Part 8 (1/2)
But the war has done one thing to Rome indisputably. It has paralysed the tourist business. Rome was the greatest tourist city in the world. But now her boarding houses and her ruins are deserted.
Occasionally in the shops one sees that mother and daughter, wistful, eager, half-starved for every good thing in life, expatriated, living shabbily in the upper regions of some respectable pension, detached from the world about them, uprooted from the world at home, travel-jaded, ruin-sated, picture-wise and unbelievably stupid concerning life's real interests--the mother and daughter who in the old days lived so numerously amid the splendeurs of Europe, flitting from Rome to Florence, from Florence to Lucerne, from Lucerne to Berlin, and thence to Paris and London, following the seasons like the birds. But today war prices have sent that precious pair home, and let us hope to honest work. It is a comfort to see Rome without their bloodless faces! That much the war has done for democracy at any rate!
And the pa.s.sing of this ”relic of old dacincy,” the shabby genteel of the earth from Rome--even if the pa.s.sing is a temporary social phenomenon, has a curious symbolic timeliness, coming when the working cla.s.s is rising. It leaves Rome almost as middle cla.s.s as Kansas City and Los Angeles! For in Rome one feels that the upper cla.s.s, the ruling cla.s.s of other centuries, is weaker than it is elsewhere in the world. They tell you flippantly that the king is training his son to run for president. The high caste Romans have an Austrian pride, that ”goeth before destruction.” For politically their power is sadly on the wane. They are miserably moth-eaten compared to our own arrogant princes of Wall Street or even compared to the dazed dukes and earls of England, who are looking out at the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds about them. One feels vaguely that these Italian n.o.bles are pa.s.sing through a rather mean stage of decay. For a time during the latter part of the last century and during the first decade of this century, the Italian n.o.blemen tried to edge into business. They lent their names to promotion schemes, and the schemes, upon the whole, turned out badly, and the people learned to distrust all financial schemes under n.o.ble patronage; so the n.o.bility is going to work. A few strong families remain--the present royal house of Savoy is among the strong ones.
Our business led us to a call on the Duke of Genoa, uncle to the King, who in the King's absence at the front with his soldiers, was a sort of acting king on the job in Rome. The automobile took us into the first court of the Royal Palace. Now the Royal Palace--save for a few executive offices--has been turned into an army hospital and we saw doctors and nurses dodging in and out of the innumerable corridors, and smelled iodoform everywhere. A major domo, in scarlet, who seemed in the modern disinfected smell of the place like the last guard of mediaevalism, greeted us as we alighted from our car; a great, powerful soldier he was, with white and gold on his scarlet broadcloth. He showed us into a pa.s.sage where the minister waited who was to take us to the Duke. The minister led us down a long stately gallery, out of the twentieth century into the fifteenth, where at the end of the gallery a most remarkably caparisoned servant stood at attention. He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable vividness, a cut-away coat of glaring scarlet broadcloth. But we could have pa.s.sed that easily enough. The thing that held us was his blue plush knee breeches. It didn't seem fitting that a man in this age of work and wisdom should wear s.h.i.+mmering blue plush knee breeches for everyday. He was a big fellow and puffy. And the scarlet coat and blue breeches certainly gave the place an olden golden air. But alas! The twentieth century burst in. For he bowed us to an elevator--a modern Chicago elevator inspected by an accident company, guaranteeing the pa.s.sengers against injuries! From the elevator we were emptied into a nineteenth century corridor, guarded by a twentieth century soldier and then we were turned by him into a waiting room. It was floored with marquetry, ceiled with brown and gold decoration--but modern enough--and walled in old tapestry.
The room expressed the ornate impotent gorgeousness of a useless leisure cla.s.s. Four or five tables, cases and stands, backed standoffishly against the tapestry on the walls, and the legs and bases of this furniture were great--unbelievably great, rococo gilded legs--legs that writhed and twisted themselves in a sheening agony of impossible forms, before they resigned themselves to dropping to the floor in distress.
Henry nudged me as our Kansas eyes bugged out at the Byzantine splendeur and whispered: ”Bill, what this place needs is a boss buster movement. How the Kansas legislature would wallop this splendeur in the appropriation bill! How the Sixth District outfit would strip the blue plush off our upholstered friend by the elevator and send him s.h.i.+nning home in a barrel. Topeka,” sighed Henry, deeply impressed, ”never will equal this!”
[Ill.u.s.tration: He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable vividness, a cutaway coat of glaring scarlet broadcloth]
In this room we met a soldierly young prince, in a dark blue dress uniform, with a light blue sash across his shoulder. He shook hands with us. And he wore gloves and didn't say, ”Excuse my glove,” as we do in Kansas! But he was polite enough for the Grand Duke himself; indeed we thought he was the Grand Duke until we saw Medill and the minister stalking through another door, saw the minister formally bowing and then we found that we had been moved into another room--a rather plainly furnished office room, such as one might find in New York or Chicago when one called on the head of a bank or of an industrial corporation. We had left the ”days of old when knights were bold,” and had come bang! into the latest moment of the twentieth century. We were shaking hands rather cordially with a kindly-eyed, bald-headed little man in a grey Vand.y.k.e beard, who wore a black frock coat, rather a low-cut white vest, a black four-in-hand rather wider than the Fifth Avenue mode, striped dark grey trousers, and no jewelry except a light double-breasted gold watch-chain. He was the Duke of Genoa, who to all intents and purposes is the civilian ruler of Italy while the King is with the army. We found four chairs grouped around a sofa, and we sat while the duke, with a diffidence that amounted to shyness, talked with us about most unimportant things. The interview was purely ceremonial. It had no relation to the pa.s.sports we were asking from his government to visit the Italian front, though this request had made the visit necessary.
Several times there were pauses in the conversation--dead stops in the talk, which court etiquette required the Duke to repair. We didn't worry about them, for always he began to repair these gaps in the talk rather bashfully but kindly, and always the subject was impersonal and of indifferent interest. He made no sign that the interview was over, but we knew, as well as though a gong had struck, when to go. So we went, and it seemed to me that the Duke put more real enthusiasm into his good-bye than into his welcome.
It was half-past five. He had been at work since eight. And perhaps it was fancy, but there seemed to be rising into his bland Italian eye a determination to knock off and take a half holiday.
We noticed that his desk was clean, as clean as General Pers.h.i.+ng's or Major Murphy's in Paris, or President Wilson's in Was.h.i.+ngton.
Then it came to us that the king's job, after all, is a desk job.
The king who used to go around ruling with a sceptre has given place to a gentleman in a business suit who probably rings for his stenographer and dictates in part as follows: ”Yours of even date received and contents noted; in reply will say!” We carried away an impression that the lot of royalty, like the policeman's lot, ”is not a happy one.” Talking it all over, we decided that in the modern world there is really any amount more fun running a newspaper than being a king, and for the size of the town, much more chance of getting things done. It did not fall to me because of an illness, but a few days later it fell to Henry and Medill to see a real king at Udine. He was living in a cottage a few miles out of town in a quiet little grove that protected him from airplanes. Now Henry's nearest brush to royalty was two years ago when in the New York suffrage campaign his oratory had brought him the homage of some of the rich and the great. Kings really weren't so much of a treat to Medill, who had taken his fill of them in childhood when his father was minister to England. But nevertheless they lorded it over me when they saw me because the king wasn't on my calling list. But they couldn't keep from me the sad fact that they had started out to make the royal call without gloves--hoping probably to catch the king with their bare hands--and had been turned back by the Italian colonel who had them in charge. Henry once sang in the cantata of ”Queen Esther,” and Medill insists that all the way up to the royal cottage Henry kept carolling under his breath the song: ”Then go thou merrily, then go thou merrily, unto the king!”
and also: ”Haman, Haman, long live Haman, he is the favoured one in all the king's dominions!” just to show that finical colonel who took them back to Udine for gloves that Wichita was no stranger to the inside politics of the court. However, gloves seemed to be the only ceremonial frill required, and they went to the king's business office as informally as they would go to the private room of a soap-maker in Cincinnati. They found the king a soft-spoken little man. Henry said he looked very much like the mayor of Kansas City, and was equally una.s.suming and considerate. He asked his guests what had become of the Progressive party, and they pointed to themselves as the ”captain and crew of the Nancy brig.”
Then they talked on for a time about many things--such as would interest the Walrus and the Carpenter. Then the accounts of the visit changed. This is Henry's: ”Well, finally after Medill began cracking his knuckles and the king began crossing and recrossing his legs, I saw it was time to go. I knew how the king felt. Every busy man has to meet a lot of bores. I sit hours with bores who flow into the Wichita Beacon office, and I began to appreciate just how the king felt. So I cleared my throat and said: 'Well Medill, don't you think we'd better excuse ourselves to his majesty and go?' The king put up his hand mildly and said: 'O please!' and the colonel in charge of the party gulped at my sympathy for the king; but I was not to be balked, and we all rose and after shaking hands around, the colonel led us out. And I didn't know that I had committed social manslaughter until the colonel exclaimed when we were in the corridor: 'Oh you republicans--you republicans, how you do like to show royalty its place!'” Medill has another version.
He declares that Henry stood the king's obvious ennui as long as he could, then he rose and cried: ”O King! live for ever, but Medill and I must pull our freight!” This version probably is apochryphal!
The Italian colonel declares that Henry expostulated: ”Well, how in the d.i.c.kens was I to know that a king always gives the high sign for company to leave!”
This Italian king is a vital inst.i.tution. He could be elected president. For he is a mixer, in spite of his diffident ways. When the army in Northern Italy was hammering away at the Austrians, the king was with the soldiers. One gets the impression that he is with the people pretty generally in their struggle with the privileged cla.s.ses. For he has lived peaceably with a socialist cabinet for some time. He is wise enough to realize that if the aristocracy is crumbling, the inst.i.tution of royalty will crumble with aristocracy if royalty makes an ally of the n.o.bility. So the king and the Socialists get along splendidly. Now the Socialists in Italy are of several kinds. There are the city Socialists, who are chiefly interested in industrial conditions--wages, old age pensions, employment insurance, and the like; a group much like the Progressive party in the United States of 1912. We saw the works and ways of these Socialists in every Italian town that we visited. Either they or the times have done wonders. And at any rate this is the first time in Italian history when industrial prosperity has so generally reached the workers that they are lifted almost bodily into the middle cla.s.ses. Then there are the Socialists who emphasize the land question, and they have had smaller success than their industrial brethren. We went one fine day to Frascatti by automobile. Our road took us out south of Rome over the New Appian way, through fertile acres lying in a wide beautiful plain. We pa.s.sed through half a dozen little agricultural villages, mean but picturesque. None of the splendid prosperity of the cities has penetrated here.
The people in these towns are peasants--and look it. They are the peasant people who live in the canva.s.ses of the artists of the Renaissance. Half a thousand years has not changed them. Along the dusty roads we pa.s.sed huge wine-carts. Two bell-bearing mules tandem gave warning to other pa.s.sing carts of a cart's approach.
The driver of the cart was curled up in his shaded seat asleep. The mules took their way. Carts pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed each other on the road. Autos whizzed by. Still the drivers slept. They were ragged, frowsy, stupid looking. They all wore colour, one a crimson belt, another a blue s.h.i.+rt, a third a red handkerchief about his head.
They would make better pictures than citizens, we thought. In Rome and Genoa the people would make better citizens than pictures. All day going to Frascatti and coming home we pa.s.sed these beggarly looking peasant farmers. At Frascatti, which stands proudly upon a great hill overlooking the Roman plain, we saw the rich acres stretching away for miles toward Rome and beyond it. Villages flashed in the sun, white and iridescent, and the squares of vineyards and the tall Lombardy poplars made a landscape that rested the eye and soothed the soul. We stood looking at it for a long time. With us were some high officials of the Italian government.
”A wonderful landscape,” said Henry to our hosts.
”In all the world there is no match for it,” said Medill.
”It has lain this way for three thousand years, bearing crops year after year!” explained our host.
”Signor,” said a friend of our host, ”they tell me that this land yields seven per cent net.”
”Yes,” replied our host. ”I was talking to a man in the agricultural department about it the other day; it really nets seven per cent.”
”What's this land worth an acre?” This question came from me, who has the Kansas man's seven devil l.u.s.t to put a price on land.
”Well--I don't--” Our host looked at his Italian friends. They gazed, puzzled and bewildered, and consulted one another. The discussion developed a curious situation. No one knew the price of that land.
With us, out in the Middle West, a boy learns the probable price of the land in his neighborhood, as soon as he learns the points of the compa.s.s. Finally our host explained: ”The truth of the matter is that this land never has been sold in the memory of living men.
Probably most of it has remained in its present owners.h.i.+p for from three hundred to five hundred years. No one sells land in Italy.”
And that revealed much; there was the whole program of the agrarian Socialist. The man on the wine-cart asleep, the peasant villages, the rags and the poverty, the hovels that we saw on the rich land and the crumbling aristocracy of Rome, living meanly, striving vainly, bewildered, and bedevilled, trying to make profits out of a dormant tenantry, grinding seven per cent out of the land and yet losing money by it--all these things were the meat of the answer, which recounted the long unbroken line of feudal owners.h.i.+p of the land. Wooden ploughs and oxen, women yoked with beasts of burden, vines and vines planted and replanted through the centuries; no capital to develop the land; insufficient profits to wake up the tenants, master and servant going gradually down in a world where labour and capital, sharing profits equitably, are rising; it was a disheartening problem.
Then in due course we left Rome and went to the Italian army on the front, and there we saw another side of the s.h.i.+eld. From Udine in Northern Italy we journeyed into the mountains where the Italian army at that time was holding the mountain tops against the Austrians.
Wherever we ascended we saw white ribbons of roads twining up the green soft mountain sides that face Italy. These roads have been made since the war. Nearly four thousand miles of them furnish approaches to the Alpine heights. They are hard-surfaced, low-graded, wide highways gouged into the mountain side. Two automobiles may pa.s.s at full speed anywhere on these roads. And all night they were alive with wagon trains bearing supplies to the front. Women help the men mend the roads. We saw few Austrian prisoners at work on the Italian roads; possibly because we were too near the front line trenches to see prisoners who are kept thirty kilos back of the line, and possibly because they have better work for the Austrians--work that old men and women cannot do. Whenever we threaded our way up a mountain side and came to a top, we found its flanks tunnelled with deep wicker-walled, broad-floored, well-drained trenches, and its top honeycombed with runways for ammunition and with great rooms for soldiers and holes for gun barrels. Mountain top after mountain top has been made into a Gibraltar by the Italians. That Gibraltar was 300 miles long, before they lost it to the Germans.
But they had few guns in their fortress. They showed us emplacement after emplacement without a stick of artillery in it. They had told the French and the English of their plight, and a few artillery companies had been sent in; but only a fraction of the need. There was no central council of the allies then. Every nation was running its own little war, and Italy was left to fall, and now the four thousand miles of Italian roads, and the 300 miles of Gibraltar are German military strongholds that will have to be conquered with our blood and iron. Probably no battle line in the world today is more interesting than the Italian front was in the autumn of 1917.