CHAPTER VI

"What do we eat to-day?" asked Paoluccio, the innkeeper on the Frascati
road, as he came in from the glare and the dust and sat down in his own
black kitchen.

"Beans and oil," answered his wife.

"An apoplexy take you!" observed the man, by way of mild comment.

"It is Friday," said the woman, unmoved, though she was of a distinctly
apoplectic habit.

The kitchen was also the eating-room where meals were served to the
wine-carters on their way to Rome and back. The beams and walls were
black with the smoke of thirty years, for no whitewash had come near
them since the innkeeper had married Nanna. It was a rich, crusty black,
lightened here and there to chocolate brown, and shaded off again to the
tint of strong coffee. High overhead three hams and half a dozen huge
sausages hung slowly curing in the acrid wood smoke. There was an open
hearth, waist high, for roasting, and having three square holes sunk in
it for cooking with charcoal. An enormous bunch of green ferns had been
hung by a long string from the highest beam to attract the flies, which
swarmed on it like bees on a branch. The floor was of beaten cement,
well swept and watered. Along three of the walls there were heavy
tables of rough-hewn oak, with benches, polished by long and constant
use. A trap-door covered the steps that led down to the deep cellar,
which was nothing but a branch of those unexplored catacombs that
undermine the Campagna in all directions. The place was dim, smoky, and
old, but it was not really dirty, for in his primitive way the Roman
wine-carter is fastidious. It is not long since he used to bring his own
solid silver spoon and fork with him, and he will generally rinse a
glass out two or three times before he will drink out of it.

The kitchen of the inn was cool compared with the road outside, and
though it smelt chiefly of the stale smoke of green wood, this was
pervaded and tempered by odours of fern, fresh cabbages, goats'-milk
cheese, and sour red wine. The brown earthen pot simmered over one of
the holes in the hearth, emitting little clouds of steam; but boiling
beans have no particular smell, as everybody knows.

Paoluccio had pushed his weather-beaten soft hat back on his head, and
sat drumming on the oak table with his knotty fingers. He was a strong
man, thickset and healthy, with grizzled hair and an intensely black
beard. His wife was fat, and purple about the jaws and under the ears.
She stood