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"Mamma," said Isabel, as we gathered in the hotel vestibule for the start to Pompeii, "is really not fit to undertake it."
"You'll excuse me, Aunt Caroline," remarked the Senator, "but your complexion isn't by any means right yet. It's a warm day and a long drive. Just as likely as not you'll be down sick after it."
"Stuff!" said Mrs. Portheris. "I thank my stars I have got no enfeebled American constitution. I am perfectly equal to it, thank you."
"It's most unwise," observed Mr. Mafferton.
"Darned—I mean extremely risky," sighed Dicky.
Mrs. Portheris faced upon them. "And pray what do you know about it?" she demanded.
Then momma put in her oar, taking most unguardedly a privilege of relationship. "Of course, you are the best judge of how you feel yourself, Aunt Caroline, but we are told there are some steps to ascend when we get there—and you know how fleshy you are."
In the instant of ominous silence which occurred while Mrs. Portheris was getting her chin into the angle of its greatest majesty, Mr. Mafferton considerately walked to the door. When it was accomplished she looked at momma sideways and down her nose, precisely in the manner of the late Mr. Du Maurier's ladies in Punch , in the same state of mind. She might have sat or stood to him. It was another ideal realised.
"That is the latest, the very latest Americanism which I have observed in your conversation, Augusta. In your native land it may be admissible, but please understand that I cannot permit it to be applied to me personally. To English ears it is offensive, very offensive. It is also quite improper for you to assume any familiarity with my figure. As you say, I may be aware of its corpulence, but nobody else—er—can possibly know anything about it."
Momma was speechless, and, as usual, the Senator came to the rescue. He never will allow momma to be trampled on, and there was distinct retaliation in his manner. "Look here, aunt," he said, "there's nothing profane in saying you're fleshy when you are , you know, and you don't need to remove so much as your bonnet strings for the general public to be aware of it. And when you come to America don't you ever insult anybody by calling her corpulent, which is a perfectly indecent expression. Now if you won't go back to bed and tranquillise your mind—on a plain soda——"
"I won't," said Mrs. Portheris.
"De carriages is already," said the head porter, glistening with an amiability of which we all appreciated the balm. And we entered the carriages—Mrs. Portheris and the downcast Isabel and Mr. Mafferton in one, and momma, poppa, Dicky, and I in the other. For no American would have been safe in Mrs. Portheris's carriage for at least two hours, and this came home even to Mr. Dod.
"Never again!" exclaimed momma as we rattled down among the narrow streets that crowd under the Funicular railway. "Never again will I call that woman Aunt Caroline."
"Don't call her fleshy, my dear, that's what really irritated her," remarked the Senator. The Senator's discrimination, I have often noticed, is not the nicest thing about him.
Hours and hours it seemed to take, that drive to Pompeii. Past the ambitious confectioner with his window full of cherry pies, each cherry round and red and shining like a marble, and the plate glass dry-goods store where ready-made costumes were displayed that looked as if they might fit just as badly as those of Westbourne Grove, and so by degrees and always down hill through narrower and shabbier streets where all the women walked bareheaded and the shops were mostly turned out on the pavement for the convenience of customers, and a good many of them went up and down in wheelbarrows. And often through narrow ways so high-walled and many-windowed that it was quite cool and dusky down below, and only a strip of sun showed far up along the roofs of one side. Here and there a wheelbarrow went strolling through these streets too, and we saw at least one family marketing. From a little square window a prodigious way up came, as we passed, a cry with custom in it, and a wheelbarrow paused beneath. Then down from the window by a long, long rope slid a basket from the hands of a young woman leaning out in red, and the vendor took the opportunity of sitting down on his barrow handle till it arrived. Soldi and a piece of paper he took out of the basket and a cabbage and onions he put in, and then it went swinging upwards and he picked up his barrow again, and we rattled on and left him shouting and pushing his hat back—it was not a soft felt but a bowler—to look up at the other windows. In spite of the bowler it was a picturesque and Neapolitan incident, and it left us much divided as to the contents of the piece of paper.
"My idea is," said the Senator, "that the young woman in the red jersey was the hired girl and that note was what you might call a clandestine communication."
"Since we are in Naples," remarked Mr. Dod, "I think, Senator, your deduction is correct. Where we come from a slavey with any self-respect would put her sentiments on a gilt-edged correspondence card in a scented envelope with a stamp on the outside and ask you to kindly drop it into the pillar box on your way to business; but this chimes in with all you read about Naples."
"Perfectly ridiculous!" said momma. "Mark my words, that note was either a list of vegetables wanted, or an intimation that if they weren't going to be fresher than the last, that man needn't stop for orders in future. And in a country as destitute of elevators as this one is I suppose you couldn't keep a servant a week if you didn't let her save the stairs somehow. But I must say if I were going to have cabbage and onions the same day I wouldn't like the neighbours to know it."
I entirely agreed with momma, and was reflecting, while they talked of something else, on the injustice of considering ours the sentimental sex, when the Senator leaned forward and advised me in an undertone to make a note of the market basket.
"And take my theory to account for the piece of paper," said he; "your mother's may be the most likely, but mine is what the public will expect ."
And always the shadows of the narrow streets crooked in the end into a little plaza full of sun and beggars, and lemonade stands, and hawkers of wild strawberries, and when the great bank of a flower-stall stood just where the shadow ended sharply and the sun began, it made something to remember. After that our way lay through a suburban parish fête , and we pursued it under strings and strings of little glass lanterns, red, and green, and blue, that swung across the streets; and there were goats and more children, and momma vainly endeavoured to keep off the smells with her parasol. Then a region of docks and masts rising unexpectedly, and many little fish shops, and a glitter of scales on the pavement, and disconnected coils of rope, and lounging men with earrings, and unkempt women with babies, and above and over all the warm scent, standing still in the sun, of hemp, and tar, and the sea.
"The city," said the Senator, casting his practised eye on a piece of dead wall that ran along the pavement, "is evidently in the turmoil of a general election, though you mightn't notice it. It's the third time I've seen those posters ' Viva il Prefétto! ' and ' Viva L'opposizione! That seems to be about all they can do, just as if we contented ourselves with yelling ''Rah for Bryan!' 'One more for McKinley!' I must say if they haven't any more notion of business than that they don't either of 'em deserve to get there."
"In France," observed Mr. Dod, "they stick up little handbills addressed to their ' chers concitoyens ' as if voters were a lot of baa-lambs and willie-boys. It makes enervating reading."
"Young man," said poppa in a burst of feeling, "they say the American eagle might keep her beak shut with advantage, more than she does; but I tell you," and the Senator's hand came down hard on Dicky's knee, "a trip around Europe is enough to turn her into a singing bird, sir, a singing bird."
I don't get my imagination entirely from momma.
" Viva il Prefétto! Viva L'opposizione! " poppa repeated pityingly, as another pair of posters came in sight. "Well, it won't ever do the Government of Italy any good, but I guess I'm with the Opposizione ."
The road grew emptier and sandy white, and commerce forsook it but for here and there a little shop with fat yellow bags, which were the people's cheeses, hanging in bladders at the door. Crumbled gateways began to appear, and we saw through them that the villa gardens inside ran down and dropped their rose leaves into the blue of the Mediterranean. We met the country people going their ways to town; they looked at us with friendly patronage, knowing all about us, what we had come to see, and the foolishness of it, and especially the ridiculous cost of carozza that take people to Pompeii. And at last, just as the sun and the jolting and the powdery white dust combined had instigated us all to suggest to the Senator how much better it would have been to come by rail, the ponies made a glad and jingling sweep under the acacias of the Hôtel Diomede, which is at the portals of Pompeii.
It seemed a casual and a cheerful place, full of open doors and proprietary Neapolitans who might have been brothers and sisters-in-law, whose conversation we interrupted coming in. There had been domestic potations; a very fat lady, with a horn comb in her hair, wiped liquid rings off the table with her apron, removing the glasses, while a collarless male person with an agreeable smile and a soft felt hat placed wooden chairs for us in a row. Poppa knows no Italian, but they seemed to understand from what he said that we wanted things to drink, and brought us with surprising accuracy precisely what each of us preferred, lemonade for momma and me, and beverages consisting largely, though not entirely, of soda water for the Senator and Mr. Dod. While we refreshed ourselves, another, elderly, grizzled, and one-eyed, came and took up a position just outside the door opposite and sang a song of adventurous love, boxing his own ears in the chorus with the liveliest effect. A further agreeable person waited upon us and informed us that he was the interpreter, he would everything explain to us, that this was a beggar man who wanted us to give him some small money, but there was no compulsion if we did not wish to do so. I think he gave us that interpretation for nothing. The fat lady then produced a large fan which she waved over us assiduously, and the collarless man in the soft hat stood by to render aid in any further emergency, smiling upon us as if we were delicacies out of season. Poppa bore it as long as he could, and we all made an unsuccessful effort to appear as if we were quite accustomed to as much attention and more in the hotels of America; but in a very few minutes we knew all the disadvantages of being of too much importance. Presently the one-eyed man gave way to a pair of players on the flute and mandolin.
"Look here," said poppa at this, to the interpreter, "you folks are putting yourselves out on our account a great deal more than is necessary. We are just ordinary travelling public, and you don't need to entertain us with side shows that we haven't ordered any more than if we belonged to your own town. See?" But the interpreter did not see. He beckoned instead to an engaging daughter of the fat lady, who approached modestly with a large book of photographs, which she opened before the Senator, kneeling beside his chair.
"Great Scott!" exclaimed poppa, "I'm not a crowned head. Rise, Miss Diomede."
Removing his cigar, he assisted the young lady to her feet and led her to a sofa at the other end of the room, where, as they turned over the photographs together, I heard him ask her if she objected to tobacco.
"You may go," said momma to the interpreter, "and explain the scenes. Mr. Wick will enjoy them much more if he understands them." The freedom from conventional restraint which characterises American society very seldom extends to married gentlemen.
We had to wait twenty minutes for the other party, on account of their British objection to anybody's dust. Even Mr. Mafferton looked quelled when they arrived, and Isabel quite abject, while Mrs. Portheris wore that air of justification which no circumstance could impair, which was particularly her own. She would not sit down. "It gives these people a claim on you," she said. "I did not come here to run up an hotel bill, but to see Pompeii. Pompeii I demand to see." The players on the flute and mandolin looked at Mrs. Portheris consideringly and then strolled away, and the guide, with a sorrowful glance at the landlady, put on his hat. "I can explain you everything," he said with an inflection that placed the responsibility for remaining in ignorance upon our own heads, but Mrs. Portheris waved him away with her fan. "No," she said. "I beg that this man shall not be allowed to inflict himself upon our party. I particularly desire to form my own impression of the historic city, that city that did so much for the reputation of Sir Henry Bulwer Lytton. Besides, these people mount up ridiculously, and with servants at home on half wages, and Consols in the state they are, one is really compelled to economise."
It was difficult to protest against Mrs. Portheris's regulations, and impossible to contravene them, so I have nothing to report of that guide but his card, which bore the name "Antonio Plicco," and his memory, which is a blank.
There was an ascent, and Mrs. Portheris mounted it proudly. I pointed out to poppa half-way up that his esteemed relative hadn't turned a hair, but he was inclined to be incredulous; said you couldn't tell what was going on in the Department of the Interior. The Senator often uses a political reference to carry him over a delicate allusion. Flowering shrubs and bushes lined the path we climbed, silent in the sunshine, dustily decorative, and at the top the turning of a key let us into a strange place. Always a strange place, however often the guide-books beat their iterations upon it, a place that leaps at imagination, peering into other days through the mists that lie between, and blinds it with a rush of light—the place where they have gathered together what was left of the dead Pompeiians and their world. There they lay before us for our wonderment as they ran, and tripped, and struggled, and fell in the night of that day when they and the gods together were overwhelmed, and they died as they thought in the end of time. And through an open door Vesuvius sent up its eternal gentle woolly curl again the daylight sky, and vineyards throve, and birds sang, and we, who had survived the gods, came curious to look. The figures lay in glass cases, and Dicky remarked, with unusual seriousness, that it was like a dead-house.
"Except," said poppa, "that in this mortuary there isn't ever going to be anybody who can identify the remains. When you come to think of it—that's kind of hard."
"No chance of Christian burial once you get into a museum," said Dick with solicitude.
"I should like," remarked Mrs. Portheris, polishing her pince nez to get a better view of a mother and daughter lying on their faces. "I should like to see the clergyman who would attempt it. These people were heathen, and richly deserved their fate. Richly!"
Momma looked at her husband's Aunt Caroline with indignant scorn. "Do you really think so?" she asked, but we could all see that her words were a very inadequate expression for her emotions. Mrs. Portheris drew all the guns of her orthodoxy into line for battle. "I am surprised——" she began, and then the Senator politely but firmly interfered.
"Ladies," he said, "' De mortuis nisi bonum ,' which is to say it isn't customary to slang corpses, especially, as you may say, in their presence. I guess we can all be thankful, anyhow, that heathen nowadays have got a cooler earth to live on," and that for the moment was the end of it, but momma still gazed commiseratingly at the figures, with a suspicious tendency to look for her handkerchief.
"It's too terrible," she said. "We can actually see their features ."
"Don't let them get on your nerves, Augusta," suggested poppa.
"I won't if I can help it. But when you see their clothes and their hair and realise——"
"It happened over eighteen hundred years ago, my dear, and most of them got away."
"That didn't make it any better for those who are now before us," and momma used her handkerchief threateningly, though it was only in connection with her nose.
"Well now, Augusta, I hate to destroy an illusion like that, because they're not to be bought with money, but since you're determined to work yourself up over these unfortunates, I've got to expose them to you. They're not the genuine remains you take them for. They're mere worthless imitations."
"Alexander," said momma suspiciously, "you never hesitate to tamper with the truth if you think it will make me any more comfortable. I don't believe you."
"All right," returned the Senator; "when we get home you ask Bramley. It was Bramley that put me on to it. Whenever one of those Pompeii fellows dropped, the ashes kind of caked over him, and in the course of time there was a hole where he had been. See? And what you're looking at is just a collection of those holes filled up with composition and then dug out. Mere holes!"
"The illusion is dreadfully perfect," sighed momma. "Fancy dying like a baked potato in hot ashes! Somehow, Alexander, I don't seem able to get over it," and momma gazed with distressed fascination at the grim form of the negro porter.
"We've got no proper grounds for coming to that conclusion either," replied poppa firmly. "Just as likely they were suffocated by the gas that came up out of the ground."
"Oh, if I could think that!" momma exclaimed with relief. "But if I find you've been deceiving me, Alexander, I'll never forgive you. It's too solemn!"
"You ask Bramley," I heard the Senator reply. "And now come and tell me if this loaf of bread somebody baked eighteen hundred and twenty something years ago isn't exactly the same shape as the Naples bakers are selling right now."
"Daughter," said momma as she went, "I hope you are taking copious notes. This is the wonder of wonders that we behold to-day." I said I was, and I wandered over to where Mrs. Portheris examined with Mr. Mafferton an egg that was laid on the last day of Pompeii. Mrs. Portheris was asking Mr. Mafferton, in her most impressive manner, if it was not too wonderful to have positive proof that fowls laid eggs then just as they do now; and I made a note of that too. Dicky and Isabel bemoaned the fate of the immortal dog who still bites his flank in the pain extinguished so long ago. I hardly liked to disturb them, but I heard Dicky say as I passed that he didn't mind much about the humans, they had their chance, but this poor little old tyke was tied up, and that on the part of Providence was playing it low down.
Then we all stepped out into the empty streets of Pompeii and Mr. Mafferton read to us impressively, from Murray, the younger Pliny's letter to Tacitus describing its great disaster. The Senator listened thoughtfully, for Pliny goes into all kinds of interesting details. "I haven't much acquaintance with the classics," said he, as Mr. Mafferton finished, "but it strikes me that the modern New York newspaper was the medium to do that man justice. It's the most remarkable case I've noticed of a good reporter born before his time ."
"A terrible retribution," said Mrs. Portheris, looking severely at the Tavern of Phœbus, forever empty of wine-bibbers. "They worshipped Jupiter, I understand, and other deities even less respectable. Can we wonder that a volcano was sent to destroy them! One thing we may be quite sure of—if the city had only turned from its wickedness and embraced Christianity, this never would have happened."
Momma compressed her lips and then relaxed them again to say, "I think that idea perfectly ridiculous." I scented battle and hung upon the issue, but the Senator for the third time interposed.
"Why no, Augusta," he said, "I guess that's a working hypothesis of Aunt Caroline's. Here's Vesuvius smokin' away ever since just the same, and there's Naples with a bishop and the relics of Saint Januarius. You can read in your guide-book that whenever Vesuvius has looked as if he meant business for the past few hundred years, the people of Naples have simply called on the bishop to take out the relics of Saint Januarius and walk 'em round the town; and that's always been enough for Vesuvius. Now the Pompeii folks didn't know a saint or a bishop by sight, and Jupiter, as Aunt Caroline says, was never properly qualified to interfere. That's how it was, I presume . I don't suppose the people of Naples take much stock in the laws of nature; they don't have to, with Januarius in a drawer. And real estate keeps booming right along."
"You have an extraordinary way of putting things," remarked Mrs. Portheris to her nephew. "Very extraordinary. But I am glad to hear that you agree with me," and she looked as if she did not understand momma's acquiescent smile.
We went our several ways to see the baths, and the Comic Theatre, the bakehouse and the gymnasium; and I had a little walk by myself in the Street of Abundance, where the little empty houses waited patiently on either side for those to return who had gone out, and the sun lay full on their floors of dusty mosaic, and their gardens where nothing grew. It seemed to me, as it seems to everybody, that Pompeii was not dead, but asleep, and her tints were so clear and gay that her dreams might be those of a ballet-girl. A solitary yellow dog chased a lizard in the sun, and the pebbles he knocked about made an absurdly disturbing noise. Beyond the vague tinted roofless walls that stretched over the pleasant little peninsula, the blue sea rippled tenderly, remembering much delight, and the place seemed to smile in its sleep. It was easy to understand why Cicero chose to have his villa in the midst of such light-heartedness, and why the gods, perhaps, decided that they had lent too much laughter to Pompeii. I made free of the hospitality of Cornelius Rufus and sat for a while in his exedra , where he himself, in marble on a little pillar in the middle of the room, made me as welcome as if I had been a client or a neighbour. We considered each other across the centuries, making mutual allowances, and spent the most sociable half-hour. I take a personal interest in the city's disaster now—it overwhelmed one of my friends.