Roman Holidays And Others. William Dean Howells

      V. POMPEII REVISITED

      Because I felt very happy in going back to Pompeii after a generation, and being alive to do so in the body, I resolved to behave handsomely by the cabman who drove me from my hotel to the station. I said to myself that I would do something that would surprise him, and I gave him his fee and nearly a franc over; but it was I who was surprised, for he ran after me into the station, as I supposed, to extort more. He was holding out a franc toward me, and I asked the guide who was bothering me to take him to Pompeii (where there are swarms of guides always on the grounds) what the matter was. “It is false,” he explained, and this proved true, though whether the franc was the one I had given the driver or whether it was one which he had thoughtfully substituted for it to make good an earlier loss I shall now never know. I put it into my pocket, wondering what I should do with it; the question what you shall do with counterfeit money in Italy is one which is apt to recur as I have hinted, and in despair of solving it at the moment I threw the false franc out of the car-window; it was the false franc I have already boasted of throwing away.

      This was, of course, after I got into the car, and after I had suffered another wrong, and was resolved at least to be good myself. I had taken first-class tickets, but, when we had followed several conductors up and down the train, the last of them said there were no first-class places left, though I shall always doubt this. I asked what we should do, and he shrugged. I had heard that if you will stand upon your rights in such a matter the company will have to put on another car for you. But I was now dealing with the Italian government, which has nationalized the railroads, but has apparently not yet repleted the rolling stock; and when the conductor found us places in a second-class carriage, rather than quarrel with a government which had troubles enough already I got aboard. I suppose really that I have not much public spirit, and that the little I have I commonly leave at home; in travelling it is burdensome. Besides, the second-class carriage would have been comfortable enough if it had not been so dirty; it looked as if it had not been washed since it was flooded with liquid ashes at the destruction of Pompeii, though they seemed to be cigar ashes.

      The country through which we made the hour's run was sympathetically squalid. We had, to be sure, the sea on one side, and that was clean enough; but the day was gray, and the sea was responsively gray; while the earth on the other side was torn and ragged, with people digging manure into the patches of broccoli, and gardening away as if it had been April instead of January. There were shabby villas, with stone-pines and cypresses herding about the houses, and tatters of life-plant overhanging their shabby walls; there were stucco shanties which the men and women working in the fields would lurk in at nightfall. At places there was some cheerful boat building, and at one place there was a large macaroni manufactory, with far stretches of the product dangling in hanks and skeins from rows of trellises. We passed through towns where women and children swarmed, working at doorways and playing in the dim, cold streets; from the balconies everywhere winter melons hung in nets, dozens and scores of them, such as you can buy at the Italian fruiterers' in New York, and will keep buying when once you know how good they are. In Naples they sell them by the slice in the street, the fruiterer carrying a board on his head with the slices arranged in an upright coronal like the rich, barbaric head-dress of some savage prince.

      Our train was slow and our car was foul, but nothing could keep us from arriving at Pompeii in very good spirits. The entrance to the dead city is gardened about with a cemeterial prettiness of evergreens; but, after you have bought your ticket and been assigned your guide, you pass through this decorative zone and find yourself in the first of streets where the past makes no such terms with the present. If some of the houses of an ampler plan had little spaces beyond the atrium planted with such flowers as probably grew there two thousand years ago, and stuck round with tiny figurines, it was to the advantage of the people's fancy; but it did not appeal so much to the imagination as the mould and moss, and the small, weedy network that covered the ground in the roofless chambers and temples and basilicas, where the broken columns and walls started from the floors which this unmeditated verdure painted in the favorite hue of ruin.

      Most of the places I re-entered through my recollection of them, but to this subjective experience there was added that of seeing much newer and vaster things than I remembered. That sad population of the victims of the disaster, restored to the semhlance of life, or perhaps rather of death, in plaster casts taken from the moulds their decay had left in the hardening ashes, had much increased in the melancholy museum where one visits them the first thing within the city gates. But their effect was not cumulative; there were more writhing women and more contorted men; but they did not make their tragedy more evident than it had been when I saw them, fewer but not less affecting, all those years ago. It was the same with the city itself; Pompeii had grown, like the rest of the world in the interval, and, although it had been dug tip instead of built up, a good third had been added to the count of its streets and houses. There were not, so far as I could see, more ruts from chariot-wheels in the lava blocks of the thoroughfares, but some convincingly two-storied dwellings had been exhumed, and others with ceilings in better condition than those of the earlier excavations; there were more all-but-unbroken walls and columns; some mosaic floors were almost as perfect as when their dwellers fled over them out of the stifling city. But upon the whole the result was a greater monotony; the revelation of house after house, nearly the same in design, did not gain impressiveness from their repetition; just as the case would be if the dwellings of an old-fashioned cross-town street in New York were dug out two thousand years after their submergence by an eruption of Orange Mountain. The identity of each of the public edifices is easily attested to the archaeologist, but the generally intelligent, as the generally unintelligent, visitor must take the archaeologist's word for the fact. One temple is much like another in its stumps of columns and vague foundations and broken altars. Among the later discoveries certain of the public baths are in the best repair, both structurally and decoratively, and in these one could replace the antique life with the least wear and tear of the imagination.

      I could not tell which the several private houses were; but the guide-books can, and there I leave the specific knowledge of them; their names would say nothing to the reader if they said nothing to me. In Pompeii, where all the houses were rather small, some of the new ones were rather large, though not larger than a few of the older ones. Not more recognizably than these, they had been devoted to the varied uses known to advanced civilization in all ages: there were dwellings, and taverns and drinking-houses and eating-houses, and there were those houses where the feet of them that abide therein and of those that frequent them alike take hold on hell. In these the guide stays the men of his party to prove the character of the places to them from the frescos and statues; but it may be questioned if the visitors so indulged had not better taken the guide's word for the fact. There can be no doubt that at the heart of paganism the same plague festered which poisons Christian life, and which, while the social conditions remain the same from age to age, will poison life forever.

      The pictures on the walls of the newly excavated houses are not strikingly better than those I had not forgotten; but of late it has been the purpose to leave as many of the ornaments and utensils in position as possible. The best are, as they ought to be, gathered into the National Museum at Naples, but those which remain impart a more living sense of the past than such wisely ordered accumulations; for it is the Pompeian paradox that in the image of death it can best recall life. It is a grave which has been laid bare, and it were best to leave its ghastly memories unhindered by other companionship. One feels that one ought to be there alone in order to see it aright. One should not perhaps