Tuscan Cities. William Dean Howells
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evening an officer's funeral passed through the piazza, with a pomp of military mourning; but that was no more effective than the merely civil funeral which we once saw just at twilight. The bearers were in white cowls and robes, and one went at the head of the bier with a large cross. The others carried torches, which sometimes they inverted, swinging forward with a slow processional movement, and chanting monotonously, with the clear dark of the evening light keen and beautiful around them.
At other times we heard the jangle of a small bell, and looking out we saw a priest of Santa Maria, with the Host in his hand and his taper-bearing retinue around him, going to administer the extreme unction to some passing soul in our neighborhood. Some of the spectators uncovered, but for the most part they seemed not to notice it, and the solemnity had an effect of business which I should be at some loss to make the reader feel. But that is the effect which church ceremonial in Italy has always had to me. I do not say that the Italians are more indifferent to their religion than other people, but that, having kept up its shows, always much the same in the celebration of different faiths, — Etruscan, Hellenic, Hebraic, — so long, they were more tired of them, and were willing to let it transact itself without their personal connivance when they could.
IV
All the life of the piazza was alike novel to the young eyes which now saw it for the first time from our windows, and lovely in ours, to which youth seemed to come back in its revision. I should not know how to give a just sense of the value of a man who used to traverse the square with a wide wicker tray on his head, piled up with Chianti wine-flasks that looked like a heap of great bubbles. I must trust him to the reader's sympathy, together with the pensive donkeys abounding there, who acquired no sort of spiritual pride from the sense of splendid array, though their fringed and tasseled harness blazed with burnished brass. They appeared to be stationed in our piazza while their peasant-owners went about the city on their errands, and it may have been in an access of homesickness too acute for repression that, with a preliminary quivering of the tail and final rise of that member, they lifted their woe-begone countenances and broke into a long disconsolate bray, expressive of a despair which has not yet found its way into poetry, and is only vaguely suggested by some music of the minor key.
These donkeys, which usually stood under our hotel, were balanced in the picture by the line of cabs at the base of the tall buildings on the other side, whence their drivers watched our windows with hopes not unnaturally excited by our interest in them, which they might well have mistaken for a remote intention of choosing a cab. From time to time one of them left the rank, and took a turn in the square from pure effervescence of expectation, flashing his equipage upon our eyes, and snapping his whip in explosions that we heard even through the closed windows. They were of all degrees of splendor and squalor, both cabs and drivers, from the young fellow with false, floating blue eyes and fur-trimmed coat, who drove a shining cab fresh from the builder's hands, to the little man whose high hat was worn down almost to its structural pasteboard, and whose vehicle limped over the stones with querulous complaints from its rheumatic joints. When we began to drive out, we resolved to have always the worldlier turnout; but we got it only two or three times, falling finally and permanently — as no doubt we deserved, in punishment of our heartless vanity — to the wreck at the other extreme of the scale. There is no describing the zeal and vigilance by which this driver obtained and secured us to himself. For a while we practiced devices for avoiding him, and did not scruple to wound his feelings; but we might as well have been kind, for it came to the same thing in the end. Once we had almost escaped. Our little man's horse had been feeding, and he had not fastened his bridle on when the portiere called a carriage for us. He made a snatch at his horse's bridle; it came off in his hand and hung dangling. Another driver saw the situation, and began to whip his horse across the square; our little man seized his horse by the forelock, and dragging him along at the top of his speed, arrived at the hotel door a little the first What could we do but laugh? Everybody in the piazza applauded, and I think it must have been this fact which confirmed our subjection. After that we pretended once that our little man had cheated us; but with respectful courage he contested the fact, and convinced us that we were wrong; he restored a gold pencil which he had found in his cab; and, though he never got it, he voluntarily promised to get a new coat, to do us the more honor when he drove us out to pay visits.
V.
He was, like all of his calling with whom he had to do in Florence, amiable and faithful, and he showed that personal interest in us from the beginning which is instant with most of them, and which found pretty expression when I was sending home a child to the hotel from a distance at nightfall. I was persistent in getting the driver's number, and he divined the cause of my anxiety.
"Oh, rest easy!" he said, leaning down toward me from his perch. " I, too, am a father I "
Possibly a Boston hackman might have gone so far as to tell me that he had young ones of his own, but he would have snubbed in reassuring me; and it is this union of grace with sympathy which, I think, forms the true expression of Italian civilization. It is not yet valued aright in the world; but the time must come when it will not be shouldered aside by physical and intellectual brutality. I hope it may come so soon that the Italians will not have learned bad manners from the rest of us. As yet, they seem uncontaminated, and the orange-vendor who crushes a plump grandmother up against the wall in some narrow street is as gayly polite in his apologies, and she as graciously forgiving, as they could have been under any older regime.
But probably the Italians could not change if they would. They may fancy changes in themselves and in one another, but the barbarian who returns to them after a long absence cannot see that they are personally different from all their political transformations. Life, which has become to us like a book which we silently peruse in the closet, or at most read aloud with a few friends, is still a drama with them, to be more or less openly played. This is what strikes you at first, and strikes you at last. It is the most recognizable thing in Italy, and I was constantly pausing in my languid strolls, confronted by some dramatic episode so bewilderingly familiar that it seemed to me I must have already attempted to write about it. One day, on the narrow sidewalk beside the escutcheoned cloister-wall of the church, two young and handsome people stopped me while they put upon that public stage the pretty melodrama of their feelings. The bareheaded girl wore a dress of the red and black plaid of the Florentine laundresses, and the young fellow standing beside her had a cloak falling from his left shoulder. She was looking down and away from him, impatiently pulling with one hand at the fingers of another, and he was vividly gesticulating, while he explained or expostulated, with his eyes not upon her, but looking straight forward; and they both stood as if, in a moment of opera, they were confronting an audience over the footlights. But they were both quite unconscious, and were merely obeying the histrionic instinct of their race. So was the schoolboy in clerical robes, when, goaded by some taunt, pointless to the foreign bystander, he flung himself into an attitude of deadly scorn, and defied the tormenting gamins; so were the vendor of chestnut-paste and his customer, as they debated over the smoking viand the exact quantity and quality which a soldo ought to purchase, in view of the state of the chestnut market and the price demanded elsewhere; so was the little woman who deplored, in impassioned accents, the non-arrival of the fresh radishes we liked with our coffee, when I went a little too early for them to her stall; so was the fruiterer who called me back with an effect of heroic magnanimity to give me the change I had forgotten, after beating him down from a franc to seventy centimes on a dozen of mandarin oranges. The sweetness of his air, tempering the severity of his self-righteousness in doing this, lingers with me yet, and makes me ashamed of having got the oranges at a just price. I wish he had cheated me.
We, too, can be honest if we try, but the effort seems to sour most of us. We hurl our integrity in the teeth of the person whom we deal fairly with; but when the Italian makes up his mind to be just, it is in no ungracious spirit. It was their lovely ways, far more than their monuments of history and art, that made return to the Florentines delightful. I would rather have had a perpetuity of the cameriere's smile when he came up with our coffee in the morning than Donatello's San Giorgio, if either were purchasable; and the face of the old chamber-maid, Maria, full of motherly affection, was better than the facade of Santa Maria Novella.