Читать книгу Tuscan Cities - William Dean Howells - Страница 7

All the life of the piazza was alike novel to the young eyes which now saw it for the first time from our windows, and lovely in ours, to which youth seemed to come back in its revision. I should not know how to give a just sense of the value of a man who used to traverse the square with a wide wicker tray on his head, piled up with Chianti wine-flasks that looked like a heap of great bubbles. I must trust him to the reader's sympathy, together with the pensive donkeys abounding there, who acquired no sort of spiritual pride from the sense of splendid array, though their fringed and tasseled harness blazed with burnished brass. They appeared to be stationed in our piazza while their peasant-owners went about the city on their errands, and it may have been in an access of homesickness too acute for repression that, with a preliminary quivering of the tail and final rise of that member, they lifted their woe-begone countenances and broke into a long disconsolate bray, expressive of a despair which has not yet found its way into poetry, and is only vaguely suggested by some music of the minor key.

These donkeys, which usually stood under our hotel, were balanced in the picture by the line of cabs at the base of the tall buildings on the other side, whence their drivers watched our windows with hopes not unnaturally excited by our interest in them, which they might well have mistaken for a remote intention of choosing a cab. From time to time one of them left the rank, and took a turn in the square from pure effervescence of expectation, flashing his equipage upon our eyes, and snapping his whip in explosions that we heard even through the closed windows. They were of all degrees of splendor and squalor, both cabs and drivers, from the young fellow with false, floating blue eyes and fur-trimmed coat, who drove a shining cab fresh from the builder's hands, to the little man whose high hat was worn down almost to its structural pasteboard, and whose vehicle limped over the stones with querulous complaints from its rheumatic joints. When we began to drive out, we resolved to have always the worldlier turnout; but we got it only two or three times, falling finally and permanently — as no doubt we deserved, in punishment of our heartless vanity — to the wreck at the other extreme of the scale. There is no describing the zeal and vigilance by which this driver obtained and secured us to himself. For a while we practiced devices for avoiding him, and did not scruple to wound his feelings; but we might as well have been kind, for it came to the same thing in the end. Once we had almost escaped. Our little man's horse had been feeding, and he had not fastened his bridle on when the portiere called a carriage for us. He made a snatch at his horse's bridle; it came off in his hand and hung dangling. Another driver saw the situation, and began to whip his horse across the square; our little man seized his horse by the forelock, and dragging him along at the top of his speed, arrived at the hotel door a little the first What could we do but laugh? Everybody in the piazza applauded, and I think it must have been this fact which confirmed our subjection. After that we pretended once that our little man had cheated us; but with respectful courage he contested the fact, and convinced us that we were wrong; he restored a gold pencil which he had found in his cab; and, though he never got it, he voluntarily promised to get a new coat, to do us the more honor when he drove us out to pay visits.