Camphoring goes on to-day; the general wretchedness of “things in the saddle” is in the air. How stupidly we complicate life by acquiring fleeces of Miletus and other perishable objects. How to dispose of the accumulations of all these years? Diogenes had the right of it. In future a tub and the sunlight will suffice me.
This afternoon as we were sitting comfortably together in the big old studio (the coolest place in Rome) enjoying our tea, Signor Boni threw a bombshell into our camp.
“I notice,” he said, “that those cracks in the wall have widened perceptibly since I was last here.”
The studio is forty feet high, sixty feet long. Among the jocose charcoal sketches scrawled on the walls certain evil-looking cracks zigzag from the high-pitched wooden roof to the red brick pavement. When we first came they were no more than mere cracks in the whitewash; now they gape wide enough to hold my finger. As we were examining the cracks we all started at a sound like the snapping of a pistol over our heads.
“What was that noise?” I cried.
“Only the creaking of the ceiling beams, it happens every now and again,” said J.
“Before we restored the Ducal Palace in Venice, and saved it from tumbling down, the same thing went on,” said Signor Boni; “but, amici miei, do you not see what all this means?”
“It means that this old barrack is going to pieces,” said J.; “some day they will either have to shore it up or tear it down.”
“Listen,” said the Venetian, impressively. “Last Sunday morning the Palazzo Piombino, in the Via della Scrofa, not half a mile from here, fell in a heap of ruins, all in a second, with no more warning than you have had. If it had not been festa, and a fine day, there would have been a great loss of life. As it was the people were all out gadding about the town.”
Pietro, who had been listening, now chimed in. “Scuse Signore, there was the cook, a friend of mine, who was obliged to remain at home in order to freeze the ice cream,—thirsty work on a hot day. Magari, that cook’s thirst saved his life. He had just climbed through the grating into the wine cellar to get a fiaschetta of the wine of Orvieto, when piff, paff, pifferty! down came the house crashing about his ears. The wine cellar had a vaulted stone roof so strong that it resisted all the bricks, mortar, and rubbish that fell upon it. They heard that cook shrieking like a small devil, and dug him out; the flask of Orvieto was still in his hand, though he had not drunk a drop; he believed that the catastrophe was a judgment upon him for taking the wine.”