easel. There was one picture there, — the picture of Annette, the one fair woman, with a dagger driven to the hilt in her heart.
The sunshine follows the rain, in fact as well as in poetry. How terribly tired Murietta had grown of playing the hermit! He had hidden away determined to let the world go on the other side, go on its own way without him, and let him alone.
It was a little humiliating to this man's vanity to find that the world did go on, and go on just about as well without him as with him. In fact, he found he was not missed at all. He began to see that this would be the final end of the story; that men come and go, and the busy world does not trouble its head at all about this man's loves, or that man's losses, or anything of the kind.
The artist began to want to see the world once more. The sun came out one day in mid winter, as only an Italian sun can — came out after a long long winter rain; and the hermit left the shadow of the Tarpeian Rock, to see the gay gathering of people on the Pincian Hill. Under the north side of the Capitoline Hill, down the Corso, up the Via Condotti, to the Spanish Square, and then up the grand, wide, tufa Spanish steps, the artist took his way, glad again to see the faces of men from the strong new West.
He went close up to the house standing at the base of the steps to the right, and lifted his hat as he looked in through the window where the last sunlight fell on the face of the boy poet, Keats; and he said as he passed on:
"He is gathered to the kings of thought."
The sun was spilling all over these hundreds of wide, high, splendid Spanish steps, and people were sunning themselves here in long rows by the dozen.
Further up the steps, on a little flat, peasants were playing their reed pipes and the tambourine, and men in long hair and short breeches with little dirk knives just visible between the waists of their goatskin coats, were dancing wildly as the wind with pretty peasant girls in very short dresses, and little tunics and bodices, and striped and tattered shawls thrown loose over the arm and flying in the air as they danced.
Never is an Italian half so lively as when at the dance. You employ any peasant to do you any service, and watch his movements. You will come to think him the dullest, stupidest, slowest creature that ever has been born. See him dance, and you will think him about the liveliest.
A beautiful scene was this. They were dancing their old Saturnalia. This was the dance that these people had danced under the cork trees on the Sabine Hills for thousands and thousands of years. And here in Rome it stood apart by itself. There was nothing like it. There can be no music like this. Nothing can imitate or approach it. No one takes part in these dances but these peasants from the Campagna, and they all gather around on these occasions. They stand huddled in a close ring, with the dancers in the centre. The dance goes on for hours and hours. As soon as one man tires he falls back exhausted into the arms of his friends, and another takes his place. The women can endure more of this than the men, but they too fall back exhausted, and then another steps out into the ring, dancing as she enters; and unless you are very quick in your observation, you will not see the change of dancers at all.
This is a dance with a meaning. It is a sort of invocation and thanksgiving to Saturn. It is said that the Carnival was introduced by the popes in the hope of displacing and rooting out this relic of heathen custom, but in vain.
Up these steps to another level, and there in the sun sat a row of beggars engaged in gambling, and all too intent on their game to even reach out a hand to the artist as he passed, and climbed fairly to the top, and stood under the obelisk before the church where sleeps poor Claude Lorraine.
Here the carriages went whirling by under the barren oak and elm trees on their way to the great little drive on the Pincian Hill. The Spanish steps away up here at the top, with all Rome beneath them, had blossomed all along the upper rows and bastions with the most beautiful women of the lower orders in Southern Italy.
These women were ranked under the general and not very comprehensive name of models. Such eyes are not to be met with anywhere in the world outside of Rome! Such wild blown hair about the brows and shoulders! Teeth, such teeth! and lips only made to love, and laugh, and show such pretty, perfect teeth.
Rome! for all the bloody stories you have given us, for all the crimes with which you cursed the world when you were Rome, we hold you hardly guilty when we see what beautiful women you have brought us from out the world that was.
On to the left, between the leafless avenues of elms, with a high wall to your right, and all old Rome away down below you, and a part of new Rome immediately under you, and you come to a very little fountain playing in a very large broad basin, beneath an old gnarled and knotted tree, with its ancient limbs reaching down as if they were tired and would like to come to the ground.
You pass through a great iron gate, up a pleasant side walk with carriages whirling by you all the time, and music playing on every hand, and cactus growing on the walls as if you were in Mexico, and then you stand on the Pincian Hill, with its forests of flowers, its fountains, its hundreds of masterpieces in marble, its banks of winter roses, its black firs and forests of great evergreens brought from the farthest borders of the world to beautify and make attractive this most delicious spot in Italy.
Then all around the edge of this, between the avenues of trees, is the drive. To the left there, as you drive between the trees and the rows of beautiful statues, you are over the wall of Rome. The wall is beneath you. If you leave your carriage and walk for three paces to the left in one of the pleasant path between the trees and by the flower beds of beautiful colours, you will come to a little abutment reaching almost to your breast. Lean and look over. You will see that this portion of the wall of Rome is nearly sixty feet in height.
Below you is the Borghese, the great drive of Rome, where men also ride, and lovers find seclusion in the paths leading from fountain to fountain through the dense wood below you.
You return to your carriage and drive on around, by flower-beds, by fountains, by beautiful figures in marble, and under fragrant and dark sweeping trees, and in a little time you are back to the place where you first entered, and in a perfect jam of carriages, with a dozen very handsome and very polite and very helpless and inefficient officers, trying hard to keep the way open and to please every foreigner who has come to enjoy the Carnival in their beautiful city.
There is a wide, wide place above the great wall. Room enough for a hundred carriages to come abreast. Here they make a diversion; and lines and lines of carriages are drawn up in rank, for under that great big palm tree that King Someone sent to Pope Somebody is the splendid military band that plays here every day just before sundown for the people.
They are slow to begin. The Italian has always and for ever, and without an exception, to make a speech before he begins even the most trifling task.
You have a minute to spare. Come close to the wall and look down. Here under you are fountains. All along the steep hill side below you see one unbroken bed of beautiful flowers, in every colour of the rainbow. Even under the trees the flowers grow in Italy.
Down there, away down over the beds of flowers and beyond the trees and across the many turns of the road that leads up here from another gate by the way of the Piazza del Popolo, you see gray granite columns bristling with prows of ships. The tradition is that these were set here to commemorate the victory over Antony and Cleopatra.
Fountains and flowers, and flowers and fountains! That is Rome!
This, just beyond the granite columns and just beneath you as it were, is the great Piazza del Popolo. There is an immense fountain in the centre of it with great big blue lions, and there are boys riding the stone lions, as they spout water, with strings in their mouths for bridles.
There are a hundred carriages in the piazza and a thousand people. But the people do not look much taller than a span. In the centre of this piazza by the founain is the oldest obelisk in Rome. That obelisk was chiselled, and had the inscriptions it holds up there to all the world, long before Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt.
Tradition locates the tomb of Nero on this very spot. Yet there is another so called tomb of Nero away over yonder five miles beyond the Tiber.
This obelisk was placed here on account of a dream which one of the popes had conerning the old tomb which stood here, bearing the name of Nero. Out of and around and over this tomb had grown a little forest of trees. These trees had grown to an immense size. The rooks had been roosting in them for centuries.
It was a bad year in Rome. Then the pope dreamed that all these rooks roosting in these trees above the tomb of Nero, were evil spirits brooding over the city. He had the trees cut down, the tomb levelled, this obelisk placed there; and now you see nothing but the naked stones, and obelisk, and fountains.
And the story is that there is the porion of a man's body beneath this obelisk too; that when they were placing it there and settling it to its place, a man got caught beneath it, and a part of his body remains still beneath the obelisk — buried perhaps with the Emperor Nero!
But hark! the music begins.
Softly it swells, sways, falls, rises again, loud, louder, long! — now light and faint and far away, sweet as kisses in a dream.
Classic song in a classic land. You may almost see the satyrs dance below the chestnut trees. You picture the great god Pan sitting by the waters of the Tiber, piping in his reed, and puffing his cheeks, and tapping the time on the sand with his hoof.
And these pretty players here, these handsome Italian musicians with hands and waists like women — these soldiers, too, with painted and powdered faces — these men wearing stays to make them seem more beautiful, know perfectly well what awe and what interest envelops them. They are playing under the prestige of the whole world's history, from the days of the she wolf up to the hour when their king came down from the north and sat down on his throne in Rome.
These players know that the beautiful blond barbarians of England and that farther and still more barbarous country, are listening and looking on and thinking of the time when Caesar entered yonder gate of Rome to reign, and when St. Paul passed out through yonder gate to die.
Higher and higher the melody mounts up. They are playing a martial air. The very horses prance in their harness. The officers come closer around, sabres rattle on the sand, the beautiful blondes lean from their carriages and listen, or seem to listen, while they do not at all seem to see the bold and adventurous eyes that watch them from every quarter of the garden.
Higher and higher the music swells. You can hear the rustle of the palm leaves — it is so still. The boughs of the ever green oak quake, tremble, quiver and dance as if with delight. The great palm tree that King Somebody presented to Pope Someone reaches out his great hands as if to say. Bless you, my sunny Italian singers!
Higher and higher, louder and louder, and at last the horses fairly plunge in their harness — the air, the heavens, are filled vnth this long last note.
It dies away; the horses plunge ahead; and the carriages are again whirling around on the rim of this last, save the Aventine, of the Seven Hills of Rome.
Start reading Chapter 20 ofThe One Fair Lady