The Toast Is Exceptional; The Muffins So
Far From Home Are At Least Reminiscent Of Their Native Island; The Tea
And Butter Are Alike Blameless.
The company, to the eye of the friend of
man, is still more acceptable, for, if the Americans have dwindled, the
English have increased; and there is nothing more endearing than the
sight of a roomful of English people at their afternoon tea in a strange
land.
No type seems to predominate; there are bohemians as obvious as
clerics; there are old ladies and young, alike freshly fair; there are
the white beards of age and the clean-shaven cheeks of youth among the
men; some are fashionable and some outrageously not; peculiarities of
all kinds abound without conflicting. Some talk, frankly audible, and
others are frankly silent, but a deep, wide purr, tacit or explicit,
close upon a muted hymn of thanksgiving, in that assemblage of mutually
repellent personalities, for the nonce united, would best denote the
universal content.
Hard by this tea-room there is a public elevator by which the reader
will no doubt rather ascend with me than, climb the Spanish Steps
without me; after the first time, I never climbed them. The elevator
costs but ten centimes, and I will pay for both; there is sometimes
drama thrown in that is worth twice the money; for there is war, more or
less roaring, set between the old man who works the elevator and the
young man who sells the tickets to it. The law is that the elevator will
hold only eight persons, but one memorable afternoon the ticket-seller
insisted upon giving a ticket to a tall, young English girl who formed
an unlawful ninth. The elevator-man, a precisian of the old school,
expelled her; the ticket-seller came forward and reinstated her; again
the elder stood upon the letter of the law; again the younger demanded
its violation. The Tuscan tongue in their Roman mouths flew into
unintelligibility, while the poor girl was put into the elevator and out
of it; and the respective parties to the quarrel were enjoying it so
much that it might never have ended if she had not taken the affair into
her own hands. She finally followed the ticket-seller back to his desk,
to which he retired after each act of the melodrama, and threw her
ticket violently down. "Here is your ticket!" she said in English so
severe that he could not help understanding and cowering before it.
"Give me back my money!" He was too much stupefied by her decision of
character to speak; and he returned her centimes in silence while we got
into our cage and mounted to the top, and the elevator-man furiously
repeated to himself his side of the recent argument all the way up. This
did not prevent his touching his hat to each of us in parting, and
assuring us that he revered us; a thing that only old-fashioned Romans
seem to do nowadays, in the supposed decay of manners which the
comfortable classes everywhere like to note in the uncomfortable. Then
some ladies of our number went off on a platform across the house-tops
to which the elevator had brought us, as if they expected to go down the
chimneys to their apartments; and the rest of us expanded into the
Piazza Trinita de' Monti; and I stopped to lounge against the uppermost
balustrade of the Spanish Steps.
It is notable, but not surprising, how soon one forms the habit of this,
for, seen from above, the Spanish Steps are only less enchanting than
the Spanish Steps seen from below, whence they are absolutely the most
charming sight in the world. The reader, if he has nothing better than a
post-card (which I could have bought him on the spot for fifty a franc),
knows how the successive stairways part and flow downward to right and
left, like the parted waters of a cascade, and lose themselves at the
bottom in banks of flowers. No lovelier architectural effect was ever
realized from a happy fancy; but, of course, the pictorial effect is
richer from below, especially from the Via dei Condotti, where it opens
into the Piazza di Spagna. I suppose there must be hours of the day, and
certainly there are hours of the night, when in this prospect the Steps
have not the sunset on them. But most of the time they have the sunset
on them, warm, tender; a sunset that begins with the banks of daffodils
and lilies and anemones and carnations and roses and almond blossoms,
keeping the downpour of the marble cascades from flooding the piazza,
and mounts, mellowing and yellowing, up their gray stone, until it
reaches the Church of Trinita de' Monti at the top.
There it lingers, I should say, till dawn, bathing the golden-brown
facade in an effulgence that lifelong absence cannot eclipse when once
it has blessed your sight. It is beauty that rather makes the heart
ache, and the charm of the Steps from above is something that you can
bear better if you are very, very worthy, or have the conceit of feeling
yourself so. It is a charm that imparts itself more in detail and is
less exclusively the effect of perpetual sunset. From the parapet
against which you lean you have a perfecter conception of the
architectural form than you get from below, and you are never tired of
seeing the successive falls of the Steps dividing themselves and then
coming together on the broad landings and again parting and coming
together.
If there were once many models, male, female, and infant, brigands,
peasants, sages, and martyrs, lounging on the Spanish Steps, as it seems
to me there used to be, and as every one has heard say, waiting there
for the artists to come and carry them off to their studios and transfer
them to their canvases, they are now no longer there in noticeable
number.
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