Italian Journeys

by William Dean Howells

"S' accommodino, Signori!" cries the cheerful voice of the conductor, and we ascend to our places in the diligence. The nightmares are brought out again; we mount, and renew the steeple-chase as before.

Suddenly, it all comes to an end, and we sit wide awake in the diligence, amid a silence only broken by the hiss of rain against the windows, and the sweep of gusts upon the roof. The diligence stands still; there is no rattle of harness, nor other sound to prove that we have arrived at the spot by other means than dropping from the clouds. The idea that we are passengers in the last diligence destroyed before the Deluge, and are now waiting our fate on the highest ground accessible to wheels, fades away as the day dimly breaks, and we find ourselves planted, as the Italians say, on the banks of another river. There is no longer any visible conductor, the horses have been spirited away, the driver has vanished.

The rain beats and beats upon the roof, and begins to drop through upon us in great, wrathful tears, while the river before us rushes away with a momently swelling flood. Enter now from the depths of the storm a number of rainy peasants, with our conductor and driver perfectly waterlogged, and group themselves on the low, muddy shore, near a flat ferry-barge, evidently wanting but a hint of forza maggiore to go down with any thing put into it. A moment they dispute in pantomime, sending now and then a windy tone of protest and expostulation to our ears, and then they drop into a motionless silence, and stand there in the tempest, not braving it, but enduring it with the pathetic resignation of their race, as if it were some form of hopeless political oppression. At last comes the conductor to us and says, It is impossible for our diligences to cross in the boat, and he has sent for others to meet us on the opposite shore. He expected them long before this, but we see! They are not come. Patience and malediction!

Remaining planted in these unfriendly circumstances from four o'clock till ten, we have still the effrontery to be glad that we did not take the steamer. What a storm that must be at sea! When at last our connecting diligences appear on the other shore, we are almost light-hearted, and make a jest of the Ombrone, as we perilously pass it in the ferry-boat too weak for our diligences. Between the landing and the vehicles there is a space of heavy mud to cross, and when we reach them we find the coupé appointed us occupied by three young Englishmen, who insist that they shall be driven to the boat. With that graceful superiority which endears their nation to the world, and makes the travelling Englishman a universal favorite, they keep the seats to which they have no longer any right, while the tempest drenches the ladies to whom the places belong; and it is only by the forza maggiore of our conductor that they can be dislodged. In the mean time the Portland man exchanges with them the assurances of personal and national esteem, which that mighty bond of friendship, the language of Shakespeare and Milton, enables us to offer so idiomatically to our transatlantic cousins.

What Grossetto was like, as we first rode through it, we scarcely looked to see. In four or five hours we should strike the railroad at Follonica; and we merely asked of intermediate places that they should not detain us. We dined in Grossetto at an inn of the Larthian period,—a cold inn and a damp, which seemed never to have been swept since the broom dropped from the grasp of the last Etrurian chambermaid,—and we ate with the two-pronged iron forks of an extinct civilization. All the while we dined, a boy tried to kindle a fire to warm us, and beguiled his incessant failures with stories of inundation on the road ahead of us. But we believed him so little, that when he said a certain stream near Grossetto was impassable, our company all but hissed him.

When we left the town and hurried into the open country, we perceived that he had only too great reason to be an alarmist. Every little rill was risen, and boiling over with the pride of harm, and the broad fields lay hid under the yellow waters that here and there washed over the road. Yet the freshet only presented itself to us as a pleasant excitement; and even when we came to a place where the road itself was covered for a quarter of a mile, we scarcely looked outside the diligence to see how deep the water was. We were surprised when our horses were brought to a stand on a rising ground, and the conductor, cap in hand, appeared at the door. He was a fat, well-natured man, full of a smiling goodwill; and he stood before us in a radiant desperation.

Would Eccellenza descend, look at the water in front, and decide whether to go on? The conductor desired to content; it displeased him to delay,—ma, in somma!—the rest was confided to the conductor's eloquent shoulders and eyebrows.

Eccellenza, descending, beheld but a disheartening prospect. On every hand the country was under water. The two diligences stood on a stone bridge spanning the stream, that, now swollen to an angry torrent, brawled over a hundred yards of the road before us. Beyond, the ground rose, and on its slope stood a farm-house up to its second story in water. Without the slightest hope in his purpose and merely as an experiment, Eccellenza suggested that a man should be sent in on horseback; which being done, man and horse in a moment floundered into swimming depths.

The conductor, vigilantly regarding Eccellenza, gave a great shrug of desolation.

Eccellenza replied with a foreigner's broken shrug,—a shrug of sufficiently correct construction, but wanting the tonic accent, as one may say, though expressing, however imperfectly, an equal desolation.