WHEN we left Naples in January the snow lay whitely upon the scarred poll of Vesuvius. Yet, as we drove to the station, we were beset by boys and girls running between the wheels of our carriage and ducking under the horses’ heads, clamorously offering bouquets of roses, violets and camellias that had blossomed in the open gardens. To save the bones, for which they showed no regard, each of us loaded herself with an immense bunch of flowers she was tempted, a dozen times before night, to throw out of the car-window. I counted ten japonicas in mine—white, creamy, and delicate pink—and I paid the black-eyed vender fifty centimes, ten cents, for all.
We ran down to the sea-shore again in April, the laughing, fecund April, that rioted over the Campagna the day we went to Tusculum. Caput was detained in Rome, and I acted as chaperone to five of the brightest, merriest American girls that ever set off upon a pleasure trip. “A Sorosis Lark,” one named it, while another was inquisitive as to the kinship of this bird to Athené’s owl.
We took the railway from Naples to Pompeii. Used as we were to the odd jumble of old and new forced upon our notice on all public lines of travel in the Old World, it yet gave us a queer thrill to hear the station at Pompeii called out in the mechanical sing-song that announces our arrival at “Richmond” or “Jersey City.” No. 27 was already engaged, much to our regret, but he recognized us, and introduced his comrade, No. 18, who, he guaranteed, “would give us satisfaction.” A jolly, kindly old fellow we found him to be, more garrulous than his friend, but so staid and respectable that, when I grew tired, I committed the four younger ladies to his guardianship, and sat me down in company with my dear, and for so long, fellow-traveller, Miss M——, upon the top step of the Temple of Jupiter to rest, promising to rejoin the party at the house of Glaucus.
We spread our shawls upon the marble to make the seat safe and comfortable, and when the voices of guide and girls were lost in the distance, had, to all appearance, the exhumed city for our own. Vesuvius was slightly restless at this date. The night before, we had rushed out upon the balcony of the hotel parlor at a warning cry, and seen the canopy of smoke above the mountain blood-red with reflections from the crater. Now, as we watched the destroyer, fast bulging volumes of vapor, white and gray, rose against the blue heavens. We pictured, by their help, the Cimmerian gloom of the night-in-day that rained ashes and scalding water upon fair and populous Pompeii. Night of eighteen centuries to temple, mart and dwelling, leaving, when the morning came, the bleached skeleton we now looked upon. “The City of the Dead!” repeated Sir Walter Scott, over and again, as he surveyed the disinterred ruins. Life seems absolutely suspended within its gates. While we sat there, we heard neither twittering bird nor chirp of insect. Even the lithe green lizards that frisk over and in other ruined walls, shun these, blasted by the hot showers,—out of mind for forty generations of living men.
We must have rested thus, and chatted softly of these things, for fully half an hour, when a large party, appearing suddenly in the echoless silence, from behind the walls of a neighboring court-yard, stared curiously at us, and we remembered that our being there without a guide was an infringement of rules. The custodian of the strangers assumed, politely, that we had lost our way, and when we named our rendezvous, directed us how to get thither by the shortest route. We were properly grateful, and when his back was turned, chose our own way and time for doing as we pleased. Were we not habitués of Pompeii—friends of older inhabitants than he dreamed of in his round?
We were too early, after all, for the rest, although long after the hour agreed upon for the meeting. While Miss M—— sallied forth on a private exploration of the vicinity, I sat in the shadow of the wall upon the step of the peristyle once adorned by Nydia’s flower-borders, and re-read the description of the scene between her and Glaucus when, upon this very spot, he told the blind girl of his love for the Neapolitan, summoning her from her graceful task of “sprinkling the thirsting plants which seemed to brighten at her approach.” He had bidden her seek him in the triclinum over there—“the chamber of Leda” when she had gathered the flowers he would send to Ione. Here, too, she gave him the philtre that was to win his love, and robbed him of his senses.
The laggards rejoined us before I had become impatient. Gay, fresh voices put phantoms and musing to flight. All were in high good humor. Their guide had allowed them to loiter and investigate to their heart’s content, and presented each with a bit of seasoned soap eighteen hundred years old, which, by the way, we tried that night and proved by the “lathering” to be saponaceous and of good quality. He had dashed their complacency by remarking, without the remotest suspicion that he was uttering dispraise, that he always recognized Americans by their nasal articulation, but reinstated himself in their favor and themselves, also, by expressing surprise and delight that all four could converse fluently in his native tongue. We extended our ramble beyond the Villa of Diomed into the Street of Tombs—the Via Appia—that, in former times, extended, without a break, all the way to Rome.
Was it in ostentatious display of their family mausoleums, or in callous contempt of natural loves and human griefs, or, from a desire to honor the manes of the departed, and remind the living of their mortality, that the traveler to these ancient cities entered them between a double file of the dead? Was there recognition, however vague, of the great fact that, through Death we gain Life?
We were to spend the night at Castellamare, and having, through a provoking blunder for which we could only blame ourselves, missed the five o’clock train, were obliged to remain in the Pompeii station until nine. We had lunched at the restaurant—and a villainous lunch it was—and being hungry and weary, and out of patience with our stupidity, would have been held excusable by charitable people had we been slightly cross. I record that we were not, as an additional proof of the Tapleyish turn of the feminine disposition. I take no credit to myself. I was tired beyond the ability to complain. Laid upon a bench, cushioned by the spare wraps of the party, my head in Prima’s lap, I beheld in admiration I lacked energy to express, the unflagging good-humor of my charges; the “small, sweet courtesies” that made harmless play of badinage and repartee. They called up a boy of ten, the son of the station-master, from his hiding-place behind the door communicating with the family apartments, and talked to him of his life and likings. He was civil, but not clean—a shrewd, knavish sprite, judging from his physiognomy, but a fond brother to the little sister who soon crept after him. She wore a single garment that had, probably, never been whole or neat in her existence of two years. Even “our girls” could not pet her. But they spoke to her kindly as she planted herself before them on her two naked feet, her neck encircled by her brother’s arm, and gave her bon-bons. The boy bade her say, “Grazie!” and supplemented her lisp with “Tank ’oo!” and “Goot morning!”—his whole stock of English.
The four hours passed at last, and we quitted the dim waiting-room for pitchy darkness and pouring rain outside. At Castellamare, we were set down upon an open platform. The clouds were falling upon us in sheets; the wind caught savagely at our light sun-umbrellas, our only defence against the storm. The pavement was ankle-deep in water, and it was ten o’clock at night. We had been recommended to go to Miss Baker’s excellent pension on the hill, but it was a full mile away, and we were wet in an instant. In the dismayed confusion, nobody knew just how it happened, or who first spoke the word of doom, but we packed ourselves and dripping garments into carriages and were driven to the Hôtel Royale. The land-lady—or housekeeper—stationed in the vestibule, took in our plight and her advantage at one fell glance. She met us with a feline smile, and we were hers.