It Was The Eve Of The Last Sad Day Of Such Shrunken And Faded Carnival
As Is Still Left To
Rome, and there were signs of it in the straggling
groups of children in holiday costume, and in here and
There a pair of
young girls in a cab, safely masked against identification and venting,
in the sense of wild escape, the joyous spirits kept in restraint all
the rest of the year. Already in the Corso, where our touring-car waited
for us at the first corner, a great cafe was turning itself inside out
with a spread of chairs and tables over the sidewalk, which we found
thronged on our return with spectators far outnumbering the merrymakers
of the carnival. Our car was not nearly so packed, and when we mounted
to the benches we found that the last and highest of them was left to
the sole occupancy of a young man, well enough dressed (his yellow
gloves may have been more than well enough) and well-mannered enough,
who continued enigmatical to the last. There was a German couple and
there were some French-speaking people; the rest of us were bound in the
tie of our common English. The agent of the enterprise accompanied us,
an international of undetermined race, and beside the chauffeur sat the
middle-aged, anxious-looking Italian who presently arose when we made
our first stop in the Piazza Colonna and harangued us in three
languages - successively, of course - concerning the Column of Marcus
Aurelius. He did not use the megaphone of his American confrere; and
from the shudder which the first sound of his voice must have sent
through a less fastidious substance than mine I perceived that an
address by megaphone I could not have borne; to that extreme of excess
even my modernism could not go. As it was, there was an instant when I
could have wished to be on foot, or even in a cab, with a red Baedeker
in my hand; and yet, as the orator went on, I had to own that he was
giving me a better account of the column than I could have got for
myself out of the guide-book. He spoke first in French, with an Italian
accent and occasionally an Italian idiom; then he spoke in English, and
then in a German which suffered from his knowledge of English.
He sat down, looking rather spent with his effort, and on the way to our
next stop, at the Temple of Neptune, the agent examined us upon our
necessities in the article of language. He himself spoke such good
English that we could not do otherwise than declare that we could get on
perfectly with an address in French. The German pair, perhaps from
patriotic grudge, denied a working knowledge of the unfriendly tongue.
The solitary on the back seat, being asked in his turn, graciously
answered, "Toutes les langues me sont egales," and thereafter we
suffered with the orator only through French and German.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 103 of 186
Words from 53527 to 54032
of 97259
