As Easy as Rolling Off a Travelogue

The Plaint of a Scribe Who Came Back From Abroad Without Any Copy

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

BACK in New York after many Midsummer weeks spent idly roaming the pleasant places of France and Italy, back alter a revel of turquoise lakes, crepes suzettc, nightingales, hatpools, green lizards, rates of exchange, aperitifs, Raquel Meller et al, I sit down at home amid my memories and face with dismay the fact that I cannot write a travel article. I am not an Isaac F. Marcosson. I am not even a Clayton Hamilton. I simply cannot do it.

If, on the day when I came wandering into Rome, I had been a Marcosson, I would have telephoned Mussolini and said: "Mussolini, what are you doing for lunch?" And, what with a few general generalizations about the Fascisti and a note or two negligently scribbled on the back of the menu card, the thing would have been done.

Instead, I knew that F. P. A. was in Rome, so I telephoned him. Wherefore the luncheon was both tasty and hilarious. But there was no copy in it.

OR I might have come back in the grand manner of Professor Hamilton to disconcert the miserable stay-at-homes by asking loftily: "Have you ever stood bareheaded in the nave at Amiens? Have you ever climbed to the Acropolis by moonlight? Have you ever walked with whispers into the hushed presence of the Ferrara Madonna of Bellini?" I am not sure but I believe that at this point the stay-at-homes arc supposed to say "No" and burst into tears of chagrin and humiliation. I fancy that I, too, might attempt this crushing technique for in my feebler moments I have done quite a bit of sight-seeing. But unfortunately it is always the undistinguished adventure of some unpremeditated day in a spot unmarked in any guide book which haunts me longest in the after years. And even when I do set my reluctant feet in some beaten path, something invariably goes wrong. I have great sympathy for my good neighbor, Percy Hammond who did his best this Summer to follow the Clayton Hamilton standard by proceeding bareheaded to the Coliseum in the moonlight. But even as he stood where Caesar stood, even as his thoughts mutely summoned all the ghosts of the grandeur that was Rome, the voice that broke the stillness was no voice of the past but the shrill and anxious clamor of a fellow tourist crying out of the shadowy corridor: "Wo ist Heinic? Wo ist Heinic? "

I think I will remember longest a casual, unhistoric day spent in a villa perched on the hills in Chianti, half way between Florence and Sienna, the bustling, pleasant country home of the Marquesa Viviani della Robbia, where the tenant farmers till the sloping fields and tread the incomparable grapes much as they have done since the Etruscan days when Rome was not. The great cool casks of Chianti, each taller than a man and standing row on row in the chill caves beneath the house, the olive trees drooping sleepy in the afternoon sun, the wise old tortoise who, the gardener swears, once looked upon Napoleon as he rode by— these blurred and blended into a background for the fair daughter of the house whose face is a composite of the portraits of all the lovely ladies in the Uffizi Gallery.

And taught in her childhood by an American governess, it was a startling thing to find that to this Italian girl, America was as romantic and haze-hung a vista as Italy might be for you or for me, that the tales of it were as glamorous to her as all the legends of Italy could be to us and that to her cars there was all the music and the mystery in such a word as Indiana, say, as we hear in the name of Vallombrosa. She subscribed faithfully to the Ladies Home Journal, bought all the records of Irving Berlin's tunes and would not let us go till we had taught her how to shoot craps and explained why, when it became vitally important for us to throw a four, we knelt and called aloud upon a strange patron saint whom we addressed familiarly as "Piccolo Giuseppe".

I would not give up the pleasant memory of such a day for all the madonnas in Florence, for all the naves from, Amiens to Milan. And even when, mindful of my trade and the need of enlarging experiences, 1 do deliberately seek a great occasion, something always goes wrong. Consider how unutterably wrong things went this Summer when I journeyed to Rome to attend the beatification services in St. Peter's.

That mishap befell on that afternoon in June when all Christendom seemed come to Rome for the beatification of Bernadette, the little peasant religieuse who years ago came wide-eyed from the woods at Lourdes to tell the tale of a vision which has since made that spot a shrine for the halt and the blind from the four corners of the earth. Now, on the long road to sainthood, Bernadette had reached the stage of beatification. Wherefore, beneath a relentless sun, the faithful in unnumbered thousands waited at the door for admission to St. Peter's.

Proud neighbors of Bernadette's from the Pyrcnce foothills, priests from Martinique and Indo-China, grand Spanish matrons in their mantillas and pious pilgrims from Quebec— these milled in the shadeless square. And deep embedded in the mass were three would-be onlookers from New York—F. P. A., Mrs. F. P. A. and your humble servant. We had been wedged in that slow-moving multitude for more than an hour and were wondering sinfully how pleasant the swimming was at Great Neck that afternoon, when we chanced to examine our damp, firm-clutched cards of admission and read with sinking hearts that only those might enter the great portal who were appropriately clad in black. This was dire news for three frolicsome young things in fairly white tennis flannels.

BUT "returning were as tedious as go o'er." It would take less time, ruffle fewer tempers and break fewer ribs to go on to the door and be thrown out than to turn and try to fight our way back through the crowd which now stretched as far as the eye could see. Yet when at last the tide of the crowd did deposit us on the threshold of St. Peter's we might have been clad in gaudy bathing suits and still been swept helpless past the oblivious guards into the great, cool, waiting basilica.

It was all astir with the festivity of preparation, incomparably gay with immense panels of scarlet flung from the highest points of the pillars to the floor. There was the hubbub of scurrying thousands as the spectators were shown to their scats, ours being on long wooden benches placed for the occasion in the transept. These were of such height that by standing up on them we could see the long aisle where soon the great procession would file by on its way to the high altar. So many stood up in this wise that soon there was just such a hum of "Down in front, down in front" as you might hear at any Army and Navy game. Unfortunately the Italians, in their foolish way, say "giu" when they mean "down" and as they pronounce this in their own odd fashion, it was a chorus of "Jew, Jew, Jew" that we heard on all sides of us. This embarrassed F. P. A. considerably. He could vent his feelings only by muttering under his breath "So's your old man."

Then, with the Swiss guards in all their upholstery clearing the transept aisle of the final stragglers and with the royal troops forming the wall of the lane along which the procession was to come, the trumpets sounded and the great spectacle began. With thunders from the organ, with shrill, sweet piping from choirs invisible, with cardinals flowing like water, the Pope came down the aisle, borne aloft as in triumph, and greeted, to my intense and delighted surprise, not by prostrate and silent adoration but bv just such a gust of hearty, friendly applause and cheering as might greet a halfback borne in triumph off the field.

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It was when this climax in the procession had swept on out of sight that we began to wonder apprehensively how we would ever rejoin the car that was trustingly waiting outside to carry us to tea under the umbrella pines of the Villa Doria. If we could not slip away then and there, if once we were caught again in that vicious throng, there would be no hope for us. Was there, haply, some accessible and unobtrusive side door through which we could vanish into the open air: We held parley on the subject with the nearest Swiss Guard. How could it be managed: He looked at us with the tired surprise usually reserved for the questioning of the village idiot. You just walk out, the Swiss Guard patiently explained. Down the main aisle: Down the main aisle, of course.

We halted abashed by the prospect of so conspicuous an exit. The choirs flooded the nave with a fresh cascade of song. We wavered. The guard grew suddenly animated. "Come, come" he muttered, "you've no time to waste" and he pushed us on our way. Thus, unwilling and a little bewildered, we debouched into the main aisle.

And at that fateful moment, as though the whole ceremony had been building just for our arrival in the aisle, something happened. I do not know what it was. Perhaps the Pope turned and faced the multitude. Perhaps the signal was given for the procession to return. At all events, we had no sooner stepped into the aisle than the soldiers closed ranks, brought up their swords to attention and we were trapped in a corridor of bristling steel.

Behind us, bearing down on us, was the clustered dignity of Holy C hurch. Ahead a lane of pointing swords, an infinitude of glistening porphyry, stretched the road to Rome, the only road to Rome. It is, I suppose, the longest aisle in the world. I do not know how long, but it is my present impression that its length is about the distance from Grant's Tomb to the State Capitol in Albany. And we had to walk it. With feet grown suddenly leaden, with knees that had become oddly unhinged, we had to walk that aisle—alone. And just as we had begun to believe that after all locomotion was not a lost art, something else, something worse, happened. I suppose the Pope had started up the aisle after us. I know only that at some signal, the soldiers as one man dropped each on his knee and thrust his sword into the air in salute, thrust his sword into the air at us. After that, everything is blank. The next thing I remember we were bowling along the road towards the Villa Doria but I could not help noticing that the raven hair of F. P. A. had turned snow white since noon.