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Shaving by Rebolledo. Money Lent The Rebolledos were very skilful; they made toys of wire and of pasteboard, which they afterward sold to the street-vendors; their home, a dingy little room of the front patio, had been converted into a workshop, and they had there a vise, a carpenter's bench and an array of broken gew-gaws that were apparently of no further use.
Backward and forward my thoughts swayed, from Brutus to Orsini, from Catiline to Cæsar Borgia, from Lucullus to Leo X., from Savonarola to Garibaldi. Meanwhile the company got itself in motion, the banners streamed out, loud-voiced street-vendors offered for sale leaflets and pamphlets containing accounts of Mansana's career, and the procession passed into the Via Felice.
As we loiter about the city, now alone, now under the discreet and unhampering escort of the Bethlehemite; watching the Mussulmans at their dinner in some dingy little restaurant, where kitchen, store-room and banquet-hall are all in the same apartment, level and open to the street; pausing to bargain with an impassive Arab for a leather belt or with an ingratiating Greek for a string of amber beads; looking in through the unshuttered windows of the Jewish houses where the families are gathered in festal array for the household rites of Passover week; turning over the chaplets, and rosaries, and anklets, and bracelets of coloured glass and mother-of-pearl, and variegated stones, and curious beans and seed-pods in the baskets of the street-vendors around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; stepping back into an archway to avoid a bag-footed camel, or a gaily caparisoned horse, or a heavy-laden donkey passing through a narrow street; exchanging a smile and an unintelligible friendly jest with a sweet-faced, careless child; listening to long disputes between buyers and sellers in that resounding Arab tongue which seems full of tragic indignation and wrath, while the eyes of the handsome brown Bedouins who use it remain unsearchable in their Oriental languor and pride; Jerusalem becomes to us more and more a symbol and epitome of that which is changeless and transient, capricious and inevitable, necessary and insignificant, interesting and unsatisfying, in the unfinished tragi-comedy of human life.
The next was where plants, flowers, and trees were forced, producing the city's food. Below that, for nearly a thousand feet, were the living quarters of the people. The ground-level of the city was in reality a beautiful park. During the day, Val explained, it was busy with street-vendors, open-air schools, theaters, and thousands who came up from underground to drink the air and the sun.
Ingram at the door of an English newspaper office in the Boulevard des Italiens, and, after vainly asking for telegrams at the hotel, walked away, aimlessly at first, along broad pavements encumbered with the chairs and tables of vast, crowded cafés, and with bright Sunday idlers and sinister street-vendors. But in a moment he had decided that he must and ought to pay a call in the Rue d'Athènes.
There still exists amongst the Romans a sort of debased, imperial pride, a belief that a Roman is per se superior to all other Italians. For manual work, or labour under others, they have an equal contempt and dislike. All the semi-independent trades, like those of cab- drivers, street-vendors, petty shopkeepers, &c. are eagerly sought after and monopolized by Romans.
Others were buying odds and ends from the street-vendors, tossing coins, and playing various games of chance. The two men walked about aimlessly. They seemed to have no friends among the pleasure-seekers. At last, however, as they stood reading a public notice posted at the entrance of the town-hall or yamen, a bystander asked them who they were.
A big city, seen for the first time by oneself alone when one does not know a soul in it, may be intensely boring or intensely interesting. It depends on oneself. Peter was in the mood to be interested. He was introspective. It pleased him to watch the early morning stir; to see the women come out in shawls and slipshod slippers and swill down their bit of pavement; to see sleepy shopkeepers take down their shutters and street-vendors set up their stalls; to try to gauge the thoughts and doings of the place from the shop-windows and the advertisements. His first need was a wash and a shave, and he got both at a little barber's in which monsieur attended to him, while madame, in considerable négligée, made her toilette before the next glass. His second was breakfast, and he got it,
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