Later, Still Interested By The Action Of The Carabiniere In Guarding The
Public Security In His Own Person, I Asked An Italian Gentleman, Who
Owned To Have Seen The Affair, Why The Officer Did Not Break Through The
Crowd And Arrest The Fighters.
"They had knives," he explained, and it
seemed a good reason for the cara-biniere's forbearance, as far as it
went; but I thought of the short work the brute locust of an Irish
policeman at home would have made of the knives.
My friend said he had
himself gone to one of the municipal police who was looking on at a
pleasant remove and said, "Those fellows have knives; they will kill
each other," and the municipal policeman had answered, with the calm of
an antique Roman sentinel on duty in time of earthquake, "Let them
kill."
I could not approve of so much impartiality, but afterward it seemed to
me I had little to be proud of in the shorter and easier method of our
own police, as contrasted with the caution of that Roman carabiniere who
left the combatants to the mild might of their friends' moral suasion.
It was better that the youth should escape, if he did, without a
vexatious criminal trial; he may have been no more to blame than the
other, who, I learned, had been carried off, in the honorable manner I
saw, to a doctor and had his stab looked to. It was not dangerous, and
the whole affair ended so. Besides, as I learned, still longer
afterward, when it was quite safe for a cabman from the same stand to
speak, the combatants were not Romans, but peasants from the Campagna,
who had come in with their market-carts and had become heated with the
bad spirits which the peasants have the habit of drinking five or six
glasses of when they visit Rome. "What we call benzine," my cabman
explained. "We Romans," he added from a moral height, "drink only a
glass or two of wine, and we never carry knives."
He may have been right concerning the peacefulness of the Romans and
their sobriety, and I am bound to say that I never saw any other violent
scene during my stay. Sometimes I heard loud quarrelling among our
cabmen, and sometimes I was the subject of it, when one driver snatched
me, an impartial prey, from another. But the bad feeling, if there was
really any, quickly passed, and some other day I fell to the cabman who
had been wronged of me. I had not always the fine sense of being booty
which I had one day on coming out of a church and blundering toward the
wrong cab. Then the driver whom I had left waiting at the door seized me
from the very cab of an unjust rival with the indignant cry, "E roba
mia!" (He's my stuff!). It was not quite the phrase I would have chosen,
but I had no quarrel, generally speaking, with the cabmen of Rome. To be
sure, they have not a rubber tire among them, and their dress leaves
much to be desired in professional uniformity. Not one of them looks
like a cabman, but many of them in pict-uresqueness of hats and coats
look like brigands. I think they would each prefer to have a fur-lined
overcoat, which the Roman of any class likes to wear well into the
spring; but they mostly content themselves with an Astrakhan collar,
more or less mangy. For the rest, some of them will point out the
objects of interest as you pass, and they are proud to do so; they are
not extortionate, and, if you overpay them ever so little (which is
quite worth while), they will not stand upon a matter of lawful fare. A
two-cent tip contents them, one of four cents makes them your friends
for life; as for a five-cent tip, I do not know what it does, but I
advise the reader when he goes to Rome to try it and see.
One fine thing is that the cabmen are in great superabundance in Rome,
and the number of barrel-ribbed, ewe-necked, and broken-kneed horses is
in no greater proportion than in Paris. Still, the average is large,
though, if you will go to the stand, you may select any horse you please
without offence. It was a cheerful sight, verging upon gayety, to see
every morning the crowd of cabs at our stand and to hear the drivers'
talk, sometimes rising into protest and mutual upbraiding. But one
Thursday morning, the brightest of the spring, a Sunday silence had
fallen on the place, and a Sabbath solitude deepened to the eye the
mystery that had first addressed itself to the ear. Then, suddenly, we
knew that we were in the presence of that Italian conception of a
general strike which interprets itself as a _sciopero._ It is saying
very little of that two days' strike to say that it was far the most
impressive experience of our Roman winter; in some sort it was the most
impressive experience of my life, for I beheld in it a reduced and
imperfect image of what labor could do if it universally chose to do
nothing. The dream of William Morris was that a world which we know is
pretty much wrong could be put right by this simple process. The trouble
has always been to get all sorts of labor to join in the universal
strike, but in the Italian _sciopero_ of four years ago the miracle was
wrought from one end of the peninsula to the other.
In the Roman strike of last April a partial miracle of the same nature
was illustratively wrought, with the same alarming effect on the
imagination.
As with the national strike, the inspiration of the Roman strike came
from the government's violent dealing with a popular manifestation which
only threatened to be mischievous.
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