A Lady of Rome

by F. Marion Crawford

The matter did not end there. The news of what they had done spread from mouth to mouth in a few hours, and their example was followed by other citizens. The policemen went about in pairs, and before night each couple of them was under the protection of a dozen or fifteen sober, respectable citizens, who walked behind at some distance, chatting and smoking, but armed with serviceable sticks. The police scored no more failures in effecting arrests during the afternoon, and there was no crowd in the Piazza di Venezia at sunset.

But the matter did not end there either. If the citizens protected the police, the Chamber of Labour, as it calls itself, would protect the rowdies. They needed it too, for on the next morning the citizens went about in considerable force, and when they came upon a suspicious-looking individual they asked him civilly if he were a striker. If he answered in the affirmative they gave him a good drubbing and left him to his meditations. In most cases the man denied the imputation indignantly and made off at a round pace. The decent working men stayed at home, as they had done from the beginning, and mourned the hour when they had joined the Chamber of Labour.

The rowdies showed fight, in accordance with the resolutions passed on the previous evening, and began to parade the streets in bands, many of them carrying revolvers in their pockets, and a good many armed with the much more dangerous knife, which Alphonse Karr used to call the ‘weapon of precision.’ The citizens had only their sticks, but they made good use of them. They meant to represent law and order, and knives and pistols are forbidden weapons. Excepting the places where the two parties were actually in collision, the city was silent. The shops opening directly on the pavement were shut; the cabmen, who belonged to the Chamber of Labour, were also on strike, but most of them, as it afterwards turned out, were having a quiet holiday in the country. The trams were not running, for drivers and conductors belonged to the organisation, and the Municipality or the Government was afraid to man the cars with soldiers. A few private carriages were to be seen, but the occupants as well as the coachmen were in considerable danger.

Nevertheless, a good many people walked about as if nothing were happening. It was not a revolution; the Government offices and schools were open, the strikers had no reason for interfering with the postal telegraph offices, and the railway-men could no longer strike because a recent law had decreed that they were not working men but Government servants. The trains therefore ran regularly; almost all the banks were open and were protected by policemen in plain clothes; the Pincio and the Villa Borghese were almost as full of nurses and children as usual on a fine winter’s day, and officers and civilians exercised their horses on the small course and in the meadow within the ring. Altogether, the state of things would have looked rather contradictory anywhere but in Rome, where it seems as if nothing can ever happen in the ordinary way. If any truthful and industrious person like Villani, or Sanudo of Venice, is quietly keeping a chronicle of daily events in Rome at the present day, and if his manuscript comes to light fifty years hence, he will not be believed. It is true that all industrious persons are not truthful, but since Aristotle admits that even a woman or a slave may possibly be good, some good-natured people will perhaps allow that a novelist may sometimes write the truth.

Maria had passed a wretched night. After the two guests had gone Montalto had come to her room and had poured out all his remorse for his mad conduct, entreating her over and over again to forgive him, not breaking down in tears, but overwhelming her with every assurance and proof of his almost insane love. It was late when he left her at last, but she could not sleep then. Every nerve in her body was quivering from the effort of self-control, her teeth were on edge, and when she closed her weary eyes she saw wheels of fire. She had gone to the chapel in her nightdress to say her prayers, heedless of the cold air and the icy marble pavement, and she had knelt there more than half an hour, trying to recover herself; not that she could think much of the words her lips silently formed, but because the solemn stillness helped her, and the restful certainty that nothing of what she had left behind could touch her there.

She went back to her room, and after three o’clock she fell asleep from utter exhaustion, because she was really a very sound and normal woman, and the human machine had run down, like a clock. Men have slept in battle.

Yet her natural elasticity was so great that in the morning, when she glanced at her face in the looking-glass, she saw that it hardly looked tired. There was only a slightly deeper shadow under her eyes to show that she had not slept enough, and that would soon go away, and she would be quite herself again.

She had not dreamt that anything had happened to Leone, for she had been too worn out to dream at all, and she was a little ashamed of her presentiments and fears. The weather never affected her very much, but the sun was streaming into her room with the crisp morning air, and she had opened both windows wide to let out the stale odour of a cigarette her husband had smoked before he left her. The smell of his Havana cigarettes had always been intensely disagreeable to her, though she would not let him guess it, and this morning it seemed positively nauseous. There was the nasty little end of one of them, with some ashes, in a little silver dish which she emptied into the fireplace; then she blew into it, and poured some lavender water into it, and dried it out with a handkerchief before she rang for her maid.

That was instinctive. She always did it when he had smoked in her room at night, and she was unconscious that it meant anything more than she had intended it to mean when she had done it for the first time, many months ago, on the morning after his return to Rome. But somehow the process had become symbolical, though she did not know that it had; it signified getting rid of the recollection of his presence.

She asked her maid if Leone had gone to school yet, and was told that he and his tutor had left the house at the usual hour. The maid had heard the tutor ask a footman whether the Count was awake, and on learning that he had not rung for his valet, the tutor inquired whether any orders had been left about taking Leone to school. The Count had left none, the footman said, and went on with his work.