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ALONE

BY

NORMAN DOUGLAS

AUTHOR OF

"SOUTH WIND," "THEY WENT," "TOGETHER," ETC.







TO HIS FRIEND

EDWARD HUTTON

WHO PRINTED SOME OF THESE TRIVIALITIES

IN THAT "ANGLO-ITALIAN REVIEW"

WHICH DESERVED A BETTER FATE






CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

MENTONE

LEVANTO

SIENA

PISA

VIAREGGIO (February)

VIAREGGIO (May)

ROME

OLEVANO

VALMONTONE

SANT' AGATA, SORRENTO

ROME

SORIANO

ALATRI


Introduction

What ages ago it seems, that "Great War"!

And what enthusiasts we were! What visionaries, to imagine that in such
an hour of emergency a man might discover himself to be fitted for some
work of national utility without that preliminary wire-pulling which was
essential in humdrum times of peace! How we lingered in long queues, and
stamped up and down, and sat about crowded, stuffy halls, waiting, only
waiting, to be asked to do something for our country by any little
guttersnipe who happened to have been jockeyed into the requisite
position of authority! What innocents....

I have memories of several afternoons spent at a pleasant place near St.
James's Park station, whither I went in search of patriotic employment.
It was called, I think, Board of Trade Labour Emergency Bureau (or
something equally lucid and concise), and professed to find work for
everybody. Here, in a fixed number of rooms, sat an uncertain number of
chubby young gentlemen, all of whom seemed to be of military age, or
possibly below it; the Emergency Bureau was then plainly--for it may
have changed later on--a hastily improvised shelter for privileged
sucklings, a kind of nursery on advanced Montessori methods. Well, that
was not my concern. One must trust the Government to know its own
business.

During my second or third visit to this hygienic and well-lighted
establishment I was introduced, most fortunately, into the sanctuary of
Mr. R----, whose name was familiar to me. Was he not his brother's
brother? He was. A real stroke of luck!

Mr. R----, a pink little thing, laid down the pen he had snatched up as
I entered the room, and began gazing at me quizzically through enormous
tortoise-shell-rimmed goggles, after the fashion of a precocious infant
who tries to look like daddy. What might he do for me?

I explained.

We had a short talk, during which various forms were conscientiously
filled up as to my qualifications, such as they were. Of course, there
was nothing doing just then; but one never knows, does one? Would I mind
calling again?

Would I mind? I should think not. I should like nothing better. It did
one good to be in contact with this youthful optimist and listen to his
blithe and pleasing prattle; he was so hopeful, so philosophic, so
cheery; his whole nature seemed to exhale the golden words: "Never say
die." And no wonder. He ought to have been at the front, but some
guardian angel in the haute finance had dumped him into this soft and
safe job: it was enough to make anybody cheerful. One should be
cautious, none the less, how one criticises the action of the
authorities. May be they kept him at the Emergency Bureau for the
express purpose of infusing confidence, by his bright manner, into the
minds of despondent patriots like myself, and of keeping the flag flying
in a general way--a task for which he, a German Jew, was pre-eminently
fitted.

Be that as it may, his consolatory tactics certainly succeeded in my
case, and I went home quite infected with his rosy cheeks and words.
Yet, on the occasion of my next visit a week or two later, there was
still nothing doing--not just then, though one never knows, does one?

"Tried the War Office?" he added airily.

I had.

Who hadn't?

The War Office was a nightmare in those early days. It resembled
Liverpool Street station on the evening of a rainless Bank Holiday. The
only clear memory I carried away--and even this may have been due to
some hallucination--was that of a voice shouting at me through the
rabble: "Can you fly?" Such was my confusion that I believe I answered
in the negative, thereby losing, probably, a lucrative billet as
Chaplain to the Forces or veterinary surgeon in the Church Lads'
Brigade. Things might have been different had my distinguished cousin
still been on the spot; I, too, might have been accommodated with a big
desk and small work after the manner of the genial Mr. R----. He died in
harness, unfortunately, soon after the outbreak of war.

I said to my young friend:

"Everybody tells one to try the War Office--I don't know why. Of course
I tried it. I wish I had a shilling for every hour I wasted in that
lunatic asylum."

"Ah!" he replied. "I feel sure a good many men would like to be paid at
that rate. Anyhow, trust me. We'll fix you up, sooner or later. (He kept
his word.) Why not have a whack at the F.O., meanwhile?"

"Because I have already had a whack at it."

I then possessed, indeed, in reply to an application on my part, a
holograph of twelve pages in the elegant calligraphy of H.M.
Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the same gentleman who was
viciously attacked by the Pankhurst section for his supposed
pro-Germanism. It conveyed no grain of hope. Other Government
Departments, he opined, might well be depleted at this moment; the
Foreign Office was in exactly the reverse position. It overflowed with
diplomatic and consular officials returned, perforce, from belligerent
countries, and now in search of occupation. Was it not natural, was it
not right, to give the preference to them? One was really at a loss to
know what to do with all those people. He had tried, hitherto in vain,
to find some kind of job for his own brother.

A straightforward, convincing statement. Acting on the hint, I visited
the Education Office, notoriously overstaffed since Tudor days; it might
now be emptier; clerical work might be obtained there in substitution of
some youngster who had been induced to join the colours. I poked my nose
into countless recesses, and finally unearthed my man.

They were full up, said Mr. F----.

Full up?

Full up.

Then, after some further conversation as to my capacities, he thought he
might find me employment as teacher of science in the country, to
replace somebody or other.

The notion was distasteful to me. I am not averse to learning from the
young; I only once tried to teach them--at a ragged school, long since
pulled down, near Ladbroke Grove, where I soon discovered that my little
pupils knew a great deal more than I did, more, indeed, than was good
for body or soul. Still, this was a tangible, definite offer of
unremunerative but at the same time semi-pseudo-patriotic work, not to
be sneezed at. An idea occurred to me.

"Supposing I stick it out and give satisfaction, shall I be able to
interchange later into this department? I am more fitted for office
duties. In fact, I have had a certain experience of them."

"No chance of that," he replied. "It is the German system. Their
schoolmasters are sometimes taken to do administrative work at
head-quarters, and vice versâ. Our English rule is: Once a teacher,
always a teacher."

Here was a deadlock. For in such matters as teaching, a man may put a
strain on himself for a certain length of time; he may even be a
success, up to a point. But if he lacks the temperamental gift of
holding classes, the results in the long run will not be fair to the
children, to say nothing of himself. With reluctance I rose to depart,
Mr. F---- adding, by way of letting me down gently:

"Tried the War Office?"

I had.

If the War Office was too lively, this place was too slumberous by half.
A cobwebby, Rip-van-Winkle-ish atmosphere brooded about those passages
and chambers. One could not help thinking that a little "German system"
might work wonders here. And this is merely one of several similar sites
I explored, and endeavoured to exploit, for patriotic purposes; I am
here only jotting down a few of the more important of those that occur
to me.

And, oh! for the brush of a Hogarth to depict the gallery of faces with
which I came in contact as I went along. They were all different, yet
all alike; different in their degrees of beefiness, stolidity, and
self-sufficiency, but plainly of the same parentage--British to the
backbone; British of the wrong kind, with a sprinkling of Welshmen,
Irishmen, and Jews. Not a Scotsman discoverable in that whole mob of
complacent office-jacks. My countrymen were conspicuous by their
absence; they were otherwise engaged, in the field, the colonies, the
engine-room. I can only remember one single exception to this rule, this
type; it was the head of the Censorship Department.

For of course I offered my services there, climbing up that decent
red-carpeted stairway, and glad to find myself among respectable
surroundings after all the unseemly holes I had lately wallowed in. I
sent up a card which, to my surprise, caused me to be ushered forthwith
into the presence of the Chief, who may have heard of my existence from
some mutual friend. Here, at all events, was a man with a face worth
looking at, a man who had done notable things in his day. What a relief,
moreover, to be able to talk to a gentleman for a change! I wished I
could have had him to myself for five minutes; there were one or two
things one would have liked to learn from him. Unfortunately he was
surrounded, as such people are, by half a dozen of the characteristic
masks. For the rest, His ex-Excellency seemed to be ineffably bored with
his new functions.

"What on earth brings you here?" he began in a fascinatingly
absent-minded style, as if he had known me all my life, and with an
inimitable nasal drawl. "This is a rotten job, my dear sir. Rotten! I
cannot recommend it. Not your style at all, I should say."

"But, my dear Sir F----, I am not applying for your job. Something
subordinate, I mean. Anything, anything."

"What? Down there, cutting up newspapers at twenty-two shillings a week?
No, no. Let's have your address, and we will communicate with you when
we find something worth your while. By the way, have you tried the War
Office?"

I had.

And it stands to reason that I tried the Munitions more than once.

It was my rare good fortune--luck pursued me on these patriotic
expeditions--to come face to face, at the Munitions, with the fons et
origo; the deputy fountain-head, that is to say; a very peculiar
private-secretary-in-chief for that department. He was a perpendicular,
iron-grey personality, if I remember rightly, who smelt of some
indifferent hair-wash and lost no time in giving you to understand that
he was preternaturally busy.

Did I know anything about machinery?

Nothing to speak of, I replied. As co-manager and proprietor of some
cotton mills employing several hundred hands for spinning and weaving, I
naturally learnt how to handle a fair number of machines--sufficiently
well, at all events, to start and stop them and tell the girls how to
avoid being scalped or having their arms torn out whenever I happened to
be passing that way. This life also gave me some experience, useful
perhaps at the Munitions, in dealing with factory-hands----

That was not the kind of machinery he meant. Did I know anything about
banking?

Nothing at all.

"You are like everybody else," he replied with a weary sigh, as much as
to say: How am I going to run the British Empire with a collection of
imbeciles like this? "We have several thousands of applicants like
yourself," he went on. "But I will put your name down. Come again."

"You are very kind."

"Do call again," he added, in his best private-secretary manner.

I called again a couple of weeks later. It struck me, namely, that they
might have acquired a sufficient stock of bankers and mechanics by this
time, and be able possibly to discover a vacancy for a public-school man
with a fairish knowledge of the world and some other things--one who,
moreover, had himself served in a cranky and fussy Government Department
and, though working in another sphere, had been thanked officially for
certain labours--once by the Admiralty, twice by the Board of Trade; and
anyway, hang it! one was not so infernally venerable as all that, was
one?

"I called about a fortnight ago. You have my name down."

"Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We have such thousands of applicants. I
remember you! A mechanic, aren't you?"

"No. And you asked me if I understood banking, and I said I didn't."

"What a pity. Now if you knew about banking----"

Nothing, evidently, had been done about my application, nor, for that
matter, about those thousands of others. We were being played with. I
began to feel grumpy. It was a lovely afternoon, and I remembered, with
regret, that I had thrown over an engagement to go for a walk with a
friend at Wimbledon. About this hour, I calculated, we should be
strolling along Beverley Brook or through the glades of Coombe Woods
with sunshine filtering through the birches overhead; it would have been
more pleasant, and far more instructive, than wasting my time with a
hatchet-faced automaton like this. That comes, I thought, of being
patriotic. I observed:

"Your department seems to require only bankers and mechanics. Would it
not be well to advertise the fact and save trouble and time to those
thousands of applicants who, you say, are in the same predicament as
myself? I came here to do national work of some general kind."

"So I gather. And if you understood banking----"

"If I did, I should be a banker at my time of life--don't you see?--and
lending money to you people, and giving you good advice, instead of
asking you for employment. Isn't that fairly obvious? As a matter of
fact, my acquaintance with banking is limited to a knowledge of how to
draw cheques, and even that useful accomplishment is fast fading from my
memory, under the stress of the times."

Being a Welshman--so I presume, from his name--he condescended to smile
faintly, but not for long; his salary was too high. As for myself, I
refrained from saying a few harsher things I was minded to say; indeed,
I made myself so vastly agreeable, after my own private recipe, that he
was quite touched. He remarked:

"I think I had better put your name down, although we have thousands of
applicants, you know. Call again, won't you?"

For which I humbly thanked him, instead of saying, as I ought to have
done:

"You go to blazes. The public is a pack of idiots to run after people
who merely keep them loitering about while they feather their own nests.
We are out to lick the Germans, and yours is not the way to do it."

Did I understand banking? The full ineptitude of this conundrum only
dawned upon me by degrees. Manifestly, if I understood banking, I might
do some specialised kind of work for the Government. But in that case I
would not apply to the Munitions. Granted they wanted bankers. Well,
there was my friend M----, renowned in the City as a genius for banking;
he could have saved them untold thousands of pounds. They would have
none of him. They sent him into the trenches, where he was duly shot.

How easy it is for a disappointed place-seeker to jibe and rail against
the powers that be, especially when he is not in full possession of the
data! For all I know, they may have discovered my friend M---- to be a
dangerous character, and have been only too glad to remove him out of
society without unnecessary fuss, in an outwardly honourable fashion,
with a view to saving his poor but respectable parents the humiliating
experience of a criminal trial and possible execution in the family.

If I understood banking ... why did they want bankers at this
institution? Ah, it was not my business to probe into such mysteries of
administration. To my limited intelligence it would seem that the mere
fact of a man applying at the Munitions was primâ facie evidence that
banking was not one of his accomplishments. It seemed to me,
furthermore, that there was no end to such "ifs"--patriotic or
otherwise. If I were a woman, for instance, I would promptly aid the
cause by jumping into a nurse's outfit, telling improper stories to the
Tommies, and getting myself photographed for the Press every morning.
But I am only a man. If I were a high-class trumpeter, I could qualify
for a job in one of the Allied Armies or, failing that, on Judgment Day.
But I can only strum the piano. And if the moon were made of green
cheese, we might all try to get hold of a slice of it, mightn't we?...

Such was my pigheadedness, my boyish zeal, my belief in human nature or
perverse sense of duty, that I actually broke my vow and returned to
that ridiculous establishment. Yes, I "called again," flattering myself
with the conjecture that, even if they had not yet obtained a requisite
amount of bankers and mechanics, and even if persons of my particular
aptitudes were still a drug in the market, there might nevertheless be
room, amid the ramifications and interstices of so great a department,
for a man or two who could help to count up or pack munitions, or, if
that proposal were hopelessly wide of the mark, for the services of
something even more recondite and exotic--an intelligent corpse-washer,
for instance, or half a dozen astrologers. I felt I could distinguish
myself, at a national crisis like this, in either capacity. Anyhow, it
was only one more afternoon wasted--one out of how many!

This time I saw Mr. W----. Though I had never met him in the flesh, I
once enjoyed the privilege of perusing a manuscript from his pen--a
story about a girl in Kew Gardens. A nice-looking young Hebrew was Mr.
W----. He had made himself indispensable, somehow or other, to the
Minister, and would doubtless by this time have been pitchforked into
some permanent and prominent job, but for that unfortunate name of his,
with its strong Teutonic flavour.

This, by the way, was about the eighth official of his tribe, and of his
age, I had come across in the course of my recent peregrinations. How
did they get there? Tell me, who can. Far be it from me to disparage the
race of Israel. I have gained the conviction--firm-fixed, now, as the
Polar Star--that the Hebrew is as good a man as the Christian. Yet one
would like to know their method, their technique, in this instance. How
was the thing done? How did they manage it, these young Jews, all
healthy-looking and of military age--how did they contrive to keep out
of the Army? Was there some secret society which protected them? Or were
they all so preposterously clever that the Old Country would straightway
evaporate into thin air unless they sat in some comfortable office,
while our own youngsters were being blown to pieces out yonder?

Mr. W----, I regret to say, was not a good Oriental. He lacked the
Semite's pliability. He was graceful, but not gracious. A consequence,
doubtless, of having inhaled for some time past the rarefied atmosphere
of the Chief, and swallowed a few pokers during the process, his manner
towards me was freezingly non-committal--worthy of the best Anglo-Saxon
traditions.

Had I come a little earlier, he avowed, he might perhaps have been able
to squeeze me into one of his departments--thus spake this infant: "One
of my departments." As it was, he feared there was nothing doing;
nothing whatsoever; not just then. Tried the War Office?

I had.

I even visited, though only twice, an offshoot of that establishment in
Victoria Street near the Army and Navy Stores, where candidates for the
position of translator--quasi-confidential work and passable pay, five
pounds a week--were interviewed. On the second occasion, after waiting
in an ante-room full of bearded and be-spectacled monsters such as haunt
the British Museum Library, I was summoned before a board of reverend
elders, who put me through a catechism, drowsy but prolonged, as to my
qualifications and antecedents. It was a systematic affair. Could I
decipher German manuscripts? Let them show me their toughest one, I
said. No! It was merely a pro forma question; they had enough German
translators on the staff. So the interrogation went on. They were going
to make sure of their man, in whom, I must say, they took little
interest save when they learnt that he had passed a Civil Service
examination in Russian and another in International Law. At that
moment--though I may be mistaken--they seemed to prick up their ears.
Not long afterwards I was allowed to depart, with the assurance that I
might hear further.

Their inquiries into my attainments and references must have given
satisfaction, for in the fulness of time a missive arrived to the effect
that, assuming me to be a competent Turkish scholar, they would be glad
to see me again with a view to a certain vacancy.

Turkish--a language I had not mentioned to them, a language of which I
never possessed more than fifty words, every one of them forgotten long
years ago.

"How very War Office," I thought.

These good people were mixing up Turkish and Russian--a natural error,
when one comes to think of it, for, though the respective tongues might
not be absolutely identical, yet the countries themselves were
sufficiently close together to account for a little slip like this.

Was it a slip? Who knows? It is so easy to criticise when one is not
fully informed about things. They may have suggested my acting as
Turkish translator for reasons of their own--reasons which I cannot
fathom, but which need not therefore be bad ones. Chagrined
office-hunters like myself are prone to be bitter. In an emergency of
this magnitude a citizen should hesitate before he finds fault with the
wisdom of those whom the nation has chosen to steer it through troubled
waters. No carping! You only hamper the Government. The general public
should learn to keep a civil tongue in its head. Theirs but to do and
die.

None the less, it was about this time that I began to experience certain
moments of despondency, and occasionally let a whole day slip by without
endeavouring to be of use to The Cause--moments when, instead of asking
myself, "What have I done for my country?" I asked, "What has my country
done for me?"--moments when I envied the hotel night-porters,
taxi-drivers, and red-nosed old women selling flowers in Piccadilly
Circus who had something more sensible to do than to bother their heads
about trying to be patriotic, and getting snubbed for their pains. Yet,
with characteristic infatuation for hopeless ventures, I persevered.
Another "whack" at the F.O. leading to another holograph, two more
whacks at the Censorship, interpreter jobs, hospital jobs, God knows
what--I persevered, and might for the next three years have been kicking
my heels, like any other patriot, in the corridor of some dingy
Government office at the mercy of a pack of tuppenny counter-jumpers,
but for a God-sent little accident, the result of sheer boredom, which
counselled a trip to the sunny Mediterranean.

Fortune was nearer to me, at that supreme moment, than she had ever yet
been. For on the day prior to my departure I received a communication
from the Board of Trade Labour, etc., etc., whose methods of work, it
was now apparent, were as expeditious as its own name was brief. That
hopeful Mr. R----, that bubbling young optimist who had so
conscientiously written down a number of my qualifications, such as they
were--he was keeping his promise after months, and months, and months.
Never say die. The dear little fellow! What job had he captured for me?

An offer to work in a factory at Gretna Green, wages to commence at 17s.
6d. per week.

H'm.

The remuneration was not on a princely scale, but I like to think that
it included the free use of the lavatory, if there happened to be one on
the premises.

So luck pursued me to the end, though it never quite caught me up. For
bags were packed, and tickets taken. And therefore:

"What did you do in the Great War, grandpapa?"

"I loafed, my boy."

"That was naughty, grandpapa."

"Naughty, but nice...."




ALONE

Mentone

Italiam petimus....

Discovered, in a local library--a genuine old maid's library: full of
the trashiest novels--those two volumes of sketches by J. A. Symonds,
and forthwith set to comparing the Mentone of his day with that of ours.
What a transformation! The efforts of Dr. James Henry Bennet and
friends, aided and abetted by the railway, have converted the idyllic
fishing village into--something different. So vanishes another fair spot
from earth. And I knew it. Yet some demon has deposited me on these
shores, where life is spent in a round of trivialities.

One fact suffices. Symonds, driving over from Nice, at last found
himself at the door of "the inn." The inn.... Are there any inns left at
Mentone?

À propos of inns, here is a suggestive state of affairs. At the present
moment, twenty-two of the principal hotels and pensions of Mentone are
closed, because owned or controlled or managed by Germans. Does not this
speak rather loudly in favour of Teuton enterprise? Where, in a German
town of 18,000 inhabitants, will you find twenty-two such establishments
in the hands of Frenchmen?

The statistical mood is upon me. I wander either among the tombs of that
cemetery overhead, studying sepulchral inscriptions and drawing
deductions, from what is therein stated regarding the age, nationality
and other circumstances of the deceased, as to the relative number of
consumptives here interred. Sixty per cent, shall we say? Or else, in
the streets of the town, I catch myself endeavouring--hitherto without
success--to count up the number of grocers' shops. They are far in
excess of what is needful. Now, why? Well, your tailor or hatter or
hosier--he makes a certain fixed profit on each article he sells, and he
does not sell them at every moment of the day. The other, quite apart
from small advantages to be gained owing to the ever-shifting prices of
his wares, is ceaselessly engaged in dispensing trifles, on each of
which he makes a small gain. The grocery business commends itself warmly
to the French genius for garnering halfpennies. Nowhere on earth, I
fancy, will you see butter more meticulously weighed than here. Buy a
ton of it, and they will replace on their counter a fragment of the
weight and size of a postage stamp, rather than let the balance descend
on your side.

And so the days, the weeks, have passed. Will one ever again escape from
Mentone? It may well be colder in Italy, but anything is preferable to
this inane Riviera existence....

I am not prone to recommend restaurants, or to discommend them, for the
simple reason that, if they have proved bad, I smile to think of other
men being poisoned and robbed as well as myself; as to the good
ones--why, only a fool would reveal their whereabouts. Since, however, I
hope so to order my remaining days of life as never to be obliged to
return to these gimcrack regions, there is no inducement for withholding
the name of the Merle Blanc at Monte Carlo, a quite unpretentious place
of entertainment that well deserves its name--white blackbirds being
rather scarcer here than elsewhere. The food is excellent--it has a
cachet of its own; the wine more than merely good. And this is
surprising, for the local mixtures (either Italian stuff which is dumped
down in shiploads at Nice, Marseille, Cette, etc., or else the poor
though sometimes aromatic product of the Var) are not gratifying to the
palate. One imbibes them, none the less, in preference to anything else,
as it is a peculiarity of what goes under the name of wine hereabouts
that the more you pay for it, the worse it tastes. If you adventure into
the Olympic spheres of Chateau Lafite and so forth, you may put your
trust in God, or in a blue pill. Chateau Cassis would be a good name for
these finer vintages, seeing that the harmless black currant enters
largely into their composition, though not in sufficient quantity to
render them wholly innocuous. Which suggests a little problem for the
oenophilist. What difference of soil or exposure or climate or treatment
can explain the fact that Mentone is utterly deficient in anything
drinkable of native origin, whereas Ventimiglia, a stone's throw
eastwards, can boast of its San Biagio, Rossese, Latte, Dolceacqua and
other noble growths, the like of which are not to be found along the
whole length of the French Riviera?

Having pastured the inner man, to his complete satisfaction, at the
hospitable Merle Blanc, our traveller will do well to pasture his eyes
on the plants in the Casino gardens. Whoever wants to see flowers and
trees on their best behaviour, must come to Monte Carlo, where the
spick-and-span Riviera note is at its highest development. Not a leaf is
out of place; they have evidently been groomed and tubbed and manicured
from the hour of their birth. And yet--is it possible? Lurking among all
this modern splendour of vegetation, as though ashamed to show their
faces, may be discerned a few lowly olive trees. Well may they skulk!
For these are the Todas and Veddahs, the aboriginals of Monte Carlo, who
peopled its sunny slopes in long-forgotten days of rustic life--once
lords of the soil, now pariahs. What are they doing here? And how comes
it that the eyesore has not yet been detected and uprooted by those
keen-sighted authorities that perform such wonders in making the visitor
feel at home, and hush up with miraculous dexterity everything in the
nature of a public scandal?

In exemplification whereof, let me tell a trivial Riviera tale. There
was an Englishwoman here, one of those indestructible modern ladies who
breakfast off an ether cocktail and half a dozen aspirins and feel all
the better for it, and who, one day, found herself losing rather heavily
at the tables. "Another aspirin is going to turn my luck," she thought,
and therewith swallowed surreptitiously her last tabloid of the panacea.
Not unobserved, however; for straightway two elegant gentlemen--they
might have been Russian princes--pounced upon her and led her to that
underground operating-room where a kindly physician is in perennial
attendance. He brushed aside her explanations.

"It would be a thousand pities for so charming a lady to poison herself.
But since you wish to take that step, why choose the Casino which has a
reputation to keep up? Are there not hotels----"

"I tell you it was only aspirin."

"Alas, we are sufficiently familiar with that tale! Now, Madam, let us
not lose a moment! It is a question of life and death."

"Aspirin, I tell you----"

"Kindly submit, or the three of us will be obliged to employ force."

The stomach-pump was produced.

It is the drawback of all sea-side places that half the landscape is
unavailable for purposes of human locomotion, being covered by useless
water. Mentone is more unfortunate than most of them, for its Hinterland
is so cloven and contorted that unless you keep on the main roads, or
content yourself with short but pleasant strolls, you will soon find all
progress barred by some natural obstruction. And one really cannot walk
along the esplanade all day long, though it is worth while, once in a
lifetime, continuing that promenade as far as Cap Martin, if only in
memory of the inspiration which Symonds drew therefrom. Who, he
asks--who can resist the influence of Greek ideas at the Cape St.
Martin? Anybody can, nowadays. The place is encrusted with smug villas
of parvenus (wherein we include the Empress Eugénie), to say nothing of
that preposterous hotel at the very point, which disfigures the country
for leagues around.

On other occasions you may find your way towards evening up to Gorbio
and stay for supper, provided you do not mind being cheated. Or wander
further afield, over Sospel to Breil by the old path--note the lavender:
they make a passable perfume of it--or else to Moulinet (famous for bad
food and a mastodontic breed of mosquitoes) and thence along the
stream--note the bushes of wild box--and over a wooded ridge to the
breezy heights of Peira Cava, there to dream away the daylight under the
pines. These are summer rambles. At present the snow lies deep.

One of my favourite excursions has been up the so-called Berceau, the
cradle-shaped hill which dominates Mentone on the east. I was there
to-day for a solitary luncheon, resting awhile in the timbered saddle
between the peaks. The summit is only about five minutes' walk from this
delectable grove, but its view inland is partially intercepted by a
higher ridge. From here, if you are in the mood, you may descend
eastward over the Italian frontier, crossing the stream which is spanned
lower down by the bridge of St. Louis, and find yourself at Mortola
Superiore (try the wine) and then at Mortola proper (try the wine).
Somewhere in this gulley was killed the last wolf of these regions; so a
grey-haired local Nimrod told me. He had wrought much mischief in his
time. That is to say, he was not killed, but accidentally
drowned--drowned in one of those artificial reservoirs which are
periodically filled and drawn off for irrigating the gardens lower down;
an ignoble death, for a wolf! A goat lay drowned beside him. The event,
he reckoned, must have taken place half a century ago. Since then, the
wolf has never been seen.

This afternoon, however, I preferred to repose in that shady dell, while
a flock of goldcrests were investigating the branches overhead and two
buzzards cruised, in dreamy spirals, about the sunny sky of midday; to
repose; to indulge my genius and review the situation; to profit, in
short, by that sense of aloofness peculiar to such aerial spots, which
tempts the mind to set its house in order. What are we doing, in these
empty regions? Why not wander hence? That cursed traveller's gift of
sitting still; of remaining stationary, no matter where, until one is
actually pushed away! And yet, how enjoyable this land might be, were it
inhabited by any race save one whose thousand little meannesses, public
and private, are calculated to drain away a man's last ounce of
self-respect! Not many are the glad memories I shall carry from Mentone.
I can think of no more than two.

There is my landlady, to begin with, who spies out every detail of my
daily life; of decent birth and richer than Croesus, but inflamed with a
peevish penuriousness which no amount of plain speaking on my part will
correct. Never a day passes that she does not permit herself some
jocular observation anent my spendthrift habits. The following is an
example of our matutinal converse:

"I fear, Monsieur, you omitted to put out the light in a certain place
last night. It was burning when I returned home."

"Certainly not, Madame. I have been nicely brought up. I never visit
places at night. You ought to be familiar with my habits after all this
time."

"True. Then it must have been some one else. Ah, these electricians'
bills!"

Or this:

"Monsieur, Monsieur! The English Consul called yesterday with his little
dog at about five o'clock. He waited in your room, but you never came
back."

"Five o'clock? I was at the baths."

"I have heard of that establishment. What do they charge for a hot
bath?"

"Three francs----"

"Bon Dieu!"

"--if you take an abonnement. Otherwise, it may well be more."

"And so you go there. Why then--why must you also wash in the morning
and splash water on my floor? It may have to be polished after your
departure. Would you mind asking the Consul, by the way, not to sit on
the bed? It weakens the springs."

Or this:

"Might I beg you, Monsieur, to tread more lightly on the carpet in your
room? I bought it only nine years ago, and it already shows signs of
wear."

"Nine years--that old rag? It must have survived by a miracle."

"I do not ask you to avoid using it. I only beg you will tread as
lightly as possible."

"Carpets are meant to be worn out."

"You would express yourself less forcibly, if you had to pay for them."

"Let us say then: carpets are meant to be trodden on."

"Lightly."

"I am not a fairy, Madame."

"I wish you were, Monsieur."

Thrice already, in a burst of confidence, has she told me the story of
an egg--an egg which rankles in the memory. Some years ago, it seems,
she went to a certain shop (naming it)--a shop she has avoided ever
since--to buy an egg; and paid the full price--yes, the full price--of a
fresh egg. That particular egg was not fresh. So far from fresh was it,
that she experienced considerable difficulty in swallowing it.

A memorable episode occurred about a fortnight ago. I was greeted
towards 8 a.m. with moanings in the passage, where Madame tottered
around, her entire head swathed in a bundle of nondescript woollen
wraps, out of which there peered one steely, vulturesque eye. She looked
more than ever like an animated fungus.

Her teeth--her teeth! The pain was past enduring. The whole jaw, rather;
all the teeth at one and the same time; they were unaccountably loose
and felt, moreover, three inches longer than they ought to feel. Never
had she suffered such agony--never in all her life. What could it be?

It was easy to diagnose periostitis, and prescribe tincture of iodine.

"That will cost about a franc," she observed.

"Very likely."

"I think I'll wait."

Next day the pain was worse instead of better. She would give anything
to obtain relief--anything!

"Anything?" I inquired. "Then you had better have a morphia injection. I
have had numbers of them, for the same trouble. The pain will vanish
like magic. There is my friend Dr. Théophile Fornari----"

"I know all about him. He demands five francs a visit, even from poor
people like myself."

"You really cannot expect a busy practitioner to come here and climb
your seventy-two stairs for much less than five francs."

"I think I'll wait. Anyhow, I am not wasting money on food just now, and
that is a consolation."

Now periostitis can hardly be called an amusing complaint, and I would
have purchased a franc's worth of iodine for almost anybody on earth.
Not then. On the contrary, I grew positively low-spirited when, after
three more days, the lamentations began to diminish in volume. They were
sweet music to my ears, at the time. They are sweeter by far, in
retrospect. If only one could extract the same amount of innocent and
durable pleasure out of all other landladies!...

My second joyful memory centres round another thing of beauty--a spiky
agave (miscalled aloe) of monstrous dimensions which may be seen in the
garden of a certain hill-side hotel. Many are the growths of this kind
which I have admired in various lands; none can vaunt as proud and
harmonious a development as this one. You would say it had been cast in
some dull blue metal. The glaucous wonder stands by itself, a prodigy of
good style, more pleasing to the eye than all that painfully generated
tropicality of Mr. Hanbury's Mortola paradise. It is flawless. Vainly
have I teased my fancy, endeavouring to discover the slightest defect in
shape or hue. Firm-seated on the turf, in exultant pose, with a pallid
virginal bloom upon those mighty writhing leaves, this plant has drawn
me like a magnet, day after day, to drink deep draughts of contentment
from its exquisite lines.

For the rest, the whole agave family thrives at Mentone; the ferox is
particularly well represented; one misses, among others, that delightful
medio-picta variety, of which I have noticed only a few indifferent
specimens. [1] It is the same with the yuccas; they flourish here,
though one kind, again, is conspicuous by its absence-- the Atkinsi
(some such name, for it is long since I planted my last yucca) with
drooping leaves of golden-purple. You will be surprised at the number of
agaves in flower here. The reason is, that they are liable to be moved
about for ornamental purposes when they want to be at rest; the plant,
more sensitive and fastidious than it looks, is outraged by this
forceful perambulation and, in an access of premature senility, or
suicidal mania, or sheer despair, gives birth to its only flower--herald
of death. The fatal climax could be delayed if gardeners, in
transplanting, would at least take the trouble to set them in their old
accustomed exposure so far as the cardinal points are concerned. But
your professional gardener knows everything; it is useless for an
amateur to offer him advice; worse than useless, of course, to ask him
for it. Indeed, the flowers, even the wild ones, might almost reconcile
one to a life on the Riviera. Almost.... I recall a comely plant, for
instance, seven feet high at the end of June, though now slumbering
underground, in the Chemin de Saint Jacques--there, where the steps
begin----

Almost....

And here my afternoon musings, up yonder, took on a more acrid
complexion. I remembered a recent talk with one of the teachers at the
local college who lamented that his pupils displayed a singular dullness
in their essays; never, in his long career at different schools, had he
met with boys more destitute of originality. What could be expected, we
both agreed? Mentone was of recent growth--the old settlement, Mentone
of Symonds, proclaims its existence only by a ceaseless and infernal
clanging of bells, rivalling Malta--no history, no character, no
tradition--a mushroom town inhabited by shopkeepers and hôteliers who
are there for the sole purpose of plucking foreigners: how should a
youngster's imagination be nurtured in this atmosphere of savourless
modernism? Then I asked myself: who comes to these regions, now that
invalids have learnt the drawbacks of their climate? Decayed Muscovites,
Englishmen such as you will vainly seek in England, and their painted
women-folk with stony, Medusa-like gambling eyes, a Turk or two, Jews
and cosmopolitan sharks and sharpers, flamboyant Americans, Brazilian,
Peruvian, Chilian, Bolivian rastaqueros with names that read like a
nightmare (see "List of Arrivals" in New York Herald)--the whole exotic
riff-raff enlivened and perfumed by a copious sprinkling of
horizontales.

And I let my glance wander along that ancient Roman road which led from
Italy to Arles and can still be traced, here and there; I took in the
section from Genoa to Marseille, an enormous stretch of country, and
wondered: what has this coast ever produced in the way of thought or
action, of great men or great women? There is Doria at Genoa, and Gaby
Deslys at Marseille; that may well exhaust the list. Ah, and half-way
through, a couple of generals, born at Nice. It is really an instructive
phenomenon, and one that should appeal to students of Buckle--this
relative dearth of every form of human genius in one of the most
favoured regions of the globe. Here, for unexplained reasons, the
Italian loses his better qualities; so does the Frenchman. Are the
natives descended from those mysterious Ligurians? Their reputation was
none of the best; they were more prompt, says Crinagoras, in devising
evil than good. That Mentone man, to be sure, whose remains you may
study at Monaco and elsewhere, was a fine fellow, without a doubt. He
lived rather long ago. Even he, by the way, was a tourist on these
shores. And were the air of Mentone not unpropitious to the composition
of anything save a kind of literary omelette soufflée, one might like to
expatiate on Sergi's remarkable book, and devise thereto an incongruous
footnote dealing with the African origin of sundry Greek gods, and
another one referring to the extinction of these splendid races of men;
how they came to perish so utterly, and what might be said in favour of
that novel theory of the influence of an ice-age on the germplasm
producing mutations--new races which breed true ... enough! Let us
remain at the Riviera level.

In the little museum under those cliffs by the sea, where the Grimaldi
caves are, I found myself lately together with a young French couple,
newly married. The little bride was vastly interested in the attendant's
explanations of the habits of those remote folk, but, as I could plainly
see, growing more and more distrustful of his statements as to what
happened all those hundreds of thousands of years ago.

"And this, Messieurs, is the jaw-bone of a cave-bear--the competitor,
one might say, in the matter of lodging-houses, with the gentleman whose
anatomy we have just inspected. Here are bones of hippopotamus, and
rhinoceros, which he hunted with the weapons you saw. And the object on
which your arm is reposing, Madame, is the tooth of an elephant. Our
ancestor must have been pretty costaud to kill an elephant with a
stone."

"Elephants?" she queried. "Did elephants scramble about these precipices
and ravines? I should like to have seen that."

"Pardon me, Madame. He probably killed them down there," and his arm
swept over the blue Mediterranean, lying at our feet. "Do you mean to
say that elephants paddled across from Algiers in order to be
assassinated by your old skeleton? I should like to have seen that."

"Pardon me, Madame. The Mediterranean did not exist in those days."

The suggestion that this boundless sea should ever have been dry land,
and in the time of her own ancestors, was too much for the young lady.
She smiled politely, and soon I heard her whispering to her husband:

"I had him there, eh? Quel farceur!"

"Yes. You caught him nicely, I must say. But one must not be too hard on
these poor devils. They have got to earn their bread somehow."

This will never do.

Italiam petimus....




Levanto

I have loafed into Levanto, on the recommendation of an Irish friend
who, it would seem, had reasons of his own for sending me there.

"Try Levanto," he said. "A little place below Genoa. Nice, kindly
people. And sunshine all the time. Hotel Nazionale. Yes, yes! The food
is all right. Quite all right. Now please do not let us start that
subject----"

We started it none the less, and at the end of the discussion he added:

"You must go and see Mitchell there. I often stayed with him. Such a
good fellow! And very popular in the place. He built an aqueduct for the
peasants--that kind of man. Mind you look him up. He will be bitterly
disappointed if you don't call. So make a note of it, won't you? By the
way, he's dead. Died last year. I quite forgot."

"Dead, is he? What a pity."

"Yes; and what a nuisance. I promised to send him down some things by
the next man I came across. You would have been that man. I know you do
not carry much luggage, but you could have taken one or two trifles at
least. He wanted a respectable English telescope, I remember, to see the
stars with--a bit of an astronomer, you know. Chutney, too--devilish
fond of chutney, the old boy was; quite a gastro-maniac. What a
nuisance! Now he will be thinking I forgot all about it. And he needed a
clothes-press; I was on no account to forget that clothes-press. Rather
fussy about his trousers, he was. And a type-writer; just an ordinary
one. But I doubt whether you could have managed a type-writer."

"Easily. And a bee-hive or two. You know how I like carrying little
parcels about for other people's friends. What a nuisance! Now I shall
have to travel with my bags half empty."

"Don't blame me, my dear fellow. I did not tell him to die, did I?"....

It must have been about midnight as the train steamed into Levanto
station. Snow was falling; you could hear the moan of the sea hard by;
an icy wind blew down from the mountains.

Sunshine all the time!

Everybody scurried off the platform. A venerable porter, after looking
in dubious fashion at my two handbags, declared he would return in a few
moments to transport them to the hotel, and therewith vanished round the
corner. The train moved on. Lamps were extinguished. Time passed. I
strode up and down in the semi-darkness, trying to keep warm and
determined, whatever happened, not to carry those wretched bags myself,
when suddenly a figure rose out of the gloom--a military figure of
youthful aspect and diminutive size, armed to the teeth.

"A cold night," I ventured.

"Do you know, Sir, that you are in the war-zone--the zona di difesa?"

He began to fumble at his rifle in ominous fashion.

Nice, kindly people!

I said:

"It is hard to die so young. And I particularly dislike the looks of
that bayonet, which is half a yard longer than it need be. But if you
want to shoot me, go ahead. Do it now. It is too cold to argue."

"Your papers! Ha, a foreigner. Hotel Nazionale? Very good. To-morrow
morning you will report yourself to the captain of the carbineers. After
that, to the municipality. Thereupon you will take the afternoon train
to Spezia. When you have been examined by the police inspector at the
station you will be accompanied, if he sees fit, to head-quarters in
order that your passport may be investigated. From there you will
proceed to the Prefecture for certain other formalities which will be
explained to you. Perhaps--who knows?--they will allow you to return to
Levanto."

"How can you expect me to remember all that?" Then I added: "You are a
Sicilian, I take it. And from Catania."

He was rather surprised. Sicilians, because they learn good Italian at
their schools, think themselves indistinguishable from other men.

Yes; he explained. He was from a certain place in the Catania part of
the country, on the slopes of Etna.

I happened to know a good deal of that place from an old she-cook of
mine who was born there and never wearied of telling me about it. To his
still greater surprise, therefore, I proceeded to discourse learnedly
about that region, extolling its natural beauties and healthy climate,
reminding him that it was the birthplace of a man celebrated in
antiquity (was it Diodorus Siculus?) and hinting, none too vaguely, that
he would doubtless live up to the traditions of so celebrated a spot.

Straightway his manner changed. There is nothing these folks love more
than to hear from foreign lips some praise of their native town or
village. He waxed communicative and even friendly; his eyes began to
sparkle with animation, and there we might have stood conversing till
sunrise had I not felt that glacial wind searching my garments, chilling
my humanity and arresting all generous impulses. Rather abruptly I bade
farewell to the cheery little reptile and snatched up my bags to go to
the hotel, which he said was only five minutes' walk from there.

Things turned out exactly as he had predicted. Arrived at Spezia,
however, I found an unpleasant surprise awaiting me. The officer in
command, who was as civil as the majority of such be-medalled jackasses,
suggested that one single day would be quite sufficient for me to see
the sights of Levanto; I could then proceed to Pisa or anywhere else
outside his priceless "zone of defence." I pleaded vigorously for more
time. After all, we were allies, were we not? Finally, a sojourn of
seven days was granted for reasons of health. Only seven days: how
tiresome! From the paper which gave me this authorisation and contained
a full account of my personal appearance I learnt, among other less
flattering details, that my complexion was held to be "natural." It was
a drop of sweetness in the bitter cup.

No butter for breakfast.

The landlord, on being summoned, avowed that to serve crude butter on
his premises involved a flagrant breach of war-time regulations. The
condiment could not be used save for kitchen purposes, and then only on
certain days of the week; he was liable to heavy penalties if it became
known that one of his guests.... However, since he assumed me to be a
prudent person, he would undertake to supply a due allowance to-morrow
and thenceforward, though never in the public dining-room; never, never
in the dining-room!

That is the charm of Italy, I said to myself. These folks are reasonable
and gifted with imagination. They make laws to shadow forth an ideal
state of things and to display their good intentions towards the
community at large; laws which have no sting for the exceptional type of
man who can evade them--the sage, the millionaire, and the "friend of
the family." Never in the dining-room. Why, of course not. Catch me
breakfasting in any dining-room.

Was it possible? There, at luncheon in the dining-room, while devouring
those miserable macaroni made with war-time flour, I beheld an over-tall
young Florentine lieutenant shamelessly engulfing huge slices of what
looked uncommonly like genuine butter, a miniature mountain of which
stood on a platter before him, and overtopped all the other viands. I
could hardly believe my eyes. How about those regulations? Pointing to
this golden hillock, I inquired softly:

"From the cow?"

"From the cow."

"Whom does one bribe?"

He enjoyed a special dispensation, he declared--he need not bribe.
Returned from Albania with shattered health, he had been sent hither to
recuperate. He required not only butter, but meat on meatless days, as
well as a great deal of rest; he was badly run down.... And eggs, raw
eggs, drinking eggs; ten a day, he vows, is his minimum. Enviable
convalescent!

The afternoon being clear and balmy, he took me for a walk, smoking
cigarettes innumerable. We wandered up to that old convent picturesquely
perched against the slope of the hill and down again, across the
rivulet, to the inevitable castle-ruin overhanging the sea. Like all
places along this shore, Levanto lies in a kind of amphitheatre, at a
spot where one or more streams, descending from the mountains, discharge
themselves into the sea. Many of these watercourses may in former times
have been larger and even navigable up to a point. Their flow is now
obstructed, their volume diminished. I daresay they have driven the sea
further out, with silt swept down from the uplands. The same thing has
struck me in England--at Lyme Regis, for instance, whose river was also
once navigable to small craft and at Seaton, about a mile up whose
stream stands that village--I forget its name--which was evidently the
old port of the district in pre-Seaton days. Local antiquarians will
have attacked these problems long ago. The sea may have receded.

A glance from this castle-height at the panorama bathed in that mellow
sunshine made me regret more than ever the enforced brevity of my stay
at Levanto. Seven days, for reasons of health: only seven days! Those
mysterious glades opening into the hill-sides, the green patches of
culture interspersed with cypresses and pines, dainty villas nestling in
gardens, snow-covered mountains and blue sea--above all, the presence of
running water, dear to those who have lived in waterless lands--why, one
could spend a life-time in a place like this!

The lieutenant spoke of Florence, his native city. He would be there
again before long, in order to present himself to the medical
authorities and be weighed and pounded for the hundredth time. He hoped
they would then let him stay there. He was tired to death of Levanto and
its solitude. How pleasant to bid farewell to this "melancholy" sea
which was supposed to be good for his complaints. He asked:

"Do you know why Florentines, coming home from abroad, always rejoice to
see that wonderful dome of theirs rising up from the plain?"

"Why?"

"Can't you guess?"

"Let me see. It is sure to be something not quite proper. H'm.... The
tower of Giotto, for example, has certain asperities, angularities,
anfractuosities----"

"You are no Englishman whatever!" he laughed. "Now try that joke on the
next Florentine you meet.... There was a German here," he went on, "who
loved Levanto. The hotel people have told me all about him. He began
writing a book to prove that there was a different walk to be taken in
this neighbourhood for every single day of the year."

"How German. And then?"

"The war came. He cleared out. The natives were sorry. This whole coast
seems to be saturated with Teutons--of a respectable class, apparently.
They made themselves popular, they bought houses, drank wine, and joked
with the countrymen."

"What do you make of them?" I inquired.

"I am a Tuscan," he began (meaning: I am above race-prejudices; I can
view these things with olympic detachment). "I think the German says to
himself: we want a world-empire, like those damned English. How did they
get it? By piracy. Two can play at that game, though it may be a little
more difficult now than formerly. Of course," he added, "we have a
certain sprinkling of humanitarians even here; the kind of man, I mean,
who stands aside in fervent prayer while his daughter is being ravished
by the Bulgars, and then comes forward with some amateurish attempt at
First Aid, and probably makes a mess of it. But Italians as a
whole--well, we are lovers of violent and disreputable methods; it is
our heritage from mediaeval times. The only thing that annoys the
ordinary native of the country is, if his own son happens to get
killed."

"I know. That makes him very angry."

"It makes him angry not with the Germans who are responsible for the
war, but with his own government which is responsible for conscripting
the boys. Ah, what a stupid subject of conversation! And how God would
laugh, if he had any sense of humour! Suppose we go down to the beach
and lie on the sand. I need rest: I am very dilapidated."

"You look thin, I must say."

"Typhoid, and malaria, and pleurisy--it is a respectable combination.
Thin? I am the merest framework, and so transparent that you can see
clean through my stomach. Perhaps you would rather not try? Count my
ribs, then."

"Count your ribs? That, my dear Lieutenant, is an occupation for a rainy
afternoon. Judging by your length, there must be a good many of
them...."

"We should be kind to our young soldiers," said the Major to whom I was
relating, after dinner, the story of our afternoon promenade. A burly
personage is the Major, with hooked nose and black moustache and
twinkling eyes--retired, now, from a service in the course of which he
has seen many parts of the world; a fluent raconteur, moreover, who
keeps us in fits of laughter with naughty stories and imitations of
local dialects. "We must be nice with them, and always offer them
cigarettes. What say you, Mr. Lieutenant?"

"Yes, sir. Offer them cigarettes and everything else you possess. The
dear fellows! They seldom have the heart to refuse."

"Seldom," echoes the judge.

That is our party; the judge, major, lieutenant and myself. We dine
together and afterwards sit in that side room while the fat little host
bustles about, doing nearly all the work of the war-diminished
establishment himself. Presently the first two rise and indulge in a
lively game of cards, amid vigorous thumpings of the table and cursings
at the ways of Providence which always contrives to ruin the best hands.
I order another litre of wine. The lieutenant, to keep me company,
engulfs half a dozen eggs. He tells me about Albanian women. I tell him
about Indian women. We thrash the matter out, pursuing this or that
aspect into its remotest ramifications, and finally come to the
conclusion that I, at the earliest opportunity, must emigrate to
Albania, and he to India.

As for the judge, he was born under the pale rays of Saturn. He has
attached himself to my heart. Never did I think to care so much about a
magistrate, and he a Genoese.

There are some men, a few men, very few, about whom one craves to be
precise. Viewed through the mist of months, I behold a corpulent and
almost grotesque figure of thirty-five or thereabouts; blue-eyed,
fair-haired but nearly bald, clean-shaven, bespectacled. So purblind has
he grown with poring over contracts and precedents that his movements
are pathologically awkward--embryonic, one might say; his unwieldy
gestures and contortions remind one of a seal on shore. The eyes being
of small use, he must touch with his hands. Those hands are the most
distinctive feature of his person; they are full of expression; tenderly
groping hands, that hesitate and fumble in wistful fashion like the
feelers of some sensitive creature of night. There is trouble, too, in
that obese and sluggish body; trouble to which the unhealthy complexion
testifies. He may drink only milk, because wine, which he dearly
loves--"and such good wine, here at Levanto"--it always deranges the
action of some vital organ inside.

The face is not unlike that of Thackeray.

A man of keen understanding who can argue the legs off a cow when duly
roused, he seems far too good for a small place like this, where, by the
way, he is a newcomer. Maybe his infinite myopia condemns him to
relative seclusion and obscurity. He has a European grip of things; of
politics and literature and finance. Needless to say, I have discovered
his cloven hoof; I make it my business to discover such things; one may
(or may not) respect people for their virtues, one loves them only for
their faults. It is a singular tinge of mysticism and credulity which
runs through his nature. Can it be the commercial Genoese, the gambling
instinct? For he is an authority on stocks and shares, and a passionate
card-player into the bargain. Gambling and religion go hand-in-hand--they
are but two forms of the same speculative spirit. Think of the
Poles, an entire nation of pious roulette-lovers! I have yet to meet a
full-blown agnostic who relished these hazards. The unbeliever is not
adventurous on such lines; he knows the odds against backing a winner in
heaven or earth.

Often, listening to this lawyer's acute talk and watching his uncouth
but sympathetic face, I ask myself a question, a very obvious question
hereabouts: How could you cause him to swerve from the path of duty? How
predispose him in your favour? Sacks of gold would be unavailing: that
is certain. He would wave them aside, not in righteous Anglo-Saxon
indignation, but with a smile of tolerance at human weakness. To
simulate clerical leanings? He is too sharp; he would probably be vexed,
not at your attempt to deceive, but at the implication that you took him
for a fool. A good tip on the stock exchange? It might go a little way,
if artfully tendered. Perhaps an apt and unexpected quotation from the
pages of some obsolete jurist--the intellectual method of approach; for
there is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of
intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook. In any case, it
would be a desperate venture to override the conscience of such a man.
May I never have to try!

His stern principles must often cause him suffering, needless suffering.
He is for ever at the mercy of some categorical imperative. This may be
the reason why I feel drawn to him. Such persons exercise a strange
attraction upon those who, convinced of the eternal fluidity of all
mundane affairs, and how that our most sacred institutions are merely
conventionalities of time and place, conform to only one rule of
life--to be guided by no principles whatever. They miss so much, those
others. They miss it so pathetically. One sees them staggering
gravewards under a load of self-imposed burdens. A lamentable spectacle,
when one thinks of it. Why bear a cross? Is it pleasant? Is it pretty?

He also has taken me for walks, but they are too slow and too short for
my taste. Every twenty yards or so he must stand still to "admire the
view"--that is, to puff and pant.

"What it is," he then exclaims, "to be an old man in youth, through no
fault of one's own. How many are healthy, and yet vicious to the core!"

I inquire:

"Are you suggesting that there may be a connection between sound health
and what society, in its latest fit of peevish self-maceration, is
pleased to call viciousness?"

"That is a captious question," he replies. "A man of my constitution,
unfit for pleasures of the body, is prone to judge severely. Let me try
to be fair. I will go so far as to say that to certain natures
self-indulgence appears to be necessary as--as sunshine to flowers."

Self-indulgence, I thought. Heavily-fraught is that word; weighted with
meaning. The history of two thousand years of spiritual dyspepsia lies
embedded in its four syllables. Self-indulgence--it is what the ancients
blithely called "indulging one's genius." Self-indulgence! How debased
an expression, nowadays. What a text for a sermon on the mishaps of good
words and good things. How all the glad warmth and innocence have faded
out of the phrase. What a change has crept over us....

Glancing through a glass window not far from the hotel, I was fortunate
enough to espy a young girl seated in a sewing shop. She is decidedly
pretty and not altogether unaware of the fact, though still a child. We
have entered upon an elaborate, classical flirtation. With all the
artfulness of her years she is using me to practise on, as a dummy, for
future occasions when she shall have grown a little bigger and more
admired; she has already picked up one or two good notions. I pretend to
be unaware of this fact. I treat her as if she were grown up, and
profess to feel that she has really cast a charm--a state of affairs
which, if true, would greatly amuse her. And so she has, up to a point.
Impossible not to sense the joy which radiates from her smile and
person. That is all, so far. It is an orthodox entertainment, merely a
joke. God knows what might happen, under given circumstances. Some of a
man's most terrible experiences--volcanic cataclysms that ravaged the
landscape and left a trail of bitter ashes in their rear--were begun as
a joke. You can say so many things in a joking way, you can do so many
things in a joking way--especially in Northern countries, where it is
easy to joke unseen.

Meanwhile, with Ninetta, I discourse sweet nothings in my choicest idiom
which has grown rather rusty in England.

Italian is a flowery language whose rhetorical turns and phrases require
constant exercise to keep them in smooth working order. No; that is not
correct. It is not the vocabulary which deteriorates. Words are ever at
command. What one learns to forget in England is the simplicity to use
them; to utter, with an air of deep conviction, a string of what we
should call the merest platitudes. It sometimes takes your breath
away--the things you have to say because these folks are so enamoured of
rhetoric and will not be happy without it.

An English girl of her social standing--I lay stress upon the standing,
for it prescribes the conduct--an English girl would never listen to
such outpourings with this obvious air of approbation; maybe she would
ask where you had been drinking; in every case, your chances would be
seriously diminished. She prefers an impromptu frontal attack, a system
which is fatal to success in this country. The affair, here, must be a
siege. It must move onward by those gradual and inevitable steps
ordained of old in the unwritten code of love; no lingering by the
wayside, no premature haste. It must march to its end with the measured
stateliness of a quadrille. Passion, well-restrained passion, should be
written on every line of your countenance. Otherwise you are liable to
be dubbed a savage. I know what it is to be called a "Scotch bear," and
only because I trembled too much, or too little--I forget which--on a
certain occasion.

I have heard those skilled in amatory matters say that the novice will
do well to confine his attentions to young girls, avoiding married women
or widows. They, the older ones, are a bad school--too prone to pardon
infractions of the code, too indulgent towards foreigners and males in
general. The girls are not so easily pleased; in fact (entre nous) they
are often the devil to propitiate. There is something remorseless about
them. They put you on your mettle. They keep you dangling. Quick-witted
and accustomed to all the niceties of love-badinage, they listen to
every word you have to say, pondering its possibly veiled signification.
Thus far and no further, they seem to imply. Yet each hour brings you
nearer the goal, if--if you obey the code. Weigh well your conduct
during the preliminary stage; remember you are dealing with a
professional in the finer shades of meaning. Presumption, awkwardness,
imprudence; these are the three cardinal sins, and the greatest of these
is imprudence. Be humble; be prepared.

Her best time for conversation, Ninetta tells me, is after luncheon,
when she is generally alone for a little while. At that hour therefore I
appear with a shirt or something that requires a button--would she mind?
The hotel people are so dreadfully understaffed just now--this war!--and
one really cannot live without shirts, can one? Would she mind very
much? Or perhaps in the evening ... is she more free in the evening?

Alas, no; never in the evenings; never for a single moment; never save
on religious festivals, one of which, she suddenly remembers, will take
place in a week or so.

This is innocent coquetry and perhaps said to test my self-restraint,
which is equal to the occasion. An impatient admirer might exclaim----

"Ah, let us meet, then!"

--language which would be permissible after four meetings, and
appropriate after six; not after two. With submissive delicacy I reply
hoping that the may shine brightly, that she may have all the joy she
deserves and give her friends all the pleasure they desire. One of them,
assuredly, would be pained in his heart not to see her on that evening.
Could she guess who it is? Let her try to discover him tonight, when she
is just closing her eyes to sleep, all alone, and thinking about
things----

There I leave it, for the present. Unless a miracle occurs, I fear I
will have quitted Levanto before that festival comes round. True, they
have played the fool with me--how often! Yet, such is my interest in
religious ceremonies, that I am frankly annoyed at the prospect of
missing that evening.

One would like to be able to stroll about the beach with her, or up to
the old castle, instead of sitting in that formal little shop. Such
enterprises are impossible. To be seen together for five minutes in any
public place might injure her reputation. It is the drawback of her sex,
in this country. I am sorry. For though she hides it as best she can,
striving to impress me with the immensity of her worldly experiences,
there is an unsophisticated freshness in her outlook. The surface has
not been scored over.

So it is, with the young. From them you may learn what their elders,
having forgotten it, can nevermore teach you. New horizons unroll
themselves; you are treading untrodden ground. Talk to a simple
creature, farmer or fisherman--well, there is always that touch of
common humanity, that sense of eternal needs, to fashion a link of
conversation. From a professional--lawyer, doctor, engineer--you may
pick up some pungent trifle which yields food for thought; it is never
amiss to hearken to a specialist. But the ordinary man of the street,
the ordinary man or woman of society, of the world--what can they tell
you about art or music or life or religion, about tailors and golf and
exhaust-pipes and furniture--what on earth can they tell you that you
have not heard already? A mere grinding-out of commonplaces! How often
one has covered the same field! They cannot even put their knowledge,
such as it is, into an attractive shape or play variations on the theme;
it is patter; they have said the same thing, in the same language, for
years and years; you have listened to the same thing from other lips, in
the same language, for years and years. How one knows it all
beforehand--every note in that barrel-organ of echoes! One leaves them
feeling like an old, old man, vowing one will never again submit to such
a process of demoralization, and understanding, better than ever, the
justification of monarchies and tyrannies: these creatures are born to
act and think and believe as others tell them. You may be drawn to one
or the other, detecting an unusual kindliness of nature or some
endearing trick; for the most part, one studies them with a kind of
medical interest. How comes it that this man, respectably equipped by
birth, has grown so warped and atrophied, an animated bundle of
deficiencies?

Life is the cause--life, the onward march of years. It has a cramping
effect; it closes the pores, intensifying one line of activity at the
expense of all the others; often enough it encrusts the individual with
a kind of shell, a veneer of something akin to hypocrisy. Your ordinary
adult is an egoist in matters of the affections; a specialist in his own
insignificant pursuit; a dull dog. Dimly aware of these defects, he
confines himself to generalities or, grown confidential, tells you of
his little fads, his little love-affairs--such ordinary ones! Like those
millions of his fellows, he has been transformed into a screw, a bolt, a
nut, in the machine. He is standardised.

A man who has tried to remain a mere citizen of the world and refused to
squeeze himself into the narrow methods and aspirations of any epoch or
country, will discover that children correspond unconsciously to his
multifarious interests. They are not standardised. They are more
generous in their appreciations, more sensitive to pure ideas, more
impersonal. Their curiosity is disinterested. The stock may be
rudimentary, but the outlook is spacious; it is the passionless outlook
of the sage. A child is ready to embrace the universe. And, unlike
adults, he is never afraid to face his own limitations. How refreshing
to converse with folks who have no bile to vent, no axe to grind, no
prejudices to air; who are pagans to the core; who, uninitiated into the
false value of externals, never fail to size you up from a more
spiritual point of view than do their elders; who are not oozing
politics and sexuality, nor afflicted with some stupid ailment or other
which prevents them doing this and that. To be in contact with physical
health--it would alone suffice to render their society a dear delight,
quite apart from the fact that if you are wise and humble you may tiptoe
yourself, by inches, into fairyland.

That scarlet sash of hers set me thinking--thinking of the comparative
rarity of the colour red as an ingredient of the Italian panorama. The
natives seem to avoid it in their clothing, save among certain costumes
of the centre and south. You see little red in the internal decorations
of the houses--in their wallpapers, the coloured tiles underfoot, the
tapestries, table-services and carpets, though a certain fondness for
pink is manifest, and not only in Levanto. There is a gulf between pink
and red.

It is essentially a land of blue and its derivatives--cool, intellectual
tints. The azure sea follows you far inland with its gleams. Look
landwards from the water--purple Apennines are ever in sight. And up
yonder, among the hills, you will rarely escape from celestial hues.

Speaking of these mountains in a general way, they are bare masses whose
coloration trembles between misty blue and mauve according to distance,
light, and hour of day. As building-stone, the rock imparts a grey-blue
tint to the walls. The very flowers are blue; it is a peculiarity of
limestone formation, hitherto unexplained, to foster blooms of this
colour. Those olive-coloured slopes are of a glaucous tone.

Or wander through the streets of any town and examine the pottery
whether ancient or modern--sure index of national taste. Greens galore,
and blues and bilious yellows; seldom will you see warmer shades. And if
you do, it is probably Oriental or Siculo-Arabic work, or their
imitations.

One does not ask for wash-hand basins of sang-de-boeuf. One wonders,
merely, whether this avoidance of sanguine tints in the works of man be
an instinctive paraphrase of surrounding nature, or due to some cause
lying deep down in the roots of Italian temperament. I am aware that the
materials for producing crimson are not common in the peninsula. If they
liked the colour, the materials would be forthcoming.

The Spaniards, a different race, sombre and sensuous, are not averse to
red. Nor are the Greeks. Russians have a veritable cult of it; their
word for "beautiful" means red. It is therefore not a matter of climate.

In Italy, those rare splashes of scarlet--the flaming horse-cloths of
Florence, a ruddy sail that flecks the sea, some procession of
ruby-tinted priests--they come as a shock, a shock of delight. Cross the
Mediterranean, and you will find emotional hues predominating; the land
is aglow with red, the very shadows suffused with it. Or go further
east....

Meanwhile, Attilio hovers discreetly near the hotel-entrance, ready to
convey me to Jericho. He is a small mason-boy to whom I contrived to be
useful in the matter of an armful of obstreperous bricks which refused
to remain balanced on his shoulder. Forthwith, learning that I was a
stranger unfamiliar with Levanto, he conceived the project of abandoning
his regular work and becoming my guide, philosopher and friend.

"Drop your job for the sake of a few days?" I inquired. "You'll get the
sack, my boy."

Not so, he thought. He was far too serviceable to those people. They
would welcome him with open arms whenever--if ever--he cared to return
to them. Was not the mason-in-chief a cousin of his? Everything could be
arranged, without a doubt.

And so it was.

He knows the country; every nook of the hills and sea-shore. A
pleasanter companion could not be found; observant and tranquil, tinged
with a gravity beyond his years--a gravity due to certain family
troubles--and with uncommon sweetness of disposition. He has evidently
been brought up with sisters.

We went one day up the valley to a village, I forget its name, that sits
on a hill-top above the spot where two streams unite; the last part of
the way is a steep climb under olives. Here we suddenly took leave of
spring and encountered a bank of wintry snow. It forced us to take
refuge in the shop of a tobacconist who provided some liquid and other
refreshment. Would I might meet him again, that genial person: I never
shall! We conversed in English, a language he had acquired in the course
of many peregrinations about the globe (he used to be a seaman), and
great was Attilio's astonishment on hearing a man whom he knew from
infancy now talking to me in words absolutely incomprehensible. He
asked:

"You two--do you really understand each other?"

On our homeward march he pointed to some spot, barely discernible among
the hills on our left. That was where he lived. His mother would be
honoured to see me. We might walk on to Monterosso afterwards. Couldn't
I manage it?

To be sure I could. And the very next day. But the place seemed a long
way off and the country absolutely wild. I said:

"You will have to carry a basket of food."

"Better than bricks which grow heavier every minute. Your basket, I
daresay, will be pretty light towards evening."

The name of his natal village, a mere hamlet, has slipped my memory. I
only know that we moved at daybreak up the valley behind Levanto and
presently turned to our right past a small mill of some kind; olives,
then chestnuts, accompanied the path which grew steeper every moment,
and was soon ankle-deep in slush from the melted snow. This was his
daily walk, he explained. An hour and a half down, in the chill twilight
of dawn; two hours' trudge home, always up hill, dead tired, through mud
and mire, in pitch darkness, often with snow and rain.

"Do you wonder," he added, "at my preferring to be with you?"

"I wonder at my fortune, which gave me such a charming friend. I am not
always so lucky."

"Luck--it is the devil. We have had no news from my father in America
for two years. No remittances ever come from him. He may be dead, for
all we know. Our land lies half untilled; we cannot pay for the hire of
day labourers. We live from hand to mouth; my mother is not strong; I
earn what I can; one of my sisters is obliged to work at Levanto. Think
what that means, for us! Perhaps that is why you call me thoughtful. I
am the oldest male in the family; I must conduct myself accordingly.
Everything depends on me. It is enough to make anyone thoughtful. My
mother will tell you about it."

She doubtless did, though I gleaned not so much as the drift of her
speech. The mortal has yet to be born who can master all the dialects of
Italy; this one seemed to bear the same relation to the Tuscan tongue
which that of the Basses-Pyrenées bears to French--it was practically
another language. Listening to her, I caught glimpses, now and then, of
familiar Mediterranean sounds; like lamps shining through a fog, they
were quickly swallowed up in the murk. Unlike her offspring, she had
never been to school. That accounted for it. A gentle woman, frail in
health and manifestly wise; the look of the house, of the children, bore
witness to her sagacity. Understanding me as little as I understood her,
our conversation finally lapsed into a series of smiles, which Attilio
interpreted as best he could. She insisted upon producing some apples
and a bottle of wine, and I was interested to notice that she poured out
to her various male offspring, down to the tiniest tot, but drank not a
drop herself, nor gave any to her big daughters.

"She is sorry they will not let you stay at Levanto."

"Carrara lies just beyond the war-zone. I want to visit the marble-mines
when the weather grows a little warmer, and perhaps write something
about them. Ask her whether you can join me there for a week or so, if I
send the money. Make her say yes."

She said yes.

With a companion like this, to reflect my moods and act as buffer
between myself and the world, I felt I could do anything. Already I saw
myself exploring those regions, interviewing directors as to methods of
work and output, poking my nose into municipal archives and libraries to
learn the history of those various quarries of marble, plain and
coloured; tracking the footsteps of Michael Angelo at Seravezza and
Pietrasanta and re-discovering that old road of his and the inscription
he left on the rock; speculating why the Romans, who ransacked the
furthermost corners of the earth for tinted stones, knew so little of
the treasures here buried; why the Florentines were long content to use
that grey bigio, when the lordly black portovenere, [2] with its golden
streaks, was lying at their very doors....

The gods willed otherwise.

Then, leaving that hospitable dame, we strolled forth along a winding
road--a good road, once more--ever upwards, under the bare chestnuts. At
last the watershed was reached and we began a zigzag descent towards the
harbour of Monterosso, meeting not a soul by the way. Snow lay on these
uplands; it began to fall softly. As the luncheon hour had arrived we
took refuge in a small hut of stone and there opened the heavy basket
which gave forth all that heart could desire--among other things, a
large fiasco of strong white wine which we drank to the dregs. It made
us both delightfully tipsy. So passed an hour of glad confidences in
that abandoned shelter with the snowflakes drifting in upon us--one of
those hours that sweeten life and compensate for months of dreary
harassment.

A long descent, past some church or convent famous as a place of
pilgrimage, led to the strand of Monterosso where the waves were
sparkling in tepid sunshine. Then up again, by a steep incline, to a
signal station perched high above the sea. Attilio wished to salute a
soldier-relative working here. I remained discreetly in the background;
it would never do for a foreigner to be seen prying into Marconi
establishments in this confounded "zone of defense." Another hour by
meandering woodland paths brought us to where, from the summit of a
hill, we looked down upon Levanto, smiling merrily in its conch-shaped
basin....

All this cloudless afternoon we conversed in a flowery dell under the
pine trees, with the blue sea at our feet. It was a different climate
from yesterday; so warm, so balmy. Impossible to conceive of snow! I
thought I had definitely bidden farewell to winter.

Trains, an endless succession of trains, were rumbling through the
bowels of the mountain underneath, many of them filled with French
soldiers bound for Salonika. They have been going southward ever since
my arrival at Levanto.

Attilio was more pensive than usual; the prospect of returning to his
bricks was plainly irksome. Why not join for a change, I suggested, one
of yonder timber-felling parties? He knew all about it. The pay is too
poor. They are cutting the pines all along this coast and dragging them
to the water, where they are sawn into planks and despatched to the
battle-front. It seemed a pity to Attilio; at this rate, he thought,
there would soon be none left, and how then would we be able to linger
in the shade and take our pleasure on some future day?

"Have no fear of that," I said. "And yet--would you believe it? Many
years ago these hills, as far as you can see to right and left and
behind, were bare like the inside of your hand. Then somebody looked at
the landscape and said: 'What a shame to make so little use of these
hundreds of miles of waste soil. Let us try an experiment with a new
kind of pine tree which I think will prosper among the rocks. One of
these days people may be glad of them.'"

"Well?"

"You see what has happened. Right up to Genoa, and down below
Levanto--nothing but pines. You Italians ought to be grateful to that
man. The value of the timber which is now being felled along this
stretch of coast cannot be less than a thousand francs an hour. That is
what you would have to pay, if you wanted to buy it. Twelve thousand
francs a day; perhaps twice as much."

"Twelve thousand francs a day!"

"And do you know who planted the trees? It was a Scotsman."

"A Scozzese. What kind of animal is that?"

"A person who thinks ahead."

"Then my mother is a Scotsman."

I glanced from the sea into his face; there was something of the same
calm depth in both, the same sunny composure. What is it, this limpid
state of the mind? What do we call this alloy of profundity and
frankness? We call it intelligence. I would like to meet that man or
woman who can make Attilio say something foolish. He does not know what
it is to feel shy. Serenely objective, he discards those subterfuges
which are the usual safeguard of youth or inexperience--the evasions,
reservations and prevarications that defend the shallow, the weak, the
self-conscious. His candour rises above them. He feels instinctively
that these things are pitfalls.

"Have you no sweetheart, Attilio?"

"Certainly I have. But it is not a man's affair. We are only children,
you understand--siamo ancora piccoli."

"Did you ever give her a kiss?"

"Never. Not a single one."

I relight my pipe, and then inquire:

"Why not give her a kiss?"

"People would call me a disrespectful boy."

"Nobody, surely, need be any the wiser?"

"She is not like you and me."

A pause....

"Not like us? How so?"

"She would tell her sister."

"What of it?"

"The sister would tell her mother, who would say unpleasant things to
mine. And perhaps to other folks. Then the fat would be in the fire. And
that is why."

Another pause....

"What would your mother say to you?"

"She would say: 'You are the oldest male; you should conduct yourself
accordingly. What is this lack of judgment I hear about?'"

"I begin to understand."




Siena

Driven from the Paradise of Levanto, I landed not on earth but--with one
jump--in Hell. The Turks figure forth a Hell of ice and snow; this is my
present abode; its name is Siena. Every one knows that this town lies on
a hill, on three hills; the inference that it would be cold in January
was fairly obvious; how cold, nobody could have guessed. The sun is
invisible. Streets are deep in snow. Icicles hang from the windows.
Worst of all, the hotels are unheated. Those English, you know,--they
refuse to supply us with coal....

Could this be the city where I was once nearly roasted to death? It is
an effort to recall that glistening month of the Palio festival, a month
I spent at a genuine pension for a set purpose, namely, to write a study
on the habits of "The Pension-cats of Europe"--those legions of elderly
English spinsters who lead crepuscular lives in continental
boarding-houses. I tore it up, I remember; it was unfair. These ladies
have a perfect right to do as they please and, for that matter, are not
nearly as ridiculous as many married couples that live outside
boarding-houses. But when Siena grew intolerable--a stark,
ill-provisioned place; you will look in vain for a respectable grocer or
butcher; the wine leaves much to be desired; indeed, it has all the
drawbacks of Florence and none of its advantages--why, then we fled into
Mr. Edward Hutton's Unknown Tuscany. There, at Abbadia San Salvatore
(though the summit of Mount Amiata did not come up to expectation) we at
last felt cool again, wandering amid venerable chestnuts and wondrously
tinted volcanic blocks, mountain-fragments, full of miniature glens and
moisture and fernery--a green twilight, a landscape made for fairies....

Was this the same Siena from which we once escaped to get cool? Muffled
up to the ears, with three waistcoats on, I move in and out of doors,
endeavouring to discover whether there be any appreciable difference in
temperature between the external air and that of my bedroom. There
cannot be much to choose between them. They say I am the only foreigner
now in Siena. That, at least, is a distinction, a record. Furthermore,
no matches, not even of the sulphur variety, were procurable in any of
the shops for the space of three days; that also, I imagine, cannot yet
have occurred within the memory of living man.

While stamping round the great Square yesterday to keep my feet warm, a
Florentine addressed me; a commercial gentleman, it would seem. He
disapproved of this square--it was not regular in shape, it was not even
level. What a piazza! Such was his patriotism that he actually went on
to say unfriendly things about the tower. Who ever thought of building a
tower at the bottom of a hill? It was good enough, he dared say, for
Siena. Oh, yes; doubtless it satisfied their artistic notions, such as
they were.

This tower being one of my favourites, I felt called upon to undertake
its defence. Recollecting all I had ever heard or read to its credit,
citing authorities neither of us had ever dreamt of--improvising
lustily, in short, as I warmed to my work--I concluded by proving it to
be one of the seven wonders of the world. He said:

"Now really! One would think you had been born in this miserable hole.
You know what we Florentines say:

  Siena
  Di tre cose è piena:
  Torri, campane,
  E figli di putane."

"I admit that Siena is deficient in certain points," I replied. "That
wonderful dome of yours, for example--there is nothing like it here."

"No, indeed. Ah, that cupola! Ah, Brunelleschi--che genio!"

"I perceive you are a true Florentine. Could you perhaps tell me why
Florentines, coming home from abroad, always rejoice to see it rising
out of the plain?"

"Some enemy has been talking to you...."

A little red-haired boy from Lucca, carrying for sale a trayful of those
detestable plaster-casts, then accosted me.

Who bought such abominations, I inquired?

Nobody. Business was bad.

Bad? I could well believe it. Having for the first time in my life
nothing better to do, I did my duty. I purchased the entire collection
of these horrors, on the understanding that he should forthwith convey
them in my presence to the desolate public garden, where they were set
up, one after the other, on the edge of a bench and shattered to
fragments with our snow-balls. Thus perished, not without laughter and
in a good cause, three archangels, two Dantés, a nondescript lady with
brocade garments and a delectable amorino whose counterpart, the sole
survivor, was reserved for a better fate--being carried home and
presented as a gift to my chambermaid.

She was polite enough to call it a beautiful work of art.

I was polite enough not to contradict her.

Both of us know better....

This young girl has no illusions (few Tuscans have) and yet a great
charm. Her lover is at the front. There is little for her to do, the
hotel being practically empty. There is nothing whatever for me to do,
in these Arctic latitudes. Bored to death, both of us, we confabulate
together huddled in shawls and greatcoats, each holding a charcoal pan
to keep the fingers from being frostbitten. I say to myself: "You will
never find a maidservant of this type in Rome, so sprightly of tongue,
distinguished in manner and spotless in person--never!"

The same with her words. The phrases trip out of her mouth, immaculate,
each in full dress. Seldom does she make an original remark, but she
says ordinary things in a tone of intense conviction and invests them
with an appetizing savour. Wherein lies that peculiar salt of Tuscan
speech? In its emphasis, its air of finality. They are emphatic, rather
than profound. Their deepest utterances, if you look below the surface,
are generally found to be variants of one of those ancestral saws or
proverbs wherewith the country is saturated. Theirs is a crusted charm.
A hard and glittering sanity, a kind of ageless enamel, is what
confronts us in their temperament. There are not many deviations from
this Tuscan standard. Close by, in Umbria, you will find a softer type.

One can be passably warm in bed. Here I lie for long, long hours,
endeavouring to generate the spark of energy which will propel me from
this inhospitable mountain. Here I lie and study an old travel-book. I
mean to press it to the last drop.

One seldom presses books out, nowadays. The mania for scraps of one kind
or another, the general cheapening of printed matter, seem to have
dulled that faculty and given us a scattered state of mind. We browse
dispersedly, in goatish fashion, instead of nibbling down to the root
like that more conscientious quadruped whose name, if I mentioned it,
would degrade the metaphor. Devouring so much, so hastily, so
irreverentially, how shall a man establish close contact with the mind
of him who writes, and impregnate himself with his peculiar outlook to
such an extent as to be able to take on, if only momentarily, a
colouring different from his own? It is a task requiring submissiveness
and leisure.

And yet, what could be more interesting than really to observe things
and men from the angle of another individual, to install oneself within
his mentality and make it one's habitation? To sit in his bones--what
glimpses of unexplored regions! Were a man to know what his fellow truly
thinks; could he feel in his own body those impulses which drive the
other to his idiomatic acts and words--what an insight he would gain!
Morally, it might well amount to "tout comprendre, c'est ne rien
pardonner"; but who troubles about pardoning or condemning?
Intellectually, it would be a feast. Thus immersed into an alien
personality, a man would feel as though he lived two lives, and
possessed two characters at the same time. One's own life, prolonged to
an age, could never afford such unexpected revelations.

The thing can be done, up to a point, with patient humility; for
everybody writes himself down more or less, though not everybody is
worth the trouble of deciphering.

I purpose to apply this method; to squeeze the juice, the life-blood,
out of what some would call a rather dry Scotch traveller. I read his
book in England for the first time two years ago, and have brought it
here with a view to further dissection. Would I had known of its
existence five years earlier! Strange to say, despite my deplorable
bookishness (vide Press) this was not the case; I could never ascertain
either the author's name or the title of his volume, though I had heard
about him, rather vaguely, long before that time. It was Dr. Dohrn of
the Naples Aquarium who said to me in those days:

"Going to the South? Whatever you do, don't forget to read that book by
an old Scotch clergyman. He ran all over the country with a top-hat and
an umbrella, copying inscriptions. He was just your style: perfectly
crazy."

Flattered at the notion of being likened to a Scottish divine, I made
all kinds of inquiries--in vain. I abandoned hope of unearthing the
top-hatted antiquarian and had indeed concluded him to be a myth, when a
friend supplied me with what may be absurdly familiar to less bookish
people: "The Nooks and By-ways of Italy." By Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D.
Liverpool, 1868.

A glance sufficed to prove that this Ramage belonged to the brotherhood
of David Urquhart, Mure of Caldwell, and the rest of them. Where are
they gone, those candid inquirers, so full of gentlemanly curiosity, so
informative and yet shrewdly human; so practical--think of Urquhart's
Turkish Baths--though stuffed with whimsicality and abstractions? Where
is the spirit that gave them birth?

One grows attached to these "Nooks and By-ways." An honest book, richly
thoughtful, and abounding in kindly twinkles.

Now, regarding the top-hat. I find no mention of it in these letters.
For letters they are; letters extracted from a diary which was written
on his return from Italy in 1828 from "very full notes made from day to
day during my journey." 1828: that date is important. It was in 1828,
therefore, when the events occurred which he relates, and he allowed an
interval of forty years to elapse ere making them public.

The umbrella on the other hand is always cropping up. It pervades the
volume like a Leitmotif. It is "a most invaluable article" for
protecting the head against the sun's rays; so constantly is it used
that after a single month's wear we find it already in "a sad state of
dilapidation." Still, he clings to it. As a defence against brigands it
might prove useful, and on one occasion, indeed, he seizes it in his
hand "prepared to show fight." This happened, be it remembered, in 1828.
Vainly one conjectures what the mountain folk of South Italy thought of
such a phenomenon. Even now, if they saw you carrying an umbrella about
in the sunshine, they would cross themselves and perhaps pray for your
recovery--perhaps not. Yet Ramage was not mad at all. He was only more
individualistic and centrifugal than many people. Having formed by
bitter experience a sensible theory--to wit, that sunstroke is
unpleasant and can be avoided by the use of an umbrella--he is not above
putting it into practice. Let others think and do as they please!

For the rest, his general appearance was quite in keeping. How
delightful he must have looked! Why have we no such types nowadays?
Wearing a "white merino frock-coat, nankeen trowsers, a large-brimmed
straw hat, and white shoes," he must have been a fairly conspicuous
object in the landscape. That hat alone will have alarmed the peasantry
who to this day and hour wear nothing but felt on their heads. And note
the predominance of the colour white in his attire; it was popular, at
that period, with English travellers. Such men, however, were unknown in
most of the regions which Ramage explored. The colour must have inspired
feelings akin to awe in the minds of the natives, for white is their
bête noire. They have a rooted aversion to it and never employ it in
their clothing, because it suggests to their fancy the idea of
bloodlessness--of anaemia and death. If you want to make one of them ill
over his dinner, wear a white waistcoat.

Accordingly, it is not surprising that he sometimes finds himself "an
object of curiosity." An English Vice-Consul, at one place, was "quite
alarmed at my appearance." Elsewhere he meets a band of peasant-women
who "took fright at my appearance and scampered off in the utmost
confusion." And what happened at Taranto? By the time of his arrival in
that town his clothes were already in such a state that "they would
scarcely fit an Irish beggar." Umbrella in hand--he is careful to
apprise us of this detail--and soaked moreover from head to foot after
an immersion in the river Tara, he entered the public square, which was
full of inhabitants, and soon found himself the centre of a large crowd.
Looking, he says, like a drowned rat, his appearance caused "great
amazement."

"What is the matter? Who is he?" they asked.

The muleteer explained that he was an Englishman, and "that immediately
seemed to satisfy them."

Of course it did. People in those times were prepared for anything on
the part of an Englishman, who was a far more self-assertive and
self-confident creature than nowadays.

Thus arrayed in snowy hue, like the lilies of the field, he perambulates
during the hot season the wildest parts of South Italy, strangely
unprejudiced, heedless of bugs and brigands--a real danger in 1828: did
he not find the large place Rossano actually blocked by them?--sleeping
in stables and execrable inns, viewing sites of antiquity and natural
beauty, interrogating everybody about everything and, in general,
"satisfying his curiosity." That curiosity took a great deal to satisfy.
It is a positive relief to come upon a sentence in this book, a sentence
unique, which betrays a relaxing or waning of this terrible curiosity.
"It requires a strong mania for antiquities to persevere examining such
remains as Alife furnishes, and I was soon satisfied with what I had
seen." Nor did he climb to the summit of Mount Vulture, as he would have
done if the view had not been obscured by a haze.

His chief concern could not be better summed up than in the sub-title he
has chosen for this volume: Wanderings in search of ancient remains and
modern superstitions. To any one who knows the country it appears
astonishing how much he contrived to see, and in how brief a space of
time. He accomplished wonders. For it was no mean task he had proposed
to himself, namely, "to visit every spot in Italy which classic writers
had rendered famous."

To visit every spot--what a Gargantuan undertaking! None but a quite
young man could have conceived such a project, and even Ramage, with all
his good health and zest, might have spent half a lifetime over the
business but for his habit of breathless hustle, which leaves the reader
panting behind. He is always on the move. He reminds one of Mr. Phineas
Fogg in that old tale. The moment he has "satisfied his curiosity" there
is no holding him; off he goes; the smiles of the girls whom he adores,
the entreaties of some gentle scholar who fain would keep him as guest
for the night--they are vain; he is tired to death, but "time is
precious" and he "tears himself away from his intelligent host" and
scampers into the wilderness once more, as if the Furies were at his
heels. He thinks nothing of rushing from Catanzaro to Cotrone, from
Manduria to Brindisi, in a single day--at a time when there was hardly a
respectable road in the country. Up to the final paragraph of the book
he is "hurrying" because time is "fast running out."

This sense of fateful hustle--this, and the umbrella--they impart quite
a peculiar flavour to his pages.

One would like to learn more about so lovable a type--for such he was,
unquestionably; one would like to know, above all things, why his
descriptions of other parts of Italy have never been printed. Was the
enterprise interrupted by his death? He tells us that the diaries of his
tours through the central and northern regions were written; that he
visited "every celebrated spot in Umbria and Etruria" and wandered "as
far as the valley of the Po." Where are these notes? Those on Etruria,
especially, would make good reading at this distance of time, when even
Dennis has acquired an old-world aroma. The Dictionary of National
Biography might tell us something about him, but that handy little
volume is not here; moreover, it has a knack of telling you everything
about people save what you ought to know.

So, for example, I had occasion not long ago to look up the account of
Charles Waterton the naturalist. [3] He did good work in his line, but
nothing is more peculiar to the man than his waywardness. It was
impossible for him to do anything after the manner of other folks. In
all his words and actions he was a freak, a curiosity, the prince of
eccentrics. Yet this, the essence of the man, the fundamental trait of
his character which shines out of every page of his writing and every
detail of his daily life--this, the feature by which he was known to his
fellows and ought to be known to posterity--it is intelligible from that
account only if you read between the lines. Is that the way to write
"biography"?

Fortunately he has written himself down; so has Ramage; and it is
instructive to compare the wayside reflections of these two
contemporaries as they rove about the ruins of Italy; the first, ardent
Catholic, his horizon close-bounded by what the good fathers of
Stonyhurst had seen fit to teach him; the other, less complacent, all
alive indeed with Calvinistic disputatiousness and ready to embark upon
bold speculations anent the origin of heathen gods and their modern
representatives in the Church of Rome; amiable scholars and gentlemen,
both of them; yet neither venturing to draw those plain conclusions
which the "classic remains of paganism" would have forced upon anybody
else--upon anybody, that is, who lacked their initial warp, whose mind
had not been twisted in youth or divided, rather, into watertight
compartments.

A long sentence....




Pisa

After a glacial journey--those English! They will not even give us coal
for steam-heating--I arrived here. It is warmer, appreciably warmer. Yet
I leave to-morrow or next day. The streets of the town, the distant
beach of San Rossore and its pine trees--they are fraught with sad
memories; memories of an autumn month in the early nineties. A city of
ghosts....

The old hotel had put on a new face; freshly decorated, it wears none
the less a poverty-stricken air. My dinner was bad and insufficient. One
grows sick of those vile maccheroni made with war-time flour. The place
is full of rigid officers taking themselves seriously. Odd, how a
uniform can fill a simpleton with self-importance. What does Bacon say?
I forget. Something apposite--something about the connection between
military costumes and vanity. For the worst of this career is that it is
liable to transform even a sensible man into a fool. I never see these
sinister-clanking marionettes without feelings of distrust. They are the
outward symbol of an atavistic striving: the modern infâme. We have been
dying for sometime past from over-legislation. Now we are caught in the
noose. A bureaucracy is bad enough. A bureaucracy can at least be
bribed. Militarism dries up even that little fount of the imagination.

Another twenty years of this, and we may be living in caves again; they
came near it, at the end of the Thirty Years' War. Such a cataclysm as
ours may account for the extinction of the great Cro-Magnon
civilization--as fine a race, physically, as has yet appeared on earth;
they too may have been afflicted with the plague of nationalism, unless,
as is quite likely, that horrid work was accomplished by a microbe of
some kind....

In the hour of evening, under a wintry sky amid whose darkly massed
vapours a young moon is peering down upon this maddened world, I wander
alone through deserted roadways towards that old solitary brick-tower.
Here I stand, and watch the Arno rolling its sullen waves. In Pisa, at
such an hour, the Arno is the emblem of Despair. Swollen with melted
snow from the mountains, it has gnawed its miserable clay banks and now
creeps along, leaden and inert, half solid, like a torrent of liquid
mud--irresolute whether to be earth or water; whether to stagnate here
for ever at my feet, or crawl onward yet another sluggish league into
the sea. So may Lethe look, or Styx: the nightmare of a flood.

There is dreary monotony in all Italian rivers, once they have reached
the plain. They are livelier in their upper reaches. At Florence--where
those citron-tinted houses are mirrored in the stream--you may study the
Arno in all its ever-changing moods. Seldom is its colour quite the
same. The hue of café-au-lait in full spate, it shifts at other times
between apple-green and jade, between celadon and chrysolite and
eau-de-Nil. In the weariness of summer the tints are prone to fade
altogether out of the waves. They grow bleached, devitalized; they are
spent, withering away like grass that has lain in the sun. [4] Yet with
every thunder-storm on yonder hills the colour-sprite leaps back into
the waters.

Your Florentine of the humbler sort loves to dawdle along the bank on a
bright afternoon, watching the play of the river and drawing a kind of
philosophic contentment out of its cool aquatic humours. Presently he
reaches that bridge--the jewellers' bridge. He thinks he must buy a
ring. Be sure the stone will reflect his Arno in one of its moods. I
will wager he selects a translucent chrysoprase set in silver, a cheap
and stubborn gem whose frigidly uncompromising hue appeals in mysterious
fashion to his own temperament.

Whoever suffers from insomnia will find himself puzzling at night over
questions which have no particular concern for him at other times. And
one seems to be more wide awake, during those moments, than by day. Yet
the promptings of the brain, which then appear so lucid, so novel and
convincing, will seldom bear examination in the light of the sun. To
test the truth of this, one has only to jot down one's thoughts at the
time, and peruse them after breakfast. How trite they read, those
brilliant imaginings!

For reasons which I cannot fathom, I pondered last night upon the
subject of heredity; a subject that had a certain fascination for me in
my biological days. The lacunae of science! We weigh the distant stars
and count up their ingredients. Yet here is a phenomenon which lies
under our very hand and to which is devoted the most passionate study:
what have we learnt of its laws? Be that as it may, there occurred to me
last night a new idea. It consisted in putting together two facts which
have struck me separately on many occasions, but never conjointly. Taken
together, I said to myself, and granted that both are correct, they may
help to elucidate a dark problem of national psychology.

The first one I state rather tentatively, having hardly sufficient
material to go upon. It is this. You will find it more common in Italy
than in England for the male offspring of a family to resemble the
father and the female the mother. I cannot suggest a reason for this. I
have observed the fact--that is all.

Let me say, in parenthesis, that it is well to confine oneself to adults
in such researches. Childhood and youth is a period of changing lights
and half-tones and temperamental interplay. Characteristics of body and
mind are held, as it were, in solution. We think a child takes after its
mother because of this or that feature. If we wait for twenty-five
years, we see the true state of affairs; the hair has grown dark like
the father's, the nose, the most telling item of the face, has also
approximated to his type, likewise the character--in fact the offspring
is clearly built on paternal lines. And vice-versa. To study children
for these purposes would be waste of time.

The second observation I regard as axiomatic. It is this. You will
nowhere find an adult offspring which reproduces in any marked degree
the physical features of one parent displaying in any marked degree the
mental features of the other. That man whose external build and
complexion is entirely modelled upon that of his hard materialistic
father and who yet possesses all the artistic idealism of his maternal
parent--such creatures do not exist in nature, though you may encounter
them as often as you please in the pages of novelists.

Let me insert another parenthesis to observe that I am speaking of the
broad mass, the average, in a general way. For it stands to reason that
the offspring may be vaguely intermediate between two parents, may
resemble one or both in certain particulars and not in others, may hark
back to ancestral types or bear no appreciable likeness to any one
discoverable. It is a theme admitting of endless combinations and
permutations. Or again, in reference to the first proposition, it would
be easy for any traveller in this country to point out, for example, a
woman who portrays the qualities of her father in the clearest manner. I
know a dozen such cases. Hundreds of them would not make them otherwise
than what I think they are--rarer here than in England.

Granting that both these propositions are correct, what should we expect
to find? That in Italy the male type of character and temperament is
more constant, more intimately associated with the male type of feature;
and the same with the female. In other words, that the categories into
which their men and women fall are fewer and more clearly defined, by
reason of the fact that their mental and moral sex-characteristics are
more closely correlated with their physical sex-characteristics. That
the Englishman, on the other hand, male or female, does not fall so
easily into categories; he is complex and difficult to "place," the
psychological sex-boundaries being more hazily demarcated. There is
iridescence and ambiguity here, whereas Italians of either sex, once the
rainbow period of youth is over, are relatively unambiguous; easily
"placed."

Is this what we find? I think so.

Speculations....

I never pass through Pisa without calling to mind certain rat-hunts in
company with J. O. M., who was carried out of the train at this very
station, dead, because he refused to follow my advice. He was my
neighbour at one time; he lived near the river Mole in relative
seclusion; coursing rats with Dandie Dinmonts was the only form of
exercise which entailed no strain on his weakened constitution. How he
loved it!

This O---- was a man of mystery and violence, who threw himself into
every kind of human activity with superhuman, Satanic, zest; traveller,
sportsman, financier, mining expert, lover of wine and women, of books
and prints; one of the founders, I believe, of the Rhodesia Company;
faultlessly dressed, infernally rich and, when he chose--which was
fairly often--preposterously brutal. Neither manner nor face were
winning. He was swarthy almost to blackness, quite un-English in looks,
with rather long hair, a most menacing moustache and the fiercest eyes
imaginable; a king of the gipsies, so far as features went. Something
sinister hung about his personality. A predatory type, unquestionably;
never so happy as when pitting his wits or strength against others,
tracking down this or that--by choice, living creatures. He had taken
life by the throat, and excesses of various kinds having shattered his
frame, there was an end, for the time being, of deer-stalking and
tigers; it was a tame period of rat-hunts with those terriers whose
murderous energies were a pis aller, yielding a sort of vicarious
pleasure. The neighbourhood was depopulated of such beasts, purchased at
fancy prices; when a sufficient quantity (say, half a hundred) had been
collected together, I used to receive a telegram containing the single
word "rats." Then the pony was saddled, and I rode down for the grand
field day.

We once gave the hugest of these destroyed rodents, I remember, to an
amiable old sow, a friend of the family. What was she going to do? She
ate it, as you would eat a pear. She engulfed the corpse methodically,
beginning at the head, working her way through breast and entrails while
her chops dripped with gore, and ending with the tail, which gave some
little trouble to masticate, on account of its length and tenuity.
Altogether, decidedly good sport....

Then O---- disappeared from my ken. Years went by. Improving health, in
the course of time, tempted him back into his former habits; he built
himself a shooting lodge in the Alps. We were neighbours again, having
no ridge worth mentioning save the Schadona pass between us. I joined
him once or twice--chamois, instead of rats. This place was constructed
on a pretentious scale, and he must have paid fantastic sums for the
transport of material to that remote region (you could watch the chamois
from the very windows) and for the rights over all the country round
about. [5] O---- told me that the superstitious Catholic peasants raised
every kind of difficulty and objection to his life there; it was a
regular conspiracy. I suggested a more friendly demeanour, especially
towards their priests. That was not his way. He merely said: "I'll be
even with them. Mark my words."....

There followed another long interval, during which he vanished
completely. Then, one April afternoon on the Posilipo, a sailor climbed
up with a note from him. The Consul-General said I lived here. If so,
would I come to Bertolini's hotel at once? He was seriously ill.

Neighbours once more!

I left then and there, and was appalled at the change in him. His skin
was drawn tight as parchment over a face the colour of earth, there was
no flesh on his hands, the voice was gone, though fire still gleamed
viciously in the hollows of his eyes. That raven-black hair was streaked
with grey and longer than ever, which gave him an incongruously devout
appearance. He had taken pitiful pains to look fresh and appetizing.

So we sat down to dinner on Bertolini's terrace, in the light of a full
moon. O---- ate nothing whatever.

He arrived from Egypt some time ago, on his way to England. The doctor
had forbidden further travelling or any other exertion on account of
various internal complications; among other things, his heart, he told
me, was as large as a child's head.

"I hope you can stand this food," he whispered, or rather croaked. "For
God's sake, order anything you fancy. As for me, I can't even eat like
you people. Asses' milk is what I get, and slops. Done for, this time.
I'm a dying man; anybody can see that. A dying man----"

"Something," I said, "is happening to that moon."

It was in eclipse. Half the bright surface had been ominously obscured
since we took our seats. O---- scowled at the satellite, and went on:

"But I won't be carried out of this dirty hole (Bertolini's)--not feet
first. Would you mind my gasping another day or two at your place? Rolfe
has told me about it."

We moved him, with infinite trouble. The journey woke his dormant
capacities for invective. He cursed at the way they jolted him about; he
cursed himself into a collapse that day, and we thought it was all over.
Then he rallied, and became more abusive than before. Nothing was right.
Stairs being forbidden, the whole lower floor of the house was placed at
his disposal; the establishment was dislocated, convulsed; and still he
swore. He swore at me for the better part of a week; at the servants,
and even at the good doctor Malbranc, who came every morning in a
specially hired steam-launch to make that examination which always ended
in his saying to me: "You must humour him. Heart-patients are apt to be
irritable." Irritable was a mild term for this particular patient. His
appetite, meanwhile, began to improve.

It was soon evident that my cook had not the common sense to prepare his
invalid dishes; a second one was engaged. Then, my gardener and
sailor-boy being manifest idiots, it became necessary to procure an
extra porter to fetch the numberless odd things he needed from town
every day, and every hour of the day. I wrote to the messenger people to
send the most capable lad on their books; we would engage him by the
week, at twice his ordinary pay. He arrived; a limp and lean nonentity,
with a face like a boiled codfish.

This miserable youth promptly became the object of O----'s bitterest
execration. I soon learnt to dread those conferences, those terrific
scenes which I was forced to witness in my capacity of interpreter.
O---- revelled in them with exceeding gusto. He used to gird his loins
for the effort of vituperation; I think he regarded the performance as a
legitimate kind of exercise--his last remaining one. As soon as the boy
returned from town and presented himself with his purchases, O---- would
glare at him for two or three minutes with such virulence, such
concentration of hatred and loathing, such a blaze of malignity in his
black eyes, that one fully expected to see the victim wither away; all
this in dead silence. Then he would address me in his usual whisper,
quite calmly, as though referring to the weather:

"Would you mind telling that double-distilled abortion that if he goes
on making such a face I shall have to shoot him. Tell him, will you;
there's a good fellow."

And I had to "humour" him.

"The gentleman"--I would say--"begs you will try to assume another
expression of countenance," or words to that effect; whereto he would
tearfully reply something about the will of God and the workmanship of
his father and mother, honest folks, both of them. I was then obliged to
add gravely:

"You had better try, all the same, or he may shoot you. He has a
revolver in his pocket, and a shooting licence from your government."

This generally led to the production of a most ghastly smile, calculated
to convey an ingratiating impression.

"Look at him," O---- would continue. "He is almost too good to be shot.
And now let's see. What does he call these things? Ask him, will you?"

"Asparagus."

"Tell him that when I order asparagus I mean asparagus and not
walking-sticks. Tell him that if he brings me such objects again, I'll
ram the whole bundle up--down his throat. What does he expect me to do
with them, eh? You might ask him, will you? And, God! what's this? Tell
him (accellerando) that when I send a prescription to be made up at the
Royal Pharmacy----"

"He explained about that. He went to the other place because he wanted
to hurry up."

"To hurry up? Tell him to hurry up and get to blazes. Oh, tell him----"

"You'll curse yourself into another collapse, at this rate."

To the doctor's intense surprise, he lingered on; he actually grew
stronger. Although never seeming to gain an ounce in weight, he could
eat a formidable breakfast and used to insist, to my horror and shame,
in importing his own wine, which he accused my German maid Bertha of
drinking on the sly. Callers cheered him up--Rolfe the Consul, Dr. Dohrn
of the Aquarium, and old Marquis Valiante, that perfect botanist--all of
them dead now! After a month and a half of painful experiences, we at
last learnt to handle him. The household machinery worked smoothly.

A final and excruciating interview ended in the dismissal of the
errand-boy, and I personally selected another one--a pretty little
rascal to whom he took a great fancy, over-tipping him scandalously. He
needed absolute rest; he got it; and I think was fairly happy or at
least tranquil (when not writhing in agony) at the end of that period. I
can still see him in the sunny garden, his clothes hanging about an
emaciated body--a skeleton in a deck-chair, a death's head among the
roses. Humiliated in this inactivity, he used to lie dumb for long
hours, watching the butterflies or gazing wistfully towards those
distant southern mountains which I proposed to visit later in the
season. Once a spark of that old throttling instinct flared up. It was
when a kestrel dashed overhead, bearing in its talons a captured lizard
whose tail fluttered in the air: the poor beast never made a faster
journey in its life. "Ha!" said O----. "That's sport."

At other times he related, always in that hoarse whisper, anecdotes of
his life, a life of reckless adventure, of fortunes made and fortunes
lost; or spoke of his old passion for art and books. He seemed to have
known, at one time or another, every artist and connoisseur on either
side of the Atlantic; he told me it had cost about £10,000 to acquire
his unique knowledge and taste in the matter of mezzotints, and that he
was concerned about the fate of his "Daphnis and Chloe" collection which
contained, he said, a copy of every edition in every language--all
except the unique Elizabethan version in the Huth library (now British
Museum). I happened to have one of the few modern reprints of that
stupid and ungainly book: would he accept it? Not likely! He was after
originals.

One day he suddenly announced:

"I am leaving you my small library of erotic literature, five or six
hundred pieces, worth a couple of thousand, I should say. Some wonderful
old French stuff, and as many Rops as you like, and Persian and Chinese
things--I can see you gloating over them! Don't thank me. And now I'm
off to England."

"To England?"

The doctor peremptorily forbade the journey; if he must go, let him wait
another couple of weeks and gain some more strength. But O---- was
obdurate; buoyed up, I imagine, with the prospect of movement and of
causing some little trouble at home. As the weather had grown unusually
hot, I booked at his own suggestion a luxurious cabin on a home-bound
liner and engaged a valet for the journey. On my handing him the
tickets, he said he had just changed his mind; he would travel overland;
there were some copper mines in Etruria of which he was director; he
meant to have a look at them en route and "give those people Hell" for
something or other. I tried to dissuade him, and all in vain. Finally I
said:

"You'll die, if you travel by land in this heat."

So he did. They carried him out of the train in the early days of June,
here at Pisa, feet first....

I never learnt the fate of that library of erotic literature. But his
will contained one singular provision: the body was to be cremated and
its ashes scattered among the hills of his Alpine property. This was his
idea of "being even" with the superstitious peasantry, who would
thenceforward never have ventured out of doors after dark, for fear of
encountering his ghost. He would harass them eternally! It was no bad
notion of revenge. A sandy-haired gentleman came from Austria to Italy
to convey this handful of potential horrors to the mountains, but the
customs officials at Ala refused to allow it to enter the country and it
ultimately came to rest in England.

Another queer thing happened. Since his arrival from Egypt, O---- had
never been able to make up his mind to pay any of his innumerable bills;
the creditors, aware of the man's wealth and position, not pressing for
a settlement. I rather think that this procrastination, this reluctance
to disburse ready money, is a symptom of his particular state of
ill-health; I have observed it with several heart-patients (and others
as well); however that may be, it became a source of real vexation to
me, for hardly was the news of his death made public before I began to
be deluged with outstanding accounts from every quarter--tradespeople,
hotel keepers, professional men, etc. I finally sent the documents with
a pressing note to his representatives who, after some demur, paid up,
English-fashion, in full. Then a noteworthy change came over the faces
of men. Everybody beamed upon me in the streets, and there arrived
multitudinous little gifts at my house--choice wines, tie-pins, game,
cigars, ebony walking-sticks, confectionery, baskets of red mullets, old
prints, Capodimonte ware, candied fruits, amber mouthpieces,
maraschino--all from donors who plainly desired to remain anonymous.
Such things were dropped from the clouds, so to speak, on my doorstep:
an enigmatic but not unpleasant state of affairs. Gradually it dawned
upon me, it was forced upon me, that I had worked a miracle. These good
people, thinking that their demands upon O----'s executors would be cut
down, Italian-fashion, by at least fifty per cent, had anticipated that
eventuality by demanding twice or thrice as much as was really due to
them. And they got it! No wonder men smiled, when the benefactor of the
human race walked abroad.




Viareggio (February)

Viareggio, dead at this season, is a rowdy place in summer; not rowdy,
however, after the fashion of Margate. There is a suggestive difference
between the two. The upper classes in both towns are of course
irreproachable in externals--it is their uniformity of behaviour
throughout the world which makes them so uninteresting from a
spectacular point of view. A place does not receive its tone from them
(save possibly Bournemouth) but from their inferiors; and here, in this
matter of public decorum, the comparison is to the credit of Italy. It
is beside the point to say that the one lies relatively remote, while
the other is convenient for cheap trips from a capital. Set Viareggio
down at the very gate of Rome and fill it with the scum of Trastevere:
the difference would still be there. It might be more noisy than
Margate. It would certainly be less blatant.

As for myself, I hate Viareggio at all seasons, and nothing would have
brought me here but the prospect of visiting the neighbouring Carrara
mines with Attilio to whom I have written, enclosing a postcard for
reply.

For this is a modern town built on a plain of mud and sand, a town of
heartrending monotony, the least picturesque of all cities in the
peninsula, the least Italian. It has not even a central piazza! You may
conjure up visions of Holland and detect something of an old-world
aroma, if you stroll about the canal and harbour where sails are now
flapping furiously in the north wind; you may look up to the
snow-covered peaks and imagine yourself in Switzerland, and then thank
God you are not there; of Italy I perceive little or nothing. The people
are birds of prey; a shallow and rapacious brood who fleece visitors
during those summer weeks and live on the proceeds for the rest of the
year. There is no commerce to liven them up and make them smilingly
polite; no historical tradition to give them self-respect; no
agriculture worth mentioning (the soil is too poor)--in other words, no
peasantry to replenish the gaps in city life and infuse an element of
decency and depth. An inordinate amount of singing and whistling goes on
all day long. Is it not a sign of empty-headedness? I would like the
opinion of schoolmasters on this point, whether, among the children
committed to their charge, the habitual whistlers be not the dullest of
wit.

And so five days have passed. A pension proving uninhabitable, and most
of the better-class hotels being closed for the winter, I threw myself
upon the mercy of an octroi official who stood guarding a forlorn gate
somewhere in the wilderness. He has sent me to a villa bearing the name
of a certain lady and situated in a street called after a certain
politician. He has done well.

A kindlier dame than my hostess could nowhere be found. She hails from
the province of the Marche and has no high opinion of this town, where
she only lives on account of her husband, a retired something-or-other
who owns the house. Although convulsed with grief, both of them, at the
moment of my arrival--a favourite kitten had just been run over--they at
once set about making me comfortable in a room with exposure due south.
The flooring is of cement: the usual Viareggio custom. Bricks are cold,
stone is cold, tiles are cold; but cement! It freezes your marrow
through double carpets. For meals I go to the "Assassino" or the
Vittoria hotel; the fare is better at the first, the company at the
other....

The large dining-room at the "Vittoria" is not in use just now. We take
our meals in two smaller rooms adjoining each other, one of which leads
into the kitchen where privileged guests may talk secrets with the cook
and poke their noses into saucepans. At a table by herself sits the
little signorina who controls the establishment, wide awake, pale of
complexion, slightly hump-backed, close-fisted as the devil though
sufficiently vulnerable to a bluff masculine protest. Our waiter is
noteworthy in his line. He is that exceptional being, an Italian snob;
he can talk of nothing but dukes and princes, Bourbons by choice,
because he once served at a banquet given by some tuppenny Parma
royalties round the corner.

The food would be endurable, save for those vile war-time maccheroni.
The wine is of doubtful origin. Doubtful, at least, to the uninitiated
who smacks his lips and wonders vaguely where he has tasted the stuff
before. The concoction has so many flavours--a veritable Proteus! I know
it well, though its father and mother would be hard to identify. It was
born on the banks of the Tiber and goes by the name of ripa: ask any
Roman. Certain cheap and heady products of the south--Sicily, Sardinia,
Naples, Apulia, Ischia--have contributed their share to its composition;
Tiber-water is the one and constant ingredient. This ripa is exported by
the ton to wine-less centres like Genoa and there drunk under any name
you please. A few butts have doubtless been dropped overboard at
Viareggio for the poisoning of its ten thousand summer visitors.

Quite a jolly crowd of folk assembles here every evening. There is, of
course, the ubiquitous retired major; also some amusing gentlemen who
run up and down between this place and Lucca on mysterious errands
connected, I fancy, with oil; as well as a dissipated young marquis sent
hither from Rimini by the ridiculously old-fashioned father to expiate
his sins--his gambling debts, his multifarious and costly
love-adventures, and the manslaughter of a carpenter whom he ran over in
his car. [6] My favourite is a fat creature with a glorious fleshy face,
the face of some Neronian parvenu--a memorable face, full of the brutal
prosperity of Trimalchio's Banquet. He told me, yesterday, a long story
about a local saint in one of their villages--a saint of yesterday who,
curing diseases and performing various other miracles, began to think
himself, as their manner is, God Almighty, or something to that effect.
The police shot him as a revolutionary, because he had gathered a few
adherents.

"Rather an extreme measure," I suggested.

"It is. Not that I love the saints. But I love the police still less."

"Like every good Italian."

"Like every good Italian...."

News from Attilio. He cannot come. Both mother and sister are ill. He
delayed writing in the hopes of their getting better; he wanted to join
me, but they are always "auguale"--the same; in short, he must stay at
home, as appears from the following plaintive and rather puzzling
postcard, the address of which I had providentially written myself:

Caro G. N. Dorcola ho ricevuto la sua cara lettera e son cozi contento
da sentire le sue notizzie io non posso venire perche mia madre e
amalata e mia sorella Enrica era tardato ascirvere perche mi credevo che
tesano mellio ma invece sono sempre auguale perche volevo venire ci
mando dici mille baci e una setta dimano addio al Signior D. Dor.

But for the fact that, counting on a fortnight's trip to Carrara, I have
asked for certain printed matter to be forwarded here from England, I
would jump into the next train for anywhere.


Running along the sea on either side of Viareggio is a noble forest of
stone pines where the wind is scarce felt, though you may hear it
sighing overhead among the crowns. This is the place for a promenade at
all hours of the day. Children climb the trunks to fetch down a few
remaining cones or break off dried branches as fuel. A sportsman told me
that several of them lose their lives every year at this adventure. What
was he doing here, with a gun? Waiting for a hare, he said. They always
wait for hares. There are none!

Then a poor thin woman, dressed in black and gathering the prickly
stalks of gorse for firewood, began to converse with me, reasonably
enough at first. All of a sudden her language changed into a burning
torrent of insanity, with wild gesticulations. She was the Queen of the
country, she avowed, the rightful Queen, and they had robbed her of all
her children, every one of them, and all her jewels. I agreed--what else
could one do? Being in the combustible stage, she went over the argument
again and again, her eyes fiercely flashing. Nothing could stop the flow
of her words. I was right glad when another woman came to my rescue and
pushed her along, as you would a calf, saying:

"You go home now, it's getting dark, run along!--yes, yes! you're the
Queen right enough--she was in the asylum, Sir, for three months and
then they let her out, the fools--of course you are, everybody knows
that! But you really mustn't annoy this gentleman any more--her husband
and son were both killed in the war, that's what started it--we'll fetch
them tomorrow at the palace, all those things, and the children, only
don't talk so much--they thought she was cured, but just hark at
her!--va bene, it's all yours, only get along--she'll be back there in a
day or two, won't she?--really, you are chattering much too much, for a
Queen; va bene, va bene, va bene--"

A sad little incident, under the pines....

A fortnight has elapsed.

I refuse to budge from Viareggio, having discovered the village of
Corsanico on the heights yonder and, in that village, a family
altogether to my liking. How one stumbles upon delightful folks! Set me
down in furthest Cathay and I will undertake to find, soon afterwards,
some person with whom I am quite prepared to spend the remaining years
of life.

The driving-road to Corsanico is a never-ending affair. Deep in mire, it
meanders perversely about the plain; meanders more than ever, but of
necessity, once the foot of the hills is reached. I soon gave it up in
favour of the steam-tram to Cammaiore which deposits you at a station
whose name I forget, whence you may ascend to Corsanico through a
village called, I think, Momio. That route, also, was promptly abandoned
when the path along the canal was revealed to me. This waterway runs in
an almost straight line from Viareggio to the base of that particular
hill on whose summit lies my village. It is a monotonous walk at this
season; the rich marsh vegetation slumbers in the ooze underground,
waiting for a breath of summer. At last you cross that big road and
strike the limestone rock.

Here is no intermediate region, no undulating ground, between the upland
and the plain. They converge abruptly upon each other, as might have
been expected, seeing that these hills used to be the old sea-board and
this green level, in olden days, the Mediterranean. Three different
tracks, leading steeply upward through olives and pines and chestnuts
from where the canal ends, will bring you to Corsanico. I know them all.
I could find my way in darkest midnight.

Days have passed; days of delight. I climb up in the morning and descend
at nightfall, my mind well stored with recollections of pleasant talk
and smiling faces. A large place, this Corsanico, straggling about the
hill-top with scattered farms and gardens; to reach the
tobacconist--near whose house, by the way, you obtain an unexpected
glimpse into the valley of Cammaiore--is something of an excursion. As a
rule we repose, after luncheon, on a certain wooded knoll. We are high
up; seven or eight hundred feet above the canal. The blue Tyrrhenian is
dotted with steamers and sailing boats, and yonder lies Viareggio in its
belt of forest; far away, to the left, you discern the tower of Pisa. A
placid lake between the two, wood-engirdled, is now famous as being the
spot selected by the great Maestro Puccini to spend a summer month in
much-advertised seclusion. I am learning the name of every locality in
the plain, of every peak among the mountains at our back.

"And that little ridge of stone," says my companion, "--do you see it,
jutting into the fields down there? It has a queer name. We call it La
Sirena."

La Sirena....

It is good to live in a land where such memories cling to old rocks.

By what a chance has the name survived to haunt this inland crag,
defying geological changes, outlasting the generations of men, their
creeds and tongues and races! How it takes one back--back into hoary
antiquity, into another landscape altogether! One thinks of those Greek
mariners coasting past this promontory, and pouring libations to the
Siren into an ocean on whose untrampled floor the countryman now sows
his rice and turnips.

  Paganisme immortel, es-tu mort? On le dit.
  Mais Pan, tout bas, s'en moque, et la Sirène en rit.

They are still here, both sea and Siren; they have only agreed to
separate for a while. The ocean shines out yonder in all its luminous
splendour of old. And the Siren, too, can be found by those to whom the
gods are kind.

My Siren dwells at Corsanico.




Viareggio (May)

Those Sirens! They have called me back, after nearly three months in
Florence, to that village on the hill-top. Nothing but smiles up there.

And never was Corsanico more charming, all drenched in sunlight and
pranked out with fresh green. On this fourteenth of May, I said to
myself, I am wont to attend a certain yearly festival far away, and
there enjoy myself prodigiously. Yet--can it be possible?--I am even
happier here. Seldom does the event surpass one's hopes.

Later than usual, long after sunset, under olives already heavy-laden,
through patches of high-standing corn and beans, across the little
brook, past that familiar and solitary farmhouse, I descended to the
canal, in full content. Another golden moment of life! Strong
exhalations rose up from the swampy soil, that teemed and steamed under
the hot breath of spring; the pond-like water, once so bare, was
smothered under a riot of monstrous marsh-plants and loud with the music
of love-sick frogs. Stars were reflected on its surface.

Star-gazing, my Star? Would I were Heaven, to gaze on thee with many
eyes.

Such was my mood, a Hellenic mood, a mood summed up in that one word
[Greek: tetelestai]--not to be taken, however, in the sense of "all's
over." Quite the reverse! Did Shelley ever walk in like humour along
this canal? I doubt it. He lacked the master-key. An evangelist of a
kind, he was streaked, for all his paganism, with the craze of
world-improvement. One day he escaped from his chains into those
mountains and there beheld a certain Witch--only to be called back to
mortality by a domestic and critic-bitten lady. He tried to translate
the Symposium. He never tried to live it....

I have now interposed a day of rest.

My welcome in the villa situated in the street called after a certain
politician was that of the Prodigal Son. There was a look bordering on
affection in the landlady's eyes. She knew I would come back, once the
weather was warmer. She would now give me a cool room, instead of that
old one facing south. Those much-abused cement floors--they were not so
inconvenient, were they, at this season? The honey for breakfast?
Assuredly; the very same. And there was a tailor she had discovered in
the interval, cheaper and better than that other one, if anything
required attention.

And thus, having lived long at the mercy of London landladies and London
charwomen--having suffered the torments of Hell, for more years than I
care to remember, at the hands of these pickpockets and hags and harpies
and drunken sluts--I am now rewarded by the services of something at the
other end of the human scale. Impossible to say too much of this good
dame's solicitude for me. Her main object in life seems to be to save my
money and make me comfortable. "Don't get your shoes soled there!" she
told me two days ago. "That man is from Viareggio. I know a better
place. Let me see to it. I will say they are my husband's, and you will
pay less and get better work." With a kind of motherly instinct she
forestalls my every wish, and at the end of a few days had already known
my habits better than one of those London sharks and furies would have
known them at the end of a century....

My thoughts go back to her of Florence, whom I have just left. Equally
efficient, she represented quite a different type. She was not of the
familiar kind, but rather grave and formal, with spectacles, dyed hair
and an upright carriage. She never mothered me; she conversed, and gave
me the impression of being in the presence of a grande dame. Such, I
used to say to myself, while listening to her well-turned periods
enlivened with steely glints of humour--such were the feelings of those
who conversed with Madame de Maintenon; such and not otherwise. It would
be difficult to conceive her saying anything equivocal or vulgar. Yet
she must have been a naughty little girl not long ago. She never dreams
that I know what I do know: that she is mistress of a high police
functionary and greatly in favour with his set--a most useful landlady,
in short, for a virtuous young bachelor like myself.

On learning this fact, I made it my business to study her weaknesses and
soon discovered that she was fond of a particular brand of Chianti. A
flask of this vintage was promptly secured; then, dissatisfied with its
materialistic aspect, I caused it to be garlanded with a wreath of
violets and despatched it to her private apartment by the prettiest
child I could pick up in the street. That is the way to touch their
hearts. The offering was repeated at convenient intervals.

A little item in the newspaper led to some talk, one morning, about the
war. I found she shared the view common to many others, that this is an
"interested" war. Society has organized itself on new lines, lines which
work against peace. There are so many persons "interested" in keeping up
the present state of affairs, people who now make more money than they
ever made before. Everybody has a finger in the pie. The soldier in the
field, the chief person concerned, is voiceless and of no account when
compared with this army of civilians, every one of whom would lose, if
the war came to an end. They will fight like demons, to keep the fun
going. What else should they do? Their income is at stake. A man's heart
is in his purse.

I asked:

"Supposing, Madame, you desired to end the war, how would you set about
it?"

Whereupon a delightfully Tuscan idea occurred to her.

"I think I would abolish this Red-Cross nonsense. It makes things too
pleasant. It would bring the troops to their senses and cause them to
march home and say: Basta! We have had enough."

"Don't you find the Germans a little prepotenti?" "Prepotenti: yes. By
all means let us break their heads. And then, caro Lei, let us learn to
imitate them...."

That afternoon, I remember, being wondrously fine and myself in such
mellow mood that I would have shared my last crust with some shipwrecked
archduchess and almost forgiven mine enemies, though not until I had hit
them back--I strolled about the Cascine. They have done something to
make this place attractive; just then, at all events, the shortcomings
were unobserved amid the burst of green things overhead and underfoot.
Originally it must have been an unpromising stretch of land, running, as
it does, in a dead level along the Arno. Yet there is earth and water;
and a good deal can be done with such materials to diversify the
surface. More might have been accomplished here. For in the matter of
hill and dale and lake, and variety of vegetation, the Cascine are not
remarkable. One calls to mind what has been attained at Kew Gardens in
an identical situation, and with far less sunshine for the landscape
gardener to play with. One thinks of a certain town in Germany where, on
a plain as flat as a billiard table, they actually reared a mountain,
now covered with houses and timber, for the disport of the citizens. To
think that I used to skate over the meadows where that mountain now
stands!

There was no horse-racing in the Cascine that afternoon; nothing but the
usual football. The pastime is well worth a glance, if only for the sake
of sympathizing with the poor referee. Several hundred opprobrious
epithets are hurled at his head in the course of a single game, and play
is often suspended while somebody or other hotly disputes his decision
and refuses to be guided any longer by his perverse interpretation of
the rules. And whoever wishes to know whence those plastic artists of
old Florence drew their inspiration need only come here. Figures of
consummate grace and strength, and clothed, moreover, in a costume which
leaves little to the imagination. Those shorts fully deserve their name.
They are shortness itself, and their brevity is only equalled by their
tightness. One wonders how they can squeeze themselves into such an
outfit or, that feat accomplished, play in it with any sense of comfort.
Play they do, and furiously, despite the heat.

Watching the game and mindful of that morning's discourse with Madame de
Maintenon, a sudden wave of Anglo-Saxon feeling swept over me. I grew
strangely warlike, and began to snort with indignation. What were all
these young fellows doing here? Big chaps of eighteen and twenty! Half
of them ought to be in the trenches, damn it, instead of fooling about
with a ball.

It would have been instructive to learn the true ideas of the rising
generation in regard to the political outlook; to single out one of the
younger spectators and make him talk. But these better-class lads
cluster together at the approach of a stranger, and one does not want to
start a public discussion with half a dozen of them. My chance came from
another direction. It was half-time and a certain player limped out of
the field and sat down on the grass. I was beside him before his friends
had time to come up. A superb specimen, all dewy with perspiration.

"Any damage?"

Nothing much, he gasped. A man on the other side had just caught him
with the full swing of his fist under the ribs. It hurt confoundedly.

"Hardly fair play," I commented.

"It was cleverly done."

"Ah, well," I said, warming to my English character, "you may get harder
knocks in the trenches. I suppose you are nearly due?"

Not for a year or so, he replied. And even then ... of course, he was
quite eligible as to physique ... it was really rather awkward ... but
as to serving in the army ... there were other jobs going. ... Was
anything more precious than life?... Could anything replace his life to
him?... To die at his age....

"It would certainly be a pity from an artistic point of view. But if
everybody thought like that, where would the Isonzo line be?"

If everybody thought as he did, there would be no Isonzo line at all.
German influence in Italy--why not? They had been there before; it was
no dark page in Italian history. Was his own government so admirable
that one should regret its disappearance? A pack of knaves and
cutthroats. Patriotism--a phrase; auto-intoxication. They say one thing
and mean another. The English too. Yes, the English too. Purely
mercenary motives, for all their noble talk.

It is always entertaining to see ourselves as others see us. I had the
presence of mind to interject some anti-British remark, which produced
the desired effect.

"Now they howl about the sufferings of Belgium, because their money-bags
are threatened. They fight for poor Belgium. They did not fight for
France in 1870, or for Denmark or Poland or Armenia. Trade was not
threatened. There was no profit in view. Profit! And they won't even
supply us with coal----"

Always that coal.

It is clear as daylight. England has failed in her duty--her duty being
to supply everybody with coal, ships, money, cannons and anything else,
at the purchaser's valuation.

He made a few more statements of this nature, and I think he enjoyed his
little fling at that, for him, relatively speaking, since the war began,
rara avis, a genuine Englishman (Teutonic construction); I certainly
relished it. Then I asked:

"Where did you learn this? About Armenia, I mean, and Poland?"

"From my father. He was University Professor and Deputy in Parliament.
One also picks up a little something at school. Don't you agree with
me?"

"Not altogether. You seem to forget that a nation cannot indulge in
those freaks of humanitarianism which may possibly befit an individual.
A certain heroic dreamer told men to give all they had to the poor. You,
if you like, may adopt this idealistic attitude. You may do generous
actions such as your country cannot afford to do, since a nation which
abandons the line of expediency is on the high road to suicide. If I
have a bilious attack, by all means come and console me; if Poland has a
bilious attack, there is no reason why England should step in as
dry-nurse; there may be every reason, indeed, why England should stand
aloof. Now in Belgium, as you say, money is involved. Money, in this
national sense, means well-being; and well-being, in this national
sense, is one of the few things worth fighting for. However, I am only
throwing out one or two suggestions. On some other day, I would like to
discuss the matter with you point by point--some other day, that is,
when you are not playing football and have just a few clothes on. I am
now at a disadvantage. You could never get me to impugn your statements
courageously--not in that costume. It would be like haggling with Apollo
Belvedere. Why do you wear those baby things?"

"We are all wearing them, this season."

"So I perceive. How do you get into them?"

"Very slowly."

"Are they elastic?"

"I wish they were."....

Four minutes' talk. It gave me an insight. He was an intellectualist. As
such, he admired brute force but refused to employ it. He was civilized.
Like many products of civilization, he was unaware of its blessings and
unconcerned in its fate. Is it not a feature peculiar to civilization
that it thinks of everything save war? That is why they are uprooted,
these flowerings, each in its turn.

My father told me; often one hears that remark, even from adults. As if
a father could not be a fool like anybody else! That a child should have
hard-and-fast opinions--it is engaging. Children are egocentric. A
fellow of this size ought to be less positive.

These refined youths are fastidious about their clothes. They would not
dream of buying a ready-made suit, however well-fitting. They are
content to take their opinions second-hand. Unlike ours, they are seldom
alone; they lack those stretches of solitude during which they might
wrestle with themselves and do a little thinking on their own account.
When not with their family, they are always among companions, being far
more sociable and fond of herding together than their English
representatives. They talk more; they think less; they seem to do each
other's thinking, which takes away all hesitation and gives them a
precocious air of maturity. If this decorative lad engages in some
profession like medicine or engineering there is hope for him, even as
others of his age rectify their perspective by contact with crude
facts--groceries and calicoes and carburettors and so forth. Otherwise,
his doom is sealed. He remains a doctrinaire. This country is full of
them.

And then--the sterilizing influence of pavements. Even when summer comes
round, they all flock in a mass to some rowdy place like this Viareggio
or Ancona where, however pleasant the bathing, spiritual life is yet
shallower than at home. What says Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D.? "Their
country life consists merely in breathing a different air, though in
nothing else does it differ from the life they live in town."

He notices things, does Ramage; and might, indeed, have elaborated this
argument. The average Italian townsman seems to have lost all sense for
the beauty of rural existence; he is incurious about it; dislodge him
from the pavement--no easy task--and he gasps like a fish out of water.
Squares and cafés--they stimulate his fancy; the doings and opinions of
fellow-creatures--thence alone he derives inspiration. What is the
result? A considerable surface polish, but also another quality which I
should call dewlessness. Often glittering like a diamond, he is every
bit as dewless. His materialistic and supercilious outlook results, I
think, from contempt or nescience of nature; you will notice the trait
still more at Venice, whose inhabitants seldom forsake their congested
mud-flat. Depth of character and ideality and humour--such things
require a rustic landscape for their nurture. These citizens are arid,
for lack of dew; unquestionably more so than their English
representatives.

POSTSCRIPT.--The pavements of Florence, by the way, have an
objectionable quality. Their stone is too soft. They wear down rapidly
and an army of masons is employed in levelling them straight again all
the year round. And yet they sometimes use this very sandstone, instead
of marble, for mural inscriptions. How long are these expected to remain
legible? They employ the same material for their buildings, and I
observe that the older monuments last, on the whole, better than the new
ones, which flake away rapidly--exfoliate or crack, according to the
direction from which the grain of the rock has been attacked by the
chisel. It may well be that Florentines of past centuries left the hewn
blocks in their shady caverns for a certain length of time, as do the
Parisians of to-day, in order to allow for the slow discharge and
evaporation of liquid; whereas now the material, saturated with
moisture, is torn from its damp and cool quarries and set in the blazing
sunshine. At the Bourse, for instance,--quite a modern structure--the
columns already begin to show fissures. [7]

Amply content with Viareggio, because the Siren dwells so near, I stroll
forth. The town is awake. Hotels are open. Bathing is beginning. Summer
has dawned upon the land.

I am not in the city mood, three months in Florence having abated my
interest in humanity. Past a line of booths and pensions I wander in the
direction of that pinery which year by year is creeping further into the
waves, and driving the sea back from its old shore. There is peace in
this green domain; all is hushed, and yet pervaded by the mysterious
melody of things that stir in May-time. Here are no sombre patches, as
under oak or beech; only a tremulous interlacing of light and shade. A
peculiarly attractive bole not far from the sea, gleaming rosy in the
sunshine, tempts me to recline at its foot.

This insomnia, this fiend of the darkness--the only way to counteract
his mischief is by guile; by snatching a brief oblivion in the hours of
day, when the demon is far afield, tormenting pious Aethiopians at the
Antipodes. How well one rests at such moments of self-created night,
merged into the warm earth! The extreme quietude of my present room,
after Florentine street-noises, may have contributed to this
restlessness. Also, perhaps, the excitement of Corsanico. But chiefly,
the dream--that recurrent dream.

Everybody, I suppose, is subject to recurrent dreams of some kind. My
present one is of a painful or at least sad nature; it returns
approximately every three months and never varies by a hair's breadth. I
am in a distant town where I lived many years back, and where each stone
is familiar to me. I have come to look for a friend--one who, as a
matter of fact, died long ago. My sleeping self refuses to admit this
fact; once embarked on the dream-voyage, I hold him to be still alive.
Glad at the prospect of meeting my friend again, I traverse cheerfully
those well-known squares in the direction of his home.... Where is it,
that house; where has it gone? I cannot find it. Ages seem to pass while
I trample up and down, in ever-increasing harassment of mind, along
interminable rows of buildings and canals; that door, that
well-remembered door--vanished! All search is vain. I shall never meet
him: him whom I came so far to see. The dismal truth, once established,
fills me with an intensity of suffering such as only night-visions can
inspire. There is no reason for feeling so strongly; it is the way of
dreams! At this point I wake up, thoroughly exhausted, and say to
myself: "Why seek his house? Is he not dead?"

This stupid nightmare leaves me unrefreshed next morning, and often
bears in its rear a trail of wistfulness which may endure a week. Only
within the last few years has it dared to invade my slumbers. Before
that period there was a series of other recurrent dreams. What will the
next be? For I mean to oust this particular incubus. The monster annoys
me, and even our mulish dream-consciousness can be taught to acquiesce
in a fact, after a sufficient lapse of time.

There are dreams peculiar to every age of man. That celebrated one of
flying, for instance--it fades away with manhood. I once indulged in a
correspondence about it with a well-known psychologist, [8] and would
like to think, even now, that this dream is a reminiscence of leaping
habits in our tree-haunting days; a ghost of the dim past, therefore,
which revisits us at night when recent adjustments are cast aside and
man takes on the credulity and savagery of his remotest forefathers; a
ghost which comes in youth when these ancient etchings are easier to
decypher, being not yet overscored by fresh personal experiences. What
is human life but a never-ending palimpsest?

So I pondered, when my musings under that pine tree were interrupted by
the arrival on the scene of a young snake. I cannot say with any degree
of truthfulness which of us two was more surprised at the encounter. I
picked him up, as I always do when they give me a chance, and began to
make myself agreeable to him. He had those pretty juvenile markings
which disappear with maturity. Snakes of this kind, when they become
full-sized, are nearly always of a uniform shade, generally black. And
when they are very, very old, they begin to grow ears and seek out
solitary places. What is the origin of this belief? I have come across
it all over the country. If you wish to go to any remote or inaccessible
spot, be sure some peasant will say: "Ah! There you find the serpent
with ears."

These snakes are not easy to catch with the hand, living as they do
among stones and brushwood, and gliding off rapidly once their
suspicions are aroused. This one, I should say, was bent on some
youthful voyage of discovery or amorous exploit; he walked into the trap
from inexperience. As a rule, your best chance for securing them is when
they bask on the top of some bush or hedge in relative unconcern,
knowing they are hard to detect in such places. They climb into these
aerial situations after the lizards, which go there after the insects,
which go there after the flowers, which go there after the sunshine,
struggling upwards through the thick undergrowth. You must have a quick
eye and ready hand to grasp them by the tail ere they have time to lash
themselves round some stem where, once anchored, they will allow
themselves to be pulled in pieces rather than yield to your efforts. If
you fail to seize them, they trickle earthward through the tangle like a
thread of running water.

He belonged to that common Italian kind which has no English
name--Germans call them Zornnatter, in allusion to their choleric
disposition. Most of them are quite ready to snap at the least
provocation; maybe they find it pays, as it does with other folks, to
assume the offensive and be first in the field, demanding your place in
the sun with an air of wrathful determination. Some of the big fellows
can draw blood with their teeth. Yet the jawbones are weak and one can
force them asunder without much difficulty; whereas the bite of a
full-grown emerald lizard, for instance, will provide quite a novel
sensation. The mouth closes on you like a steel trap, tightly
compressing the flesh and often refusing to relax its hold. In such
cases, try a puff of tobacco. It works! Two puffs will daze them; a
fragment of a cigar, laid in the mouth, stretches them out dead. And
this is the beast which, they say, will gulp down prussic acid as if it
were treacle.

But snakes vary in temperament as we do, and some of these Zamenis
serpents are as gentle and amiable as their cousin the Aesculap snake.
My friend of this afternoon could not be induced to bite. Perhaps he was
naturally mild, perhaps drowsy from his winter sleep or ignorant of the
ways of the world; perhaps he had not yet shed his milk teeth. I am
disposed to think that he forgot about biting because I made a
favourable impression on him from the first. He crawled up my arm. It
was pleasantly warm, but a little too dark; soon he emerged again and
glanced around, relieved to discover that the world was still in its old
place. He was not clever at learning tricks. I tried to make him stand
on his head, but he refused to stiffen out. Snakes have not much sense
of humour.

Lizards are far more companionable. During two consecutive summers I had
a close friendship with a wall-lizard who spent in my society certain of
his leisure moments--which were not many, for he always had an
astonishing number of other things on hand. He was a full-grown male,
bejewelled with blue spots. A fierce fighter was Alfonso (such was his
name), and conspicuous for a most impressive manner of stamping his
front foot when impatient. Concerning his other virtues I know little,
for I learnt no details of his private life save what I saw with my
eyes, and they were not always worthy of imitation. He was a polygamist,
or worse; obsessed, moreover, by a deplorable habit of biting off the
tails of his own or other people's children. He went even further. For
sometimes, without a word of warning, he would pounce upon some innocent
youngster and carry him in his powerful jaws far away, over the wall,
right out of my sight. What happened yonder I cannot guess. It was
probably a little old-fashioned cannibalism.

Though my meals in those days were all out of doors, his attendance at
dinner-time was rather uncertain; I suspect he retired early in order to
spend the night, like other polygamists, in prayer and fasting. At the
hours of breakfast and luncheon--he knew them as well as I did--he was
generally free, and then quite monopolized my company, climbing up my
leg on to the table, eating out of my hand, sipping sugar-water out of
his own private bowl and, in fact, doing everything I suggested. I did
not suggest impossibilities. A friendship should never be strained to
breaking-point. Had I cared to risk such a calamity, I might have taught
him to play skittles....

For the rest, it is not very amusing to be either a lizard or a snake in
Italy. Lizards are caught in nooses and then tied by one leg and made to
run on the remaining three; or secured by a cord round the neck and
swung about in the air--mighty good sport, this; or deprived of their
tails and given to the baby or cat to play with; or dragged along at the
end of a string, like a reluctant pig that is led to market. There are
quite a number of ways of making lizards feel at home.

With snakes the procedure is simple. They are killed; treated to that
self-same system to which they used to treat us in our arboreal days
when the glassy eye of the serpent, gleaming through the branches, will
have caused our fur to stand on end with horror. No beast provokes human
hatred like that old coiling serpent. Long and cruel must have been his
reign for the memory to have lingered--how many years? Let us say, in
order to be on the safe side, a million. Here, then, is another ghost of
the past, a daylight ghost.

And look around you; the world is full of them. We live amid a legion of
ancestral terrors which creep from their limbo and peer in upon our
weaker moments, ready to make us their prey. A man whose wits are not
firmly rooted in earth, in warm friends and warm food, might well live a
life of ceaseless trepidation. Many do. They brood over their immortal
soul--a ghost. Others there are, whose dreams have altogether devoured
their realities. These live, for the most part, in asylums.

There flits, along this very shore, a ghost of another kind--that of
Shelley. Maybe the spot where they burnt his body can still be pointed
out. I have forgotten all I ever read on that subject. An Italian
enthusiast, the librarian of the Laurentian Library in Florence,
garnered certain information from ancient fishermen of Viareggio in
regard to this occurrence and set it down in a little book, a book with
white covers which I possessed during my Shelley period. They have
erected a memorial to the English poet in one of the public squares
here. The features of the bust do not strike me as remarkably etherial,
but the inscription is a good specimen of Italian adapted to lapidary
uses--it avoids those insipid verbal terminations which weaken the
language and sometimes render it almost ridiculous.

Smollet lies yonder, at Livorno; and Ouida hard by, at Bagni di Lucca.
She died in one of these same featureless streets of Viareggio, alone,
half blind, and in poverty....

I know Suffolk, that ripe old county of hers, with its pink villages
nestling among drowsy elms and cornfields; I know their "Spread Eagles"
and "Angels" and "White Horses" and other taverns suggestive--sure sign
of antiquity--of zoological gardens; I know their goodly ale and old
brown sherries. Her birthplace, despite those venerable green mounds, is
comparatively dull--I would not care to live at Bury; give me Lavenham
or Melford or some place of that kind. While looking one day at the
house where she was born, I was sorely tempted to crave permission to
view the interior, but refrained; something of her own dislike of prying
and meddlesomeness came over me. Thence down to that commemorative
fountain among the drooping trees. The good animals for whose comfort it
was built would have had some difficulty in slaking their thirst just
then, its basin being chocked up with decayed leaves.

We corresponded for a good while and I still possess her letters
somewhere; I see in memory that large and bold handwriting, often only
two words to a line, on the high-class slate-coloured paper. The sums
she spent on writing materials! It was one of her many ladylike traits.

I tried to induce her to stay with me in South Italy. She made three
conditions: to be allowed to bring her dogs, to have a hot bath every
day, and two litres of cream. Everything could be managed except the
cream, which was unprocurable. Later on, while living in the Tyrolese
mountains, I renewed the invitation; that third condition could now be
fulfilled as easily as the other two. She was unwell, she replied, and
could not move out of the house, having been poisoned by a cook. So we
never met, though she wrote me much about herself and about
"Helianthus," which was printed after her death. In return, I dedicated
to her a book of short stories; they were published, thank God, under a
pseudonym, and eight copies were sold.

She is now out of date. Why, yes. Those guardsmen who drenched their
beards in scent and breakfasted off caviare and chocolate and sparkling
Moselle--they certainly seem fantastic. They really were fantastic. They
did drench their beards in scent. The language and habits of these
martial heroes are authenticated in the records of their day; glance,
for instance, into back numbers of Punch. The fact is, we were all
rather ludicrous formerly. The characters of Dickens, to say nothing of
Cruikshank's pictures of them: can such beings ever have walked the
earth?

If her novels are somewhat faded, the same cannot be said of her letters
and articles and critiques. To our rising generation of authors--the
youngsters, I mean; those who have not yet sold themselves to the
devil--I should say: read these things of Ouida's. Read them
attentively, not for their matter, which is always of interest, nor yet
for their vibrant and lucid style, which often rivals that of Huxley.
Read them for their tone, their temper; for that pervasive good
breeding, that shining honesty, that capacity of scorn. These are
qualities which our present age lacks, and needs; they are conspicuous
in Ouida. Abhorrence of meanness was her dominant trait. She was
intelligent, fearless; as ready to praise without stint as to voice the
warmest womanly indignation. She was courageous not only in matters of
literature; courageous, and how right! Is it not satisfactory to be
right, when others are wrong? How right about the Japanese, about
Feminism and Conscription and German brutalitarianism! How she puts her
finger on the spot when discussing Marion Crawford and D'Annunzio! Those
local politicians--how she hits them off! Hers was a sure touch. Do we
not all now agree with what she wrote at the time of Queen Victoria and
Joseph Chamberlain? When she remarks of Tolstoy, in an age which adored
him (I am quoting from memory), that "his morality and monogamy are
against nature and common sense," adding that he is dangerous, because
he is an "educated Christ"--out of date? When she says that the world is
ruled by two enemies of all beauty, commerce and militarism--out of
date? When she dismisses Oscar Wilde as a cabotin and yet thinks that
the law should not have meddled with him--is not that the man and the
situation in a nutshell?

No wonder straightforward sentiments like these do not appeal to our age
of neutral tints and compromise, to our vegetarian world-reformers who
are as incapable of enthusiasm as they are of contempt, because their
blood-temperature is invariably two degrees below the normal. Ouida's
critical and social opinions are infernally out of date--quite
inconveniently modern, in fact. There is the milk of humanity in them,
glowing conviction and sincerity; they are written from a standpoint
altogether too European, too womanly, too personally-poignant for
present-day needs; and in a language, moreover, whose picturesque and
vigorous independence comes as a positive shock after the colourless
Grub-street brand of to-day.

They come as a shock, these writings, because in the brief interval
since they were published our view of life and letters has shifted. A
swarm of mystics and pragmatists has replaced the lonely giants of
Ouida's era. It is an epoch of closed pores, of constriction. The novel
has changed. Pick up the average one and ask yourself whether this
crafty and malodorous sex-problem be not a deliberately commercial
speculation--a frenzied attempt to "sell" by scandalizing our
unscandalizable, because hermaphroditic, middle classes? Ouida was not
one of these professional hacks, but a personality of refined instincts
who wrote, when she cared to write at all, to please her equals; a
rationalistic anti-vulgarian; a woman of wide horizons who fought for
generous issues and despised all shams; the last, almost the last, of
lady-authors. What has such a genial creature in common with our anaemic
and woolly generation? "The Massarenes" may have faults, but how many of
our actual woman-scribes, for all their monkey-tricks of cleverness,
could have written it? The haunting charm of "In Maremma": why ask our
public to taste such stuff? You might as well invite a bilious
nut-fooder to a Lord Mayor's banquet.

The mention of banquets reminds me that she was blamed for preferring
the society of duchesses and diplomats to that of the Florentine
literati, as if there were something reprehensible in Ouida's fondness
for decent food and amusing talk when she could have revelled in Ceylon
tea and dough-nuts and listened to babble concerning Quattro-Cento
glazes in any of the fifty squabbling art-coteries of that City of
Misunderstandings. It was one of her several failings, chiefest among
them being this: that she had no reverence for money. She was unable to
hoard--an unpardonable sin. Envied in prosperity, she was smugly pitied
in her distress. Such is the fate of those who stand apart from the
crowd, among a nation of canting shopkeepers. To die penniless, after
being the friend of duchesses, is distinctly bad form--a slur on
society. True, she might have bettered her state by accepting a
lucrative proposal to write her autobiography, but she considered such
literature a "degrading form of vanity" and refused the offer. She
preferred to remain ladylike to the last, in this and other little
trifles--in her lack of humour, her redundancies, her love of expensive
clothes and genuinely humble people, of hot baths and latinisms and
flowers and pet dogs and sealing-wax. All through life she made no
attempt to hide her woman's nature, her preference for male over female
company; she was even guilty of saying that disease serves the world
better than war, because it kills more women than men. Out of date, with
a vengeance!

There recurs to me a sentence in a printed letter written by a
celebrated novelist of the artificial school, a sentence I wish I could
forget, describing Ouida as "a little terrible and finally pathetic
grotesque." Does not a phrase like this reveal, even better than his own
romances, the essentially non-human fibre of the writer's mind? Whether
this derivative intellectualist spiderishly spinning his own plots and
phrases and calling Ouida a "grotesque"--whether this echo ever tried to
grasp the bearing of her essays on Shelley or Blind Guides or Alma
Veniesia or The Quality of Mercy--tried to sense her burning words of
pity for those that suffer, her hatred of hypocrisy and oppression and
betrayal of friendship, her so righteous pleadings, coined out of the
heart's red blood, for all that makes life worthy to be lived? He may
have tried. He never could succeed. He lacked the sympathy, the sex. He
lacked the sex. Ah, well--Schwamm drueber, as the Norwegians say. Ouida,
for all her femininity, was more than this feline and gelatinous New
Englander.




Rome

The railway station at Rome has put on a new face. Blown to the winds is
that old dignity and sense of leisure. Bustle everywhere; soldiers in
line, officers strutting about; feverish scurryings for tickets. A young
baggage employé, who allowed me to effect a change of raiment in the
inner recesses of his department, alone seemed to keep up the traditions
of former days. He was unruffled and polite; he told me, incidentally,
that he came from ----. That was odd, I said; I had often met persons
born at ----, and never yet encountered one who was not civil beyond the
common measure. His native place must be worthy of a visit.

"It is," he replied. "There are also certain fountains...."

That restaurant, for example--one of those few for which a man in olden
days of peace would desert his own tavern in the town--how changed! The
fare has deteriorated beyond recognition. Where are those succulent
joints and ragouts, the aromatic wine, the snow-white macaroni, the
cafe-au-lait with genuine butter and genuine honey?

War-time!

Conversed awhile with an Englishman at my side, who was gleefully
devouring lumps of a particular something which I would not have liked
to touch with tongs.

"I don't care what I eat," he remarked.

So it seemed.

I don't care what I eat: what a confession to make! Is it not the same
as saying, I don't care whether I am dirty or clean? When others tell me
this, I regard it as a pose, or a poor joke. This person was manifestly
sincere in his profession of faith. He did not care what he ate. He
looked it. Were I afflicted with this peculiar ailment, this attenuated
form of coprophagia, I should try to keep the hideous secret to myself.
It is nothing to boast of. A man owes something to those traditions of
our race which has helped to raise us above the level of the brute. Good
taste in viands has been painfully acquired; it is a sacred trust.
Beware of gross feeders. They are a menace to their fellow-creatures.
Will they not act, on occasion, even as they feed? Assuredly they will.
Everybody acts as he feeds.

Then lingered on the departure platform, comparing its tone with that of
similar places in England. A mournful little crowd is collected here.
Conscripts, untidy-looking fellows, are leaving--perhaps for ever. They
climb into those tightly packed carriages, loaded down with parcels and
endless recommendations. Some of the groups are cheerful over their
farewells, though the English note of deliberate jocularity is absent.
The older people are resigned; in the features of the middle generation,
the parents, you may read a certain grimness and hostility to fate; they
are the potential mourners. The weeping note predominates among the
sisters and children, who give themselves away pretty freely. An
infectious thing, this shedding of tears. One little girl, loth to part
from that big brother, contrived by her wailing to break down the
reserve of the entire family....

It rains persistently in soft, warm showers. Rome is mirthless.

There arises, before my mind's eye, the vision of a sweet old lady
friend who said to me, in years gone by:

"When next you go to Rome, please let me know if it is still raining
there."

It was here that she celebrated her honeymoon--an event which must have
taken place in the 'sixties or thereabouts. She is dead now. So is her
husband, the prince of moralizers, the man who first taught me how
contemptible the human race may become. Doubtless he expired with some
edifying platitude on his lips and is deblatterating them at this very
moment in Heaven, where the folks may well be seasoned to that kind of
talk.

Let us be charitable, now that he is gone!

To have lived so long with a person of this incurable respectability
would have soured any ordinary woman's temper. Hers it refined; it made
her into something akin to an angel. He was her cross; she bore him
meekly and not, I like to think, without extracting a kind of sly, dry
fun out of the horrible creature. A past master in the art of gentle
domestic nagging, he made everybody miserable as long as he lived, and I
would give something for an official assurance that he is now miserable
himself. He was a worm; a good man in the worse sense of the word. It
was the contrast--the contrast between his gentle clothing and ungentle
heart, which moved my spleen. What a self-sufficient and inhuman brood
were the Victorians of that type, hag-ridden by their nightmare of duty;
a brood that has never yet been called by its proper name. Victorians?
Why, not altogether. The mischief has its roots further back. Addison,
for example, is a fair specimen.

Why say unkind things about a dead man? He cannot answer back.

Upon my word, I am rather glad to think he cannot. The last thing I ever
wish to hear again is that voice of his. And what a face: gorgonizing in
its assumption of virtue! Now the whole species is dying out, and none
too soon. Graft abstract principles of conduct upon natures devoid of
sympathy and you produce a monster; a sanctimonious fish; the coldest
beast that ever infested the earth. This man's affinities were with
Robespierre and Torquemada--both of them actuated by the purest
intentions and without a grain of self-interest: pillars of integrity.
What floods of tears would have been spared to mankind, had they only
been a little corrupt! How corrupt a person of principles? He lacks the
vulgar yet divine gift of imagination.

That is what these Victorians lacked. They would never have subscribed
to this palpable truth: that justice is too good for some men, and not
good enough for the rest. They cultivated the Cato or Brutus tone; they
strove to be stern old Romans--Romans of the sour and imperfect
Republic; for the Empire, that golden blossom, was to them a period of
luxury and debauch. Nero--most reprehensible! It was not Nero, however,
but our complacent British reptiles, who filled the prisons with the
wailing of young children, and hanged a boy of thirteen for stealing a
spoon. I wish I had it here, that book which everybody ought to read,
that book by George Ives on the History of Penal Methods--it would help
me to say a few more polite things. The villainies of the virtuous: who
shall recount them? I can picture this vastly offensive old man acting
as judge on that occasion and then, his "duties towards society"
accomplished, being driven home in his brougham to thank Providence for
one of those succulent luncheons, the enjoyment of which he invariably
managed to ruin for every one except himself.

God rest his soul, the unspeakable phenomenon! He ought to have
throttled himself at his mother's breast. Only a woman imbued with
ultra-terrestrial notions of humour could have tolerated such an
infliction. Anybody else would have poisoned him in the name of
Christian charity and common sense, and earned the gratitude of
generations yet unborn.

Well, well! R.I.P....

On returning to Rome after a considerable absence--a year or so--a few
things have to be done for the sake of auld lang syne ere one may again
feel at home. Rites must be performed. I am to take my fill of memories
and conjure up certain bitter-sweet phantoms of the past. Meals must be
taken in definite restaurants; a certain church must be entered; a sip
of water taken from a fountain--from one, and one only (no easy task,
this, for most of the fountains of Rome are so constructed that, however
abundant their flow, a man may die of thirst ere obtaining a mouthful);
I must linger awhile at the very end, the dirty end, of the horrible Via
Principe Amedeo and, again, at a corner near the Portico d'Ottavia;
perambulate the Protestant cemetery, Monte Mario, and a few quite
uninteresting modern sites; the Acqua Acetosa, a stupid place, may on no
account be forgotten, nor yet that bridge on the Via Nomentana--not the
celebrated bridge but another one, miles away in the Campagna, the
dreariest of little bridges, in the dreariest of landscapes. Why? It has
been hallowed by the tread of certain feet.

Thus, by a kind of sacred procedure, I immerge myself into those old
stones and recreate my peculiar Roman mood. It is rather ridiculous.
Tradition wills it.

To-day came the turn of the Protestant cemetery. I have a view of this
place, taken about the 'seventies--I wish I could reproduce it here, to
show how this spot has been ruined. A woman who looks after the
enclosure was in a fairly communicative mood; we had a few minutes'
talk, among the tombs. What a jumble of names and nationalities, by the
way! What a mixed assemblage lies here, in this foreign earth! One would
like to write down all their names, shake them in a bag, pick out fifty
at random and compose their biographies. It would be a curious
cosmopolitan document.

They have now a dog, the woman tells me, a ferocious dog who roams among
the tombs, since several brass plates have been wrenched off by
marauders. At night? I inquire. At night. At night.... Slowly, warily, I
introduce the subject of fiammelle. It is not a popular theme. No! She
has heard of such things, but never seen them; she never comes here at
night, God forbid!

What are fiammelle? Little flames, will-o'-the-wisps which hover about
the graves at such hours, chiefly in the hot months or after autumn
rains. It is a well-authenticated apparition; the scientist Bessel saw
one; so did Casanova, here at Rome. He describes it as a pyramidal flame
raised about four feet from the ground which seemed to accompany him as
he walked along. He saw the same thing later, at Cesena near Bologna.
There was some correspondence on the subject (started by Dr. Herbert
Snow) in the Observer of December 1915 and January 1916. Many are the
graveyards I visited in this country and in others with a view to
"satisfying my curiosity," as old Ramage would say, on this point, and
all in vain. My usual luck! The fiammelle, on that particular evening,
were coy--they were never working. They are said to be frequently
observed at Scanno in the Abruzzi province, and the young secretary of
the municipality there, Mr. L. O., will tell you of our periodical
midnight visits to the local cemetery. Or go to Licenza and ask for my
intelligent friend the schoolmaster. What he does not know about
fiammelle is not worth knowing. Did he not, one night, have a veritable
fight with a legion of them which the wind blew from the graveyard into
his face? Did he not return home trembling all over and pale as
death?...

Here reposes, among many old friends, the idealist Malwida von
Meysenbug; that sculptured medallion is sufficient to proclaim her
whereabouts to those who still remember her. It is good to pause awhile
and etheralize oneself in the neighbourhood of her dust. She lived a
quiet life in an old brown house, since rebuilt, that overlooks the
Coliseum, on whose comely ellipse and blood-stained history she loved to
pasture eyes and imagination. Often I walked thence with her, in those
sparkling mornings, up the Palatine hill, to stroll about the ilexes and
roses in view of the Forum, to listen to the blackbirds, or the siskins
in that pine tree. She was of the same type, the same ethical parentage,
as the late Mathilde Blind, a woman of benignant and refined enthusiasm,
full of charity to the poor and, in those later days, almost
shadowy--remote from earth. She had saturated herself with Rome, for
whose name she professed a tremulous affection untainted by worldly
considerations such as mine; she loved its "persistent spiritual life";
it was her haven of rest. So, while her arm rested lightly on mine, we
wandered about those gardens, the saintly lady and myself; her mind
dwelling, maybe, on memories of that one classic love-adventure and the
part she came nigh to playing in the history of Europe, while mine was
lost in a maze of vulgar love-adventures, several of which came nigh to
making me play a part in the police-courts of Rome.

What may have helped to cement our strange friendship was my
acquaintance, at that time, with the German metaphysicians. She must
have thought me a queer kind of Englishman to discuss with such
familiarity the tenets of these cloudy dreamers. Malwida loved them in a
bland and childlike fashion. She would take one of their dicta as a
starting-point--establish herself, so to speak, within this or that
nebular hypothesis--and argue thence in academic fashion for the sake of
intellectual exercise and the joy of seeing where, after a thousand
twists and turnings, you were finally deposited. A friend of ours--some
American--had lately published a Socratic dialogue entitled "The
Prison"; it formed a fruitful theme of conversation. [9] Nietzsche was
also then to the fore, and it pleases me to recollect that even in those
days I detected his blind spot; his horror of those English materialists
and biologists. I did not pause to consider why he hated them so
ardently; I merely noted, more in sorrow than in anger, this fact which
seemed to vitiate his whole outlook--as indeed it does. Now I know the
reason. Like all preacher-poets, he is anthropocentric. To his way of
thinking the human mind is so highly organized, so different from that
of beasts, that not all the proofs of ethnology and physiology would
ever induce him to accept the ape-ancestry of man. This monkey-business
is too irksome and humiliating to be true; he waives it aside, with a
sneer at the disgusting arguments of those Englishmen.

That is what happens to men who think that "the spirit alone lives; the
life of the spirit alone is true life." A philosopher weighs the value
of evidence; he makes it his business, before discoursing of the origin
of human intellect, to learn a little something of its focus, the brain;
a little comparative anatomy. These men are not philosophers.
Metaphysicians are poets gone wrong. Schopenhauer invents a "genius of
the race"--there you have his cloven hoof, the pathetic fallacy, the
poet's heritage. There are things in Schopenhauer which make one blush
for philosophy. The day may dawn when this man will be read not for what
he says, but for how he says it; he being one of the few of his race who
can write in their own language. Impossible, of course, not to hit upon
a good thing now and then, if you brood as much as he did. So I remember
one passage wherein he adumbrates the theory of "Recognition Marks"
propounded later by A. R. Wallace, who, when I drew his attention to it,
wrote that he thought it a most interesting anticipation. [10]

He must have stumbled upon it by accident, during one of his excursions
into the inane.

And what of that jovial red-bearded personage who scorned honest work
and yet contrived to dress so well? Everyone liked him, despite his
borrowing propensities. He was so infernally pleasant, and always on the
spot. He had a lovely varnish of culture; it was more than varnish; it
was a veneer, a patina, an enamel: weather-proof stuff. He could talk
most plausibly--art, music, society gossip--everything you please;
everything except scandal. No bitter word was known to pass his lips. He
sympathized with all our little weaknesses; he was too blissfully
contented to think ill of others; he took it for granted that everybody,
like himself, found the world a good place to inhabit. That, I believe,
was the secret of his success. He had a divine intuition for discovering
the soft spots of his neighbours and utilizing the knowledge, in a frank
and gentlemanly fashion, for his own advantage. It was he who invented a
saying which I have since encountered more than once: "Never run after
an omnibus or a woman. There will be another one round in a minute." And
also this: "Never borrow from a man who really expects to be paid back.
You may lose a friend."

What lady is he now living on?

"A good-looking fellow like me--why should I work? Tell me that.
Especially with so many rich ladies in the world aching for somebody to
relieve them of their spare cash?"

"The wealthy woman," he once told me, after I had begun to know him more
intimately, "is a great danger to society. She is so corruptible! People
make her spend money on all kinds of empty and even harmful projects.
Think of the mischief that is done, in politics alone, by the money of
these women. Think of all the religious fads that spring up and are kept
going in a state of prosperity because some woman or other has not been
instructed as to the proper use of her cheque-book. I foresee a positive
decline ahead of us, if this state of affairs is allowed to go on. We
must club together, we reasonable men, and put an end to the scandal.
These women need trimmers; an army of trimmers. I have done a good deal
of trimming in my day. Of course it involves some trouble and a close
degree of intimacy, now and then. But a sensible man will always know
where to draw the line."

"Where do you draw it?"

"At marriage."

Whether he ever dared to tap the venerable Malwida for a loan? Likely
enough. He often played with her feelings in a delicate style, and his
astuteness in such matters was only surpassed by his shamelessness. He
was capable of borrowing a fiver from the Pope--or at least of
attempting the feat; of pocketing some hungry widow's last mite and
therewith purchasing a cigarette before her eyes. All these sums he took
as his due, by right of conquest. Whether he ever "stung" Malwida? I
should have liked to see the idealist's face when confronted in that
cheery off-hand manner with the question whether she happened to have
five hundred francs to spare.

"No? Whatever does it matter, my dear Madame de Meysenbug? Perhaps I
shall be more fortunate another day. But pray don't put yourself out for
an extravagant rascal like myself. I am always spending money--can't
live without it, can one?--and sometimes, though you might not believe
it, on quite worthy objects. There is a poor family I would like to take
you to see one day; the father was cut to pieces in some wretched
agricultural machine, the mother is dying in a hospital for consumption,
and the six little children, all shivering under one blanket--well,
never mind! One does what one can, in a small way. That was an
interesting lecture, wasn't it, on Friday? He made a fine point in what
he said about the relation of the Ego to the Cosmos. All the same, I
thought he was a little hard on Fichte. But then, you know, I always
felt a sort of tenderness for Fichte. And did you notice that the room
was absolutely packed? I doubt whether that would have been the case in
any other European capital. This must be the secret charm of Rome, don't
you think so? This is what draws one to the Eternal City and keeps one
here and makes one love the place in spite of a few trivial
annoyances--this sense of persistent spiritual life."

The various sums derived from ladies were regarded merely as
adventitious income. I found out towards the end of our acquaintance,
when I really began to understand his "method," that he had a second
source of revenue, far smaller but luckily "fixed." It was drawn from
the other sex, from that endless procession of men passing through Rome
and intent upon its antiquities. Rome, he explained, was the very place
for him.

"This is what keeps me here and makes me love the place in spite of a
few trivial annoyances--this persistent coming and going of tourists.
Everybody on the move, all the time! A man must be daft if he cannot
talk a little archaeology or something and make twenty new friends a
year among such a jolly crowd of people. They are so grateful for having
things explained to them. Another lot next year! And there are really
good fellows among them; fellows, mind you, with brains; fellows with
money. From each of those twenty he can borrow, say, ten pounds; what is
that to a rich stranger who comes here for a month or so with the
express purpose of getting rid of his money? Of course I am only talking
about the medium rich; one need never apply to the very rich--they are
always too poor. Well, that makes about two hundred a year. It's not
much, but, thank God, it's safe as a house and it supplements the
ladies. Women are so distressingly precarious, you know. You cannot
count on a woman unless you have her actually under your thumb. Under
your thumb, my boy; under your thumb. Don't ever forget it."

I have never forgotten it.

Where is he now? Is he dead? A gulf intervenes between that period and
this. What has become of him? You might as well ask me about his
contemporary, the Piccadilly goat. I have no idea what became of the
Piccadilly goat, though I know pretty well what would become of him,
were he alive at this moment.

Mutton-chops. [11]

Yet I can make a guess at what is happening to my red-haired friend. He
is not dead, but sleepeth. He is being lovingly tended, in a crapulous
old age, by one of the hundred ladies he victimized. He takes it as a
matter of course. I can hear him chuckling dreamily, as she smooths his
pillow for him. He will die in her arms unrepentant, and leave her to
pay for the funeral.

"Work!" he once said. "To Hell with work. The man who talks to me about
work is my enemy."

One sunny morning during this period there occurred a thunderous
explosion which shattered my windows and many others in Rome. A
gunpowder magazine had blown up, somewhere in the Campagna; the
concussion of air was so mighty that it broke glass, they said, even at
Frascati.

We drove out later to view the site. It resembled a miniature volcano.

There I left the party and wandered alone into one of those tortuous
stream-beds that intersect the plain, searching for a certain kind of
crystal which may be found in such places, washed out of the soil by
wintry torrents. I specialized in minerals in those days--minerals and
girls. Dangerous and unprofitable studies! Even at that tender age I
seem to have dimly discerned what I now know for certain: that dangerous
and unprofitable objects are alone worth pursuing. The taste for
minerals died out later, though I clung to it half-heartedly for a long
while, Dr. Johnston-Lavis, Professor Knop and others fanning the dying
embers. One day, all of a sudden, it was gone. I found myself riding
somewhere in Asiatic Turkey past a precipice streaked in alternate veins
of purest red and yellow jasper, with chalcedony in between: a discovery
which in former days would have made me half delirious with joy. It left
me cold. I did not even dismount to examine the site. "Farewell to
stones" I thought....

Often we lingered by the Fontana Trevi to watch the children disporting
themselves in the water and diving for pennies--a pretty scene which has
now been banished from the politer regions of Rome (the town has grown
painfully proper). There, at the foot of that weedy and vacuous and yet
charming old Neptune--how perfectly he suits his age!--there, if you
look, you will see certain gigantic leaves sculptured into the rock. I
once overheard a German she-tourist saying to her companion, as she
pointed to these things: "Ist doch sonderbar, wie das Wasser so die
Pflanzen versteinert." She thought they were natural plants petrified by
the water's action.

What happened yesterday was equally surprising. We were sitting at the
Arch of Constantine and I was telling my friend about the Coliseum hard
by and how, not long ago, it was a thicket of trees and flowers, looking
less like a ruin than some wooded mountain. Now the Coliseum is surely
one of the most famous structures in the world. Even they who have never
been to the spot would recognize it from those myriad
reproductions--especially, one would think, an Italian. Nevertheless,
while thus discoursing, a man came up to us, a well-dressed man, who
politely inquired:

"Could you tell me the name of this castello?"

I am glad to think that some account of the rich and singular flora of
the Coliseum has been preserved by Deakin and Sebastiani, and possibly
by others. I could round their efforts by describing the fauna of the
Coliseum. The fauna of the Coliseum--especially after 11 p.m.--would
make a readable book; readable but hardly printable.

These little local studies are not without charm. Somebody, one day, may
be induced to tell us about the fauna of Trafalgar Square. He should
begin with a description of the horse standing on three legs and gazing
inanely out of those human eyes after the fashion of its classic
prototype; then pass on to the lions beloved of our good Richard
Jefferies which look like puppy-dogs modelled in cotton-wool (why did
the sculptor not take a few lessons in lions from the sand-artist on
Yarmouth beach?), and conclude by dwelling as charitably as possible on
the human fauna--that droll little man, barely discernible, perched on
the summit of his lead pencil....

There was a slight earthquake at sunrise. I felt nothing....

And, appropriately enough, I encountered this afternoon M. M., that most
charming of persons, who, like Shelley and others, has discovered Italy
to be a "paradise of exiles." His friends may guess whom I mean when I
say that M. M. is connoisseur of earthquakes social and financial; his
existence has been punctuated by them to such an extent that he no
longer counts events from dates in the ordinary calendar, from birthdays
or Christmas or Easter, but from such and such a disaster affecting
himself. Each has left him seemingly more mellow than the last. Just
then, however, he was in pensive mood, his face all puckered into
wrinkles as he glanced upon the tawny flood rolling beneath that old
bridge. There he stood, leaning over the parapet, all by himself. He
turned his countenance aside on seeing me, to escape detection, but I
drew nigh none the less.

"Go away," he said. "Don't disturb me just now. I am watching the little
fishes. Life is so complicated! Let us pray. I have begun a new novel
and a new love-affair."

"God prosper both!" I replied, and began to move off.

"Thanks. But supposing the publisher always objects to your choicest
paragraphs?"

"I am not altogether surprised, if they are anything like what you once
read to me out of your unexpurgated 'House of the Seven Harlots.' Why
not try another firm? They might be more accommodating. Try mine."

He shook his head dubiously.

"They are all alike. It is with publishers as with wives: one always
wants somebody else's. And when you have them, where's the difference?
Ah, let us pray. These little fishes have none of our troubles."

I inquired about the new romance. At first he refused to disclose
anything. Then he told me it was to be entitled "With Christ at
Harvard," and that it promised some rather novel situations. I shall
look forward to its appearance.

What good things one could relate of M. M., but for the risk of
incurring his wrath! It is a thousand pities, I often tell him, that he
is still alive; I am yearning to write his biography, and cannot afford
to wait for his dissolution.

"When I am dead," he always says.

"By that time, my dear M., I shall be in the same fix myself."

"Try to survive. You may find it worth your while, when you come to look
into my papers. You don't know half. And I may be taking that little
sleeping-draught of mine any one of these days...." [12]

Mused long that night, and not without a certain envy, on the lot of M.
M. and other earthquake-connoisseurs--or rather on the lot of that true
philosopher, if he exists, who, far from being damaged by such
convulsions, distils therefrom subtle matter of mirth, I have only known
one single man--it happened to be a woman, an Austrian--who approached
this ideal of splendid isolation. She lived her own life, serenely
happy, refusing to acquiesce in the delusions and conventionalities of
the crowd; she had ceased to trouble herself about neighbours, save as a
source of quiet amusement; a state of affairs which had been brought
about by a succession of benevolent earthquakes that refined and
clarified her outlook.

Such disasters, obviously, have their uses. They knock down obsolete
rubbish and enable a man to start building anew. The most sensitive
recluse cannot help being a member of society. As such, he unavoidably
gathers about him a host of mere acquaintances, good folks who waste his
time dulling the edge of his wit and infecting him with their orthodoxy.
Then comes the cataclysm. He loses, let us say, all his money, or makes
a third appearance in the divorce courts. He can then at last (so one of
them expressed it to me) "revise his visiting-list," an operation which
more than counterbalances any damage from earthquakes. For these same
good folks are vanished, the scandal having scattered them to the winds.
He begins to breathe again, and employ his hours to better purpose. If
he loses both money and reputation he must feel, I should think, as
though treading on air. The last fools gone! And no sage lacks friends.

Consider well your neighbour, what an imbecile he is. Then ask yourself
whether it be worth while paying any attention to what he thinks of you.
Life is too short, and death the end of all things. Life must be lived,
not endured. Were the day twice as long as it is, a man might find it
diverting to probe down into that unsatisfactory fellow-creature and try
to reach some common root of feeling other than those physiological
needs which we share with every beast of earth. Diverting; hardly
profitable. It would be like looking for a flea in a haystack, or a joke
in the Bible. They can perhaps be found; at the expense of how much
trouble!

Therefore the sage will go his way, prepared to find himself growing
ever more out of sympathy with vulgar trends of opinion, for such is the
inevitable development of thoughtful and self-respecting minds. He
scorns to make proselytes among his fellows: they are not worth it. He
has better things to do. While others nurse their griefs, he nurses his
joy. He endeavours to find himself at no matter what cost, and to be
true to that self when found--a worthy and ample occupation for a
life-time. The happiness-of-the-greatest-number, of those who pasture on
delusions: what dreamer is responsible for this eunuchry? Mill, was it?
Bentham, more likely. As if the greatest number were not necessarily the
least-intelligent! As if their happiness were not necessarily
incompatible with that of the sage! Why foster it? He is a poor
philosopher, who cuts his own throat. Away with their ghosts;
de-spiritualize yourself; what you cannot find on earth is not worth
seeking.

That charming M. M., I fear, will never compass this clarity of vision,
this perfect de-spiritualization and contempt of illusions. He will
never remain curious, to his dying day, in things terrestrial and in
nothing else. From a Jewish-American father he has inherited that all
too common taint of psychasthenia (miscalled neurasthenia); he
confesses, moreover,--like other men of strong carnal proclivities--to
certain immaterial needs and aspirations after "the beyond." Not one of
these earthquake-specialists, in fact, but has his Achilles heel: a
mental crotchet or physical imperfection to mar the worldly perspective.
Not one of them, at close of life, will sit beside some open window in
view of a fair landscape and call up memories of certain moments which
no cataclysms have taken from him; not one will lay them in the balance
and note how they outweigh, in their tiny grains of gold, the dross of
an age of other men's lives. Not one of them! They will be preoccupied,
for the most part, with unseasonable little concerns. Pleasant folk,
none the less. And sufficiently abundant in Italy. Altogether, the
Englishman here is as often an intenser being than the home product.
Alien surroundings awaken fresh and unexpected notes in his nature. His
fibres seem to lie more exposed; you have glimpses into the man's
anatomy. There is something hostile in this sunlight to the hazy or
spongy quality which saturates the domestic Anglo-Saxon, blurring the
sharpness of his moral outline. No doubt you will also meet with dull
persons; Rome is full of them, but, the type being easier to detect
among a foreign environment, there is still less difficulty in evading
them....

Thus I should have had no compunction, some nights ago, in making myself
highly objectionable to Mr. P. G. who has turned up here on some mission
connected with the war--so he says, and it may well be true; no
compunction whatever, had that gentleman been in his ordinary social
state. Mr. P. G., the acme of British propriety, inhabiting a house, a
mansion, on the breezy heights of north London, was on that occasion
decidedly drunk. "Indulging in a jag," he would probably have called it.
He tottered into a place where I happened to be sitting, having lost his
friends, he declared; and soon began pouring into my ear, after the
confidential manner of a drunkard, a flood of low talk, which if I
attempted to set it down here, would only result in my being treated to
the same humiliating process as the excellent M. M. with his "choicest
paragraphs." It was highly instructive--the contrast between that
impeccable personality which he displays at home and his present state.
I wish his wife and two little girls could have caught a few shreds of
what he said--just a few shreds; they would have seen a new light on
dear daddy.

In vino veritas. Ever avid of experimentum in some corpore vili and
determined to reach the bed-rock of his gross mentality, I plied him
vigorously with drink, and was rewarded. It was rich sport, unmasking
this Philistine and thanking God, meanwhile, that I was not like unto
him. We are all lost sheep; and none the worse for that. Yet whoso is
liable, however drunk, to make an exhibition of himself after the
peculiar fashion of Mr. P. G., should realize that there is something
fundamentally wrong with his character and take drastic measures of
reform--measures which would include, among others, a total abstention
from alcohol. Old Aristotle, long ago, laboured to define wherein
consisted the trait known as gentlemanliness; others will have puzzled
since his day, for we have bedaubed ourselves with so thick a coating of
manner and phrase that many a cad will pass for something better. Well,
here is the test. Unvarnish your man; make him drink, and listen. That
was my procedure with P. G. Esquire. I listened to his outpouring of
inanity and obscenity and, listening sympathetically, like some
compassionate family doctor, could not help asking myself: Is such a man
to be respected, even when sober? Be that as it may, he gave me to
understand why some folk are rightly afraid of exposing, under the
influence of drink, the bête humaine which lurks below their skin of
decency. His language would have terrified many people. Me it rejoiced.
I would not have missed that entertainment for worlds. He finally wanted
to have a fight, because I refused to accompany him to a certain place
of delights, the address of which--I might have given him a far better
one--had been scrawled on the back of a crumpled envelope by some
cabman. Unable to stand on his legs, what could he hope to do there?




Olevano

I have loafed into Olevano.

A thousand feet below my window, and far away, lies the gap between the
Alban and Volscian hills; veiled in mists, the Pontine marches extend
beyond, and further still--discernible only to the eye of faith--the
Tyrrhenian.

The profile of these Alban craters is of inimitable grace. It recalls
Etna, as viewed from Taormina. How the mountain cleaves to earth, how
reluctantly it quits the plain before swerving aloft in that noble line!
Velletri's ramparts, twenty miles distant, are firmly planted on its
lower slope. Standing out against the sky, they can be seen at all hours
of the day, whereas the dusky palace of Valmontone, midmost on the green
plain and rock-like in its proportions, fades out of sight after midday.

Hard by, on your right, are the craggy heights of Capranica. Tradition
has it that Michael Angelo was in exile up there, after doing something
rather risky. What had he done? He crucified his model, desirous, like a
true artist, to observe and reproduce faithfully in marble the muscular
contractions and facial agony of such a sufferer. To crucify a man: this
was going almost too far, even for the Pope of that period, who seems to
have been an unusually sensitive pontiff--or perhaps the victim was a
particular friend of his. However that may be, he waxed wroth and
banished the conscientious sculptor in disgrace to this lonely mountain
village, there to expiate his sins, for a day or two....

One sleeps badly here. Those nightingales--they are worse than the
tram-cars in town. They begin earlier. They make more noise. Surely
there is a time for everything? Will certain birds never learn to sing
at reasonable hours?

A word as to these nightingales. One of them elects to warble, in
deplorably full-throated ease, immediately below my bedroom window. When
this particular fowl sets up its din at about 3.45 a.m. it is a
veritable explosion; an ear-rending, nerve-shattering explosion of
noise. I use that word "noise" deliberately. For it is not music--not
until your ears are grown accustomed to it.

I know a little something about music, having studied the art with
considerable diligence for a number of years. Impossible to enumerate
all the composers and executants on various instruments, the conductors
and opera-singers and ballet-girls with whom I was on terms of
familiarity during that incarnation. Perhaps I am the only person now
alive who has shaken hands with a man (Lachner) who shook hands with
Beethoven and heard his voice; all of which may appear when I come to
indite my musical memoirs. I have written a sonata in four movements,
opus 643, hitherto unpublished, and played the organ during divine
service to a crowded congregation. Furthermore I performed, not at my
own suggestion, his insipid Valse Caprice to the great Antoine
Rubinstein, who was kind enough to observe: "Yes, yes. Quite good. But I
rather doubt whether you could yet risk playing that in a concert." And
in the matter of sheer noise I am also something of an expert, having
once, as an infant prodigy, broken five notes in a single masterly
rendering of Liszt's polonaise in E Major--I think it is E
Major--whereupon my teacher, himself a pupil of Liszt, genially
remarked: "Now don't cry, and don't apologize. A polonaise like yours is
worth a piano." I set these things down with modest diffidence, solely
in order to establish my locus standi as a person who might be expected
to know the difference between sound and noise. As such, I have no
hesitation in saying that the first three bars of that nightingale
performance are, to sleeping ears, not music. They break upon the
stillness with the crash of Judgment Day.

And every night the same scare. It causes me to start up, bathed in
sudden perspiration, out of my first, and best, and often only sleep,
with the familiar feeling that something awful is happening. Windows
seem to rattle, plaster drops from the ceiling--an earthquake? Lord, no.
Nothing so trivial. Nothing so brief. It is that blasted bird clearing
its throat for a five hours' entertainment. Let it not be supposed that
the song of these southerners bears any resemblance to that of an
English nightingale. I could stand a hatful of English nightingales in
my bedroom; they would lull me to sleep with their anaemic whispers. You
might as well compare the voice of an Italian costermonger, the crowing
of a cock, the braying of a local donkey, with their representatives in
the north--those thin trickles of sound, shadowy as the squeakings of
ghosts. Something will have to be done about those nightingales unless I
am to find my way into a sanatorium. For hardly is this bird started on
its work before five or six others begin to shout in emulation--a little
further off, I am glad to say, but still near enough to be inconvenient;
still near enough to be reached by a brick from this window----A brick.
Methinks I begin to see daylight....

Meanwhile one can snatch a little rest out of doors, in the afternoon. A
delectable path, for example, runs up behind the cemetery, bordered by
butterfly orchids and lithospermum and aristolochia and other plants
worthy of better names; it winds aloft, under shady chestnuts, with
views on either side. Here one can sit and smoke and converse with some
rare countryman passing by; here one can dream, forgetful of
nightingales--soothed, rather, by the mellifluous note of the oriole
among the green branches overhead and the piping, agreeably remote, of
some wryneck in the olives down yonder. The birds are having a quiet
time, for the first time in their lives; sportsmen are all at the front.
I kicked up a partridge along this track two days ago.

Those wrynecks, by the way, are abundant but hard to see. They sit
close, relying on their protective colour. And it is the same with the
tree-creepers. I have heard Englishmen say there are no tree-creepers in
Italy. The olive groves are well stocked with them (there are numbers
even in the Borghese Gardens in Rome), but you must remain immovable as
a rock in order to see them; for they are yet shyer, more silent, more
fond of interposing the tree-trunk between yourself and them, than those
at home. Mouse-like in hue, in movement and voice--a strange case of
analogous variation....

As to this Scalambra, this mountain whose bleak grey summit overtops
everything near Olevano, I could soon bear the sight of it no longer. It
seemed to shut out the world; one must up and glance over the edge, to
see what is happening on the other side. I looked for a guide and
porter, for somebody more solid than Giulio, who is almost an infant;
none could be found. Men are growing scarce as the Dodo hereabouts, on
account of the war. So Giulio came, though he had never made the ascent.

Now common sense, to say nothing of a glance at the map, would suggest
the proper method of approach: by the village of Serrano, the Saint
Michael hermitage, and so up. Scouting this plan, I attacked the
mountain about half-way between that village and Rojate. I cannot
recommend my route. It was wearisome to the last degree and absolutely
shadeless save for a small piece of jungle clothing a gulley, hung with
myriads of caterpillars and not worth mentioning as an incident in that
long walk. No excitement--not the faintest chance, so far as I could
see, of breaking one's neck, and uphill all the time over limestone. One
never seems to get any nearer. This Scalambra, I soon discovered, is one
of those artful mountains which defend their summits by thrusting out
escarpments with valleys in between; you are kept at arm's length, as it
were, by this arrangement of the rock, which is invisible at a distance.
And when at last you set foot on the real ridge and climb laboriously to
what seems to be the top--lo! there is another peak a little further
off, obviously a few feet higher. Up you go, only to discover a third,
perhaps a few inches higher still. Alpine climbers know these tricks.

We reached the goal none the less and there lay, panting and gasping;
while an eagle, a solitary eagle with tattered wings, floated overhead
in the cloudless sky.

The descent to Rojate under that blazing sun was bad enough. My flask
had been drained to the dregs long ago, and the Scalambra, true to its
limestone tradition, had not supplied even a drop of water. Arriving at
the village at about two in the afternoon, we found it deserted;
everybody enjoying their Sunday nap. Rojate is a dirty hole. The water
was plainly not to be trusted; it might contain typhoid germs, and I was
responsible for Giulio's health; wine would be safer, we agreed. There,
in a little shop near the church--a dark and cool place, the first shade
we had entered for many hours--we drank without ever growing less
thirsty. We felt like cinders, so hot, so porous, that the liquid seemed
not only to find its way into the legitimate receptacle but to be
obliged to percolate, by some occult process of capillarity, the
remotest regions of the body. As time went on, the inhabitants dropped
in after their slumbers and kept us company. We told our adventures,
drank to the health of the Allies one by one and several times over; and
it was not until we had risen to our feet and passed once more into the
sunshine of the square that we suddenly felt different from what we
thought we felt.

The first indication was conveyed by Giulio, who called upon the
populace of Rojate, there assembled, to bear solemn witness to the fact
that I was his one and only friend, and that he would nevermore abandon
me--a sentiment in which I stoutly concurred. (A fellow-feeling makes us
wondrous blind.) Other symptoms followed. His hat, for example, which
had hitherto behaved in exemplary fashion, now refused to remain
steadily balanced on his head; it took some first-class gymnastics to
prevent it from falling to the ground. In fact, while I confined myself
to the minor part of Silenus--my native role--this youngster gave a
noteworthy representation of the Drunken Faun....

Now I see no harm in appreciating wine up to a certain point, and am
consoled to observe that Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D., was of the same
way of thinking. He says so himself, and there is no reason for doubting
his word. He frankly admits, for instance, that he enjoys the stuff
called moscato "with great zest." He samples the Falernian vintage and
pronounces it to be "particularly good, and not degenerated." Arrived at
Cutro, he is not averse to reviving his spirits with "a pretty fair
modicum of wine." He also lets slip--significant detail--the fact that
Dr. Henderson was one of his friends, and that he travelled about with
him. You may judge a man by the company he keeps. Who was this Dr.
Henderson? He was the author of "The History of Ancient Wines." Old
Henderson, I should say, could be trusted to know something of local
vintages.

And so far good.

At Licenza, however, Ramage tells us that he "got glorious on the wine
of Horace's Sabine farm." I do not know what he means by this
expression, which seems to be purposely ambiguous; in any case, it does
not sound very nice. At another place, again, he and his entertainer
consumed some excellent liquor "in considerable quantity"--so he avows;
adding that "it was long past midnight ere we closed our bacchanalian
orgies, and he (the host) ended by stating that he was happy to have
made my acquaintance." Note the lame and colourless close of that
sentence: he ended by stating. One always ends that way after
bacchanalian orgies, though one does not always gloss over the escapade
with such disingenuous language.

We can guess what really took place. It was something like what happened
at Rojate. Did not the curly-haired Giulio end by "stating" something to
the same effect?

I cannot make up my mind whether to be pleased with this particular
trait in friend Ramage's character. For let it never be forgotten that
our traveller was a young man at the time. He says so himself, and there
is no reason for doubting his word. Was he acting as beseemed his years?

I am not more straight-laced than many people, yet I confess it always
gives me a kind of twinge to see a young man yielding to intemperance of
any kind. There is something incongruous in the spectacle, if not
actually repellent. Rightly or wrongly, one is apt to associate that
time of life with stern resolve. A young man, it appears to me, should
hold himself well in hand. Youth has so much to spare! Youth can afford
to be virtuous. With such stores of joy looming ahead, it should be a
period of ideals, of self-restraint and self-discipline, of earnestness
of purpose. How well the Greek Anthology praises "Temperance, the nurse
of Youth!" The divine Plato lays it down that youngsters should not
touch wine at all, since it is not right to heap fire on fire. He adds
that older men like ourselves may indulge therein as an ally against the
austerity of their years--agreeing, therefore, with Theophrastus who
likewise recommends it for the "natural moroseness" of age.

Observe in this connection what happened to Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D.,
at Trebisacce. Here was a poor old coastguard who had been taken
prisoner by the Corsairs thirty years earlier, carried to Algiers, and
afterwards ransomed. Having "nothing better to do" (says our author) "I
confess I furnished him with somewhat more wine than was exactly
consistent with propriety"; with so liberal a quantity, indeed, that the
coastguard became quite "obstreperous in his mirth"; whereupon Ramage
hops on his mule and leaves him to his fate. Here, then, we have a young
fellow deliberately leading an old man astray. And why? Because he has
"nothing better to do." [13] It is not remarkably edifying. True, he
afterwards makes a kind of apology for "causing my brother to sin by
over-indulgence...."

But if we close our eyes to the fact that Ramage, when he gave way to
these excesses, was a young man and ought to have known better, what an
agreeable companion we find him!

He never rails at anything. Had I been subjected to half the annoyances
he endured, my curses would have been loud and long. Under such
provocation, Ramage contents himself with reproving his tormentors in
rounded phrases of oratio obliqua which savour strongly of those Latin
classics he knew so well. What he says of the countryfolk is not only
polite but true, that their virtues are their own, while their vices
have been fostered by the abuses of tyranny. "Whatever fault one may
find with this people for their superstition and ignorance, there is a
loveableness in their character which I am not utilitarian enough in my
philosophy to resist." This comes of travelling off the beaten track and
with an open mind; it comes of direct contact. When one remembers that
he wrote in 1828 and was derived from a bigoted stock, his religious
tolerance is refreshing--astonishing. He studies the observances of the
poorer classes with sympathetic eye and finds that they are "pious to a
degree to which I am afraid we must grant that we have no pretensions."
That custom of suspending votive offerings in churches he does not think
"worthy of being altogether condemned or ridiculed. The feeling is the
same that induces us, on recovery from severe illness, to give thanks to
Almighty God, either publicly in church or privately in our closets."
How many Calvinists of to-day would write like this?

We could do with more of these sensible and humane reflections, but
unfortunately he is generally too "pressed for time" to indulge in them.
That mania of hustling through the country....

One morning he finds himself at Foggia, with the intention of visiting
Mons Garganus. First of all he must "satisfy his curiosity" about Arpi;
it is ten miles there and back. Leaving Foggia for the second time he
proceeds twenty miles to Manfredonia, and inspects not only this town,
but the site of old Sipontum. Then he sails to the village of Mattinata,
and later to Vieste, the furthermost point of the promontory. About six
miles to the north are the presumable ruins of Merinum; he insists upon
going there, but the boatmen strike work; regretfully he returns to
Manfredonia, arriving at 11 p.m., and having covered on this day some
sixty or seventy miles. What does he do at Manfredonia? He sleeps for
three hours--and then a new hustle begins, in pitch darkness.

Another day he wakes up at Sorrento and thinks he will visit the Siren
Islets. He crosses the ridge and descends to the sea on the other side,
to the so-called Scaricatojo--quite a respectable walk, as any one can
find out for himself. Hence he sails to the larger of the islets, climbs
to the summit and makes some excavations, in the course of which he
observes what I thought I was the first to discover--the substructures
of a noble Roman villa; he also scrambles into King Robert's tower. Then
to the next islet, and up it; then to the third, and up it. After that,
he is tempted to visit the headland of Minerva; he goes there, and
satisfies his curiosity. He must now hence to Capri. He sails across,
and after a little refreshment, walks to the so-called Villa of Jupiter
at the easterly apex of the island. He then rows round the southern
shore and is taken with the idea of a trip to Misenum, twenty miles or
so distant. Arrived there, he climbs to the summit of the cape and
lingers a while--it is pleasant to find him lingering--to examine
something or other. Then he "rushes" down to the boat and bids them row
to Pozzuoli, where he arrives (and no wonder) long after sunset. A good
day's hustle....

The ladies made a great impression on his sensitive mind; yet not even
they were allowed to interfere with his plans. At Strongoli the
"sparkling eyes of the younger sister" proved the most attractive object
in the place. He was strongly urged to remain a while and rest from his
fatigues. But no; there were many reasons why he should press forward.
He therefore presses forward. At another place, too, he was waited upon
by his entertainer's three daughters, the youngest of whom was one of
the most entrancing girls he had ever met with--in fact, it was well
that his time was limited, else "I verily believe I should have
committed all kinds of follies." That is Ramage. He parts from his host
with "unfeigned regret"--but--parts. His time is always limited. Bit for
that craze of pressing forward, what fun he could have had!

Stroll to that grove of oaks crowning a hill-top above the Serpentaro
stream. It has often been described, often painted. It is a corner of
Latium in perfect preservation; a glamorous place; in the warm dusk of
southern twilight--when all those tiresome children are at last
asleep--it calls up suggestions of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Here is a
specimen of the landscape as it used to be. You may encounter during
your wanderings similar fragments of woodland, saved by their
inaccessibility from the invading axe. "Hands off the Oak!" cries an old
Greek poet.

The Germans, realizing its picturesque value, bought this parcel of land
and saved the trees from destruction. It was well done. Within, they
have cut certain letterings upon the rock which violate the sylvan
sanctity of the place--Germans will do these things; there is no
stopping them; it is part of their crudely expansive temperament--certain
letterings, among other and major horrors, anent the "Law of
the Ever-beautiful" (how truly Teutonic!)--lines, that is, signed by the
poet Victor von Scheffel, and dated 2 May, 1897. Scheffel was a kindly
and erudite old toper, who toped himself into Elysium via countless
quarts of Affenthaler. I used to read his things; the far-famed
Ekkehardt furnishing an occasion for a visit to the Hohentwiel mountain
in search of that golden-tinted natrolite mineral, which was duly found
(I specialized in zeolites during that period).

Now what was Scheffel doing at this Serpentaro in 1897? For I attended
his funeral, which took place in the 'eighties. Can it be that his son,
a scraggy youth in those days, inherited not only the father's name but
his poetic mantle? Was it he who perpetrated those sententious lines? I
like to think so. That "law of the ever-beautiful" does not smack of the
old man, unless he was more disguised than usual, and having a little
fun with his pedantic countrymen....

Climb hence--it is not far--to the village of Civitella, now called
Bellegra, a prehistoric fastness with some traces of "cyclopean"
defences. Those ancients must have had cisterns; inconceivable that
springs should ever have issued from this limestone crag. You can see
the women of to-day fetching water from below, from a spot which I was
too lazy to investigate, where perhaps the soft tertiary rock leans upon
this impervious stuff and allows the liquid to escape into the open. An
unclean place is Bellegra, and loud, like all these Sabine villages,
with the confused crying of little children. That multiple wail of
misery will ring in your ear for days afterwards. They are more
neglected by their mothers than ever, since women now have all the men's
work in the fields to do. They are hungrier than ever, on account of the
war which has imposed real hardships on these agricultural folk;
hardships that seize them by the throat and make them sit down, with
folded hands, in dumb despair: so I have seen them. How many of these
unhappy babies will grow to maturity?

Death-rate must anyhow be high hereabouts, for nothing is done in the
way of hygiene. In the company of one who knows, I perambulated the
cemetery of Olevano and was astonished at the frequency of tombstones
erected to the young. "Consumption," my friend told me. They scorn
prophylactics. I should not care to send growing children into these
villages, despite their "fine air." Here, at Bellegra, the air must be
fine indeed in winter; too fine for my taste. It lies high, exposed to
every blast of Heaven, and with noble views in all directions.

Rest awhile, on your homeward march, at the small bridge near Olevano
where the road takes a turn. A few hundred yards up the glen on your
left is a fountain whose waters are renowned for their purity; the
bridge itself is not a favourite spot after sunset; it is haunted by a
most malignant spectre. That adds considerably, in my eyes, to the charm
of the place. Besides, here stands an elder tree now in full flower.
What recollections does that scent evoke! What hints of summer, after
rain!

A venerable tree, old as the hills; that last syllable tells its
tale--you may read it in the Sanscrit. A man-loving tree; seldom one
sees an elder by itself, away from human habitations, in the jungle. I
have done so; but in that particular jungle, buried beneath the soil,
were the ruins of old houses. When did it begin to attach itself to the
works of man, to walls and buildings? And why? Does it derive peculiar
sustenance from the lime of the masonry? I think not, for it grows in
lands where lime is rare, and in the shadow of log-huts. It seeks
shelter from the wind for its frail stalks and leaves, that shrivel
wondrously when the plant is set in exposed situations.

The Sabine mountains are full of elders. They use the berries to colour
the wine. A German writer, R. Voss, wove their fragrance into a kind of
Leit-motif for one of his local novels. I met him once by accident, and
am not anxious to meet him again. A sacerdotal and flabbily pompous old
man--straightway my opinion of his books, never very high, fell to zero,
and has there remained. He knew these regions well, and doubtless
sojourned at one time or another at yonder caravanserai-hotel, abandoned
of late, but then filled with a crowd of noisy enthusiasts who have
since been sacrificed to the war-god. Doubtless he drank wine with them
on that terrace overlooking the brown houses of Olevano, though I
question whether he then paid as much as they are now charging me;
doubtless he rejoiced to see that stately array of white lilies fronting
the landscape, though I question whether he derived more pleasure from
them than I do....

While at Bellegra, this afternoon, I gazed landwards to where, in the
Abruzzi region, the peaks are still shrouded in snow.

How are they doing our there, at Scanno? Is that driving-road at last
finished? Can the "River Danube" still be heard flowing underground in
the little cave of Saint Martin? Are the thistles of violet and red and
blue and gold and silver as gorgeous as ever? [14] And those legions of
butterflies--do they still hover among the sunny patches in the narrow
vale leading to Mount Terrata? And Frattura, that strange place--what
has happened to Frattura? Built on a fracture, on the rubble of that
shattered mountain which produced the lake lower down, it has probably
crumbled away in the last earthquake. Well I remember Frattura! It was
where the wolf ate the donkey, and where we, in our turn, often
refreshed ourselves in the dim hovel of Ferdinando--never with greater
zest than on the hot downward march from Mount Genzana. Whether those
small purple gentians are still to be found on its summit? And the
emerald lizard on the lower slopes? Whether the eagles still breed on
the neighbouring Montagna di Preccia? They may well be tired of having
their nest plundered year after year.

What foreigner has older and pleasanter memories of Scanno? I would like
to meet that man, and compare notes.

And so, glancing over the hills from Bellegra, I sent my thoughts into
those Abruzzi mountains, and registered a vow to revisit Scanno--if only
in order to traverse once more by moonlight, for the sake of auld lang
syne, the devious paths to Roccaraso, or linger in that moist nook by
the lake-side where stood the Scanno of olden days (the Betifuli, if
such it was, of the Pelignians), where the apples grow, where the sly
dabchick plays among the reeds, and where, one evening, I listened to
something that might have been said much sooner. Acque Vive....

I kept my vow. Our bill at Scanno for wine alone was 189 francs, and for
beer 92 francs; figures which look more formidable than they are and
which I cite only to prove that we--for of course I was not
alone--enjoyed ourselves fairly well during those eighteen days. By the
way, what does Baedeker mean by speaking of the "excellent wines" of
Scanno, where not a drop is grown? He might have said the same of
Aberdeen.

The season was too late for the thistles, too late for the little
coppers and fritillaries and queens of Spain and commas and all the rest
of that fluttering tribe in the narrow vale leading to Terrata, though
wood-pigeons were still cooing there. Scanno has been spared by the
earthquake which laid low so many other places; it has prospered;
prospered too much for my taste, since those rich smoky tints,
especially of the vaulted interiors, are now disappearing under an
invasion of iron beams and white plaster. The golden duskiness of
Scanno, heightened as it was by the gleaming copper vessels borne on
every young girl's head, will soon be a thing of the past. Young trees
along the road-side--well-chosen trees: limes, maples, willows, elms,
chestnuts, ashes--are likewise doing well and promise pretty effects of
variegated foliage in a few years' time; so are the plantations of pines
in the higher regions of the Genzana. In this matter of afforestation,
Scanno continues its system of draconic severity. It is worth while, in
a country which used to suffer so much from reckless grazing of goats on
the hill-sides, and the furious floods of water. The Sagittario stream
is hemmed in by a cunning device of stones contained within bags of
strong wire; it was introduced many years ago by an engineer from
Modena. And if you care to ascend the torrents, you will find they have
been scientifically dammed by the administration, whereas the peasant,
when they overflow and ruin his crops, contents himself with damning
them in quite an amateurish fashion. Which reminds me that I picked up
during this visit, and have added to my collection, a new term of abuse
to be addressed to your father-in-law: Porcaccio d'un cagnaccio! Novel
effects, you perceive, obtained by a mere intensification of colour.

As to Frattura--yes, it is shattered. Vainly we tried to identify
Ferdinando's abode among all that debris. The old man himself escaped
the cataclysm, and now sells his wares in one of the miserable wooden
shanties erected lower down. The mellow hermit at St. Egidio, of whom
more on p. 171, has died; his place is taken by a worthless vagabond.
Saint Domenico and his serpents, the lonely mead of Jovana (? Jovis
fanum), that bell in the church-tower of Villalago which bears the
problematical date of 600 A.D.--they are all in their former places.
Mount Velino still glitters over the landscape, for those who climb high
enough to see it. The cliff-swallows are there, and dippers skim the
water as of old. Women, in their unhygienic costume, still carry those
immense loads of wood on their heads, though payment is considerably
higher than the three half-pence a day which it used to be.

Enough of Scanno!

Whoever wishes to leave the place on foot and by an unconventional
route, may go to Sora via Pescasseroli. Adventurous souls will scramble
over the Terrata massif, leaving the summit well on their right, and
descend on its further side; others may wander up the Valle dei Prati
and then, bending to the right along the so-called Via del Campo, mount
upwards past a thronged alp of sheep, over the watershed, and down
through charming valleys of beechen timber. A noble walk, and one that
compares favourably with many Abruzzi excursions. What deserts they
often are, these stretches of arid limestone, voiceless and waterless,
with the raven's croak for your only company!

I am glad to have seen Pescasseroli, where we arrived at about 9 a.m.
For the rest, it is only one of many such places that have been brought
to a state of degradation by the earthquake, the present war, and
governmental neglect. Not an ounce of bread was procurable for money, or
even as a gift. The ordinary needs of life--cigars, matches, maccheroni
and so forth: there were none of them. An epidemic of the gapes,
infecting the entire race of local hens, had caused the disappearance of
every egg from the market. And all those other countless things which a
family requires for its maintenance--soap and cloth and earthenware and
kitchen utensils and oils--they have become rarities; the natives are
learning to subsist without them; relapsing into a kind of barbarism. So
they sit among the cracked tenements; resentful, or dumbly apathetic.

"We have been forgotten," said one of them.

The priests inculcate submission to the will of God. What else should
they teach? But men will outgrow these doctrines of patience when
suffering is too acute or too prolonged. "Anything is better than this,"
they say. Thus it comes about that these ruined regions are a goodly
soil for the sowing of subversive opinions; the land reeks of
ill-digested socialism.

We found a "restaurant" where we lunched off a tin of antediluvian
Spanish sardines, some mouldy sweet biscuits, and black wine. (A
distinction is made in these parts between black and red wine; the
former is the Apulian variety, the other from Sulmona.) During this
repast, we were treated to several bear-stories. For there are bears at
Pescasseroli, and nowhere else in Italy; even as there are chamois
nearby, between Opi and Villetta Barrea, among the crags of the
Camosciara, which perpetuates their name. One of those present assured
us that the bear is a good beast; he will eat a man, of course, but if
he meets a little boy, he contents himself with throwing stones at
him--just to teach him good manners. Certain old bears are as big as a
donkey. They have been seen driving into their cave a flock of
twenty-five sheep, like any shepherd. It is no rare thing to encounter
in the woods a bear with a goat slung over his shoulder; he must
breakfast, like anybody else. One of these gentlemen told us that the
bears, not long ago, were a source of considerable profit to the
peasantry round about. It was in this wise. Their numbers had been
reduced, it seems, to a single pair and the species was threatened with
extinction, when, somehow or other, this state of affairs became known
to the King who, alarmed at the disappearance from his realm of a
venerable and autochtonous quadruped, the largest European beast of
prey, conceived the happy idea of converting the whole region into a
Royal Preserve. On pain of death, no bear was to be molested or even
laughed at; any damage they might do would be compensated out of the
Royal Purse.

For a week or so after this enactment, nothing was heard of the bears.
Then, one morning, the conscientious Minister of the Royal Household
presented himself at the palace, with a large sheaf of documents under
his arm.

"What have we here?" inquired the King.

"Attestations relating to the bears of Pescasseroli, Your Majesty. They
seem to be thriving."

"Ah! That is nice of them. They are multiplying once more, thanks to Our
Royal protection. We thought they would."

"Multiplying indeed, Sire. Here are testimonials, sworn before the local
syndic, showing that they have devoured 18 head of cattle and 43 sheep."

"In that short time? Is it possible? Well, well! The damage must be
paid. And yet We never knew the bears could propagate so fast. Maybe our
Italian variety is peculiarly vigorous in such matters."

"Seems so, Your Majesty. Very prolific."

A week or so passed and, once more, His Excellency was announced. The
King observed:

"You are not looking quite yourself this morning, my good Minister.
Would it be indiscreet to inquire the cause? No family or parliamentary
worries, We trust?"

"Your Majesty is very kind! No. It is the bears of Pescasseroli. They
have eaten 75 head of cattle, 93 sheep, and 114 goats. Ah--and 18
horses. Here are the claims for damages, notarially attested."

"We must pay. But if only somebody could teach the dear creatures to
breed a little more reasonably!"

"I cannot but think, Sire, that the peasants are abusing Your
Majesty's----"

"May We never live to hear anything against Our faithful and
well-beloved Abruzzi folk!"

Nearly a month elapsed before the Minister again presented himself. This
time he looked really haggard and careworn, and was bowed down under an
enormous bundle of papers. The King glanced up from that writing-desk
where, like all other sovereigns, he had been working steadily since
4.30 a.m., and at once remarked, with that sympathetic intuition for
which he is famous among crowned heads:

"We think We know. The bears."

Your Majesty is never wrong. They have devoured 126 cows and calves and
bullocks, 418 sheep and goats, 62 mules, 37 horses, and 96 donkeys. Also
55 shepherd dogs and 827 chickens. Here are the claims."

"Dear, dear, dear. This will never do. If it is a question of going to
ruin, We prefer that it should be the bears rather than Ourselves. We
must withdraw Our Royal protection, after settling up these last items.
What say you, my good Minister?"

"Your Majesty is always right. A private individual may indulge in the
pastime of breeding bears to the verge of personal bankruptcy. Ruling
sovereigns will be guided by juster and more complex considerations."

And from that moment, added our gentlemanly informant, there began a
wonderful shrinkage in the numbers of the bears. Within a day or two,
they were again reduced to a single couple.

Gladly would I have listened to more of these tales but, having by far
the worst of the day's walk still before us, we left the stricken
regions about midday and soon began an interminable ascent, all through
woods, to the shrine of Madonna di Tranquillo. Hereabouts is the
watershed, whence you may see, far below, the tower of Campoli Apennino.
That village was passed in due course, and Sora lay before us, after a
thirteen hours' march....

That same night in Sora--it may have been 2 a.m.--some demon drew nigh
to my bedside and whispered in my ear: "What are you doing here, at
Sora? Why not revisit Alatri? (I had been there already in June.) Just
another little promenade! Up, sluggard, while the night-air is cool!"

I obeyed the summons and turned to rouse my slumbering companion, to
whom I announced my inspiration. His remarks, on that occasion, were
well worth listening to.

Next evening found us at Alatri.

Now whoever, after walking from Scanno over Pescasseroli to Sora in one
day, and on the next, in the blazing heat of early autumn, from Sora
over Isola Liri and Veroli to Alatri--touching in two days the soil of
three Italian provinces: Aquila, Caserta, and Rome--whoever, after doing
this, and inspecting the convent of Casamari en route, feels inclined
for a similar promenade on the third day: let him rest assured of my
profound respect.

Calm, sunny days at Olevano. And tranquil nights, for some time past.

The nightingale has been inspired to move a little up country, into
another bush. Its rivals have likewise retired further off, and their
melodramatic trills sound quite pleasant at this distance.

So tin cans have their uses, even when empty. Certain building
operations may have been interrupted. I apologise, though I will not
promise not to repeat the offence. They can move their nests; I cannot
move this house. Bless their souls! I would not hurt a hair on their
dear little heads, but one must really have a few hours' sleep, somehow
or other. A single night's repose is more precious to me than a myriad
birds or quadrupeds or bipeds; my ideas on the sacred nature of sleep
being perfectly Oriental. That Black Hole of Calcutta was an infamous
business. And yet, while nowise approving the tyrant's action, I can
thoroughly understand his instructions on the subject of slumber.

Not every one at Olevano is so callous. Waiting the other day at the
bifurcation of the roads for the arrival of the station motor-car--the
social event of the place--I noticed two children bringing up to a
bigger one the nest of a chaffinch, artfully frosted over with silver
lichen from some olive, and containing a naked brood which sprawled
pathetically within. Wasn't it pretty, they asked?

"Very pretty," he replied. "Now you will take it straight back where you
found it. Go ahead. I am coming with you." And he marched them off.

I am glad to put this incident on record. It is the second of its kind
which I have observed in this country, the first being when a fisherman
climbed up a bad piece of rock to replace a nest--idle undertaking--which
some boys had dislodged with stones. At a short distance from
the scene sat the mother-bird in pensive mood, her head cocked on one
side. What did she think of the benevolent enthusiast?...

Olevano is said to have been discovered by the Germans. I am sceptical
on this point, having never yet found a place that was discovered by
them. An English eccentric or two is sure to have lived and died here
all by himself; though doubtless, once on the spot, they did their best
to popularise and vulgarise it. In this matter, as in art or science or
every department of life, a German requires forerunners. He must follow
footsteps. He gleans; picks the brains of other people, profits by their
mistakes and improves on their ideas.

I know nothing of the social history of Olevano--of its origin, so far
as foreigners are concerned. It is the easiest and the flimsiest thing
in the world to invent; there are so many analogies!

The first foreign resident of Olevano was a retired Anglo-Indian army
officer with unblemished record, Major Frederick Potter. He came across
the place on a trip from Rome, and took a fancy to it. Decent climate.
Passable food. You could pick up a woodcock or two. He was accustomed to
solitude anyhow, all his old friends being dead or buried, or scattered
about the world. He had tried England for a couple of years and
discovered that people there did not like being ordered about as they
should be; they seemed to mind it less, at Olevano. He had always been
something of a pioneer, and the mere fact of being the first "white man"
in the place gave him a kind of fondness for it.

It was he, then, who discovered Olevano--Freddy Potter. We can see him
living alone, wiry and whiskered and cantankerous, glorying in his
solitude up to the fateful day when, to his infinite annoyance, a
fellow-countryman turns up--Mr. Augustus Browne of London. Mr. Browne is
a blameless personality who, enjoying indifferent health, brings an
equally blameless old housekeeper with him. He is not a sportsman like
Potter, but indulges in a pretty taste for landscape painting, with
elaborate flowers and butterflies worked into the foreground. So they
live, each in jealous seclusion, drinking tea at fixed hours, importing
groceries from England, dressing for dinner, avoiding contact with the
"natives" and, of course, pretending to be unaware of one another's
existence.

As time goes on, their mutual distrust grows stronger. The Major has
never forgiven that cockney for invading Olevano, his private domain,
while Browne finds no words to express his disgust at Potter, who
presumably calls himself a Briton and yet smokes those filthy cheroots
in public (this was years and years ago). Why is the fellow skulking
here, all by himself? Some hanky-panky with regimental money; every one
knows how India plays the devil with a man's sense of right and wrong.
And Potter is not long in making up his mind that this civilian has
bolted to Olevano for reasons which will not bear investigation and is
living in retirement, ten to one, under an assumed name. Browne! He
really might have picked out a better one, while he was about it. That
water-colour business--a blind, a red herring; the so-called lady
companion----

The natives, meanwhile, observe with amazement the mutual conduct of two
compatriots. They are known, far and wide, as "the madmen" till some
bright spirit makes the discovery that they are not madmen at all, but
only homicides hiding from justice; whereupon contempt is changed to
grudging admiration.

Browne dies, after many years. His lady packs up and departs. The old
Major's delight at being once more alone is of short duration; he falls
ill and is entombed, his last days being embittered by the arrival of a
party of German tourists who declare they have "discovered" this
wonderful new spot, and threaten to bring more Teutons in their rear to
participate in its joys.

They come, singly and in batches, and soon make Olevano uninhabitable to
men of the Potter and Browne type. They keep the taverns open all night,
sing boisterous choruses, kiss each other in the street "as if they were
in their bedrooms," organise picnics in the woods, sketch old women
sitting in old doorways, start a Verschoenerungsverein and indulge in a
number of other antics which, from the local point of view, are held to
be either coarse or childish. The natives, after watching their doings
with critical interest, presently pronounce a verdict--a verdict to
which the brightest spirits of the place give their assent--a verdict
which, by the way, I have myself heard uttered.

"Those Englishmen"--thus it runs--"were at least assassins. These people
are merely fools."

POSTSCRIPT--One thing has occurred of late which would hardly have
happened were the Germans still in occupation of Olevano. At the central
piazza is a fountain where the cattle drink and where, formerly, you
could rest and glance down upon the country lying below--upon a piece of
green landscape peering in upon the street. This little view was like a
window, it gave an aerial charm to the place. They have now blocked it
up with an ugly house. The beauty of the site is gone. It is surprising
that local municipalities; however stupid, however corrupt, should not
be aware of the damage done to their own interests when they permit such
outrages. The Germans--were any of them still here--would doubtless have
interfered en masse and stopped the building.

Something should be done about these reviewers.

There has followed me hither a bundle of press notices of a recent book
of mine. They are favourable. I ought to be delighted. I happen to be
annoyed.

What takes place in this absurd book? The three unities are preserved. A
respectable but rather drab individual, a bishop, whose tastes and moods
are fashioned to reflect those of the average drab reader, arrives at a
new place and is described as being, among other things, peculiarly
sensitive on the subject of women. He cannot bear flippant allusions to
the sex. He has preserved a childlike faith in their purity, their
sacred mission on earth, their refining influence upon the race. His
friends call him old-fashioned and quixotic on this point. A true woman,
he declares, can do no wrong. And this same man, towards the end of the
book, watches how the truest woman in the place, the one whom he admires
more than all the rest, his own cousin and a mother, calmly throws her
legitimate husband over a cliff. He realises that he is "face to face
with an atrocious and carefully planned murder." Such, however, has been
the transformation of his mind during a twelve days' sojourn that he
understands the crime, he pardons it, he approves it.

Can this wholesale change of attitude be brought about without a plot?
Yet many of these reviewers discover no such thing in the book. "It
possesses not the faintest shadow of a plot," says one of the most
reputable of them. This annoys me.

I see no reason why a book should have a plot. In regard to this one, it
would be nearer the truth to say that it is nothing but plot from
beginning to end. How to make murder palatable to a bishop: that is the
plot. How? You must unconventionalise him, and instil into his mind the
seeds of doubt and revolt. You must shatter his old notions of what is
right. It is the only way to achieve this result, and I would defy the
critic to point to a single incident or character or conversation in the
book which does not further the object in view. The good bishop soon
finds himself among new influences; his sensations, his intellect, are
assailed from within and without. Figures such as those in chapters 11,
19 and 35; the endless dialogue in the boat; the even more tedious
happenings in the local law-court; the very externals--relaxing wind and
fantastic landscape and volcanic phenomena--the jovial immoderation of
everything and everybody: they foster a sense of violence and
insecurity; they all tend to make the soil receptive to new ideas.

If that was your plot, the reviewer might say, you have hidden it rather
successfully. I have certainly done my best to hide it. For although the
personalities of the villain and his legal spouse crop up periodically,
with ominous insistence, from the first chapter onwards, they are always
swallowed up again. The reason is given in the penultimate chapter,
where the critic might have found a résumé of my intentions and the key
to this plot--to wit, that a murder under those particular circumstances
is not only justifiable and commendable but--insignificant. Quite
insignificant! Not worth troubling about. Hundreds of decent and honest
folk are being destroyed every day; nobody cares tuppence; "one dirty
blackmailer more or less--what does it matter to anybody"? There are so
many more interesting things on earth. That is why the bishop--i.e. the
reader--here discovers the crime to be a "contemptible little episode,"
and decides to "relegate it into the category of unimportant events." He
was glad that the whole affair had remained in the background, so to
speak, of his local experiences. It seemed appropriate. In the
background: it seemed appropriate. That is the heart, the core, of the
plot. And that is why all those other happenings find themselves pushed
into the foreground.

I know full well that this is not the way to write an orthodox English
novel. For if you hide your plot, how shall the critic be expected to
see it? You must serve it on a tray; you must (to vary the simile) hit
the nail on the head and ask him to be so good as to superintend the
operation. That is the way to rejoice the cockles of his heart. He can
then compare you to someone else who has also hit the nail on the head
and with whose writings he happens to be familiar. You have a flavour of
Dostoievsky minus the Dickens taint; you remind him of Flaubert or
Walter Scott or somebody equally obscure; in short, you are in a
condition to be labelled--a word, and a thing, which comes perilously
near to libelling. If, to this description, he adds a short summary of
your effort, he has done his duty. What more can he do? He must not
praise overmuch, for that might displease some of his own literary
friends. He must not blame overmuch, else how shall his paper survive?
It lives on the advertisements of publishers and--say those persons,
perhaps wisely--"if you ill-treat our authors, there's an end to our
custom." Commercialism....

Which applies far less to literary criticism than to other kinds. Of
most of the critics of music and art the best one can say is that there
are hearty fellows among them who, with the requisite training, might
one day become fit for their work. England is the home of the amateur in
matters intellectual, the specialist in things material. No bootmaker
would allow an unpractised beginner to hack his leather about in a
jejune attempt to construct a pair of shoes. The other commodity, being
less valuable than cowhide, may be entrusted to the hands of any
'prentice who cares to enliven our periodicals with his playful
hieroglyphics. Criticism in England--snakes in Iceland. [15]

All alone, for a wonder, I climbed up to the sanctuary of St. Michael
above Serrone, that solitary white speck visible from afar on the upper
slopes of Mount Scalambra. It is a respectable walk, and would have been
inconveniently warm but for the fact that I rose with the nightingales,
reaching my destination at the very moment when the sun peered over the
ridge of the mountain at its back. A delicious ramble in the dewy shade
of morning, with ten minutes' rest on a wall at Serrone, talking to an
old woman who wore those ponderous red ornaments designed, I suppose, to
imitate coral.

I had hoped to meet at this hermitage some amiable and garrulous
anchorite who would share my breakfast. It is the ideal place for such a
life, and many are the mountain solitaries of this species I have known
in Italy (mostly retired shepherds). There was he of Scanno--dead, I
doubt not, by this time--that simple-hearted venerable with whom I
whiled away the long evenings at the shrine of Sant' Egidio, gazing over
the placid lake below, or up stream, at the dusky houses of Scanno
theatrically ranged against their hill-side. I became his friend, once
and for ever, after finding a wooden snuff-box he had lost--his only
snuff-box; it lay at the edge of the path among thick shrubs, and he
could hardly believe his eyes when he saw it again. One of my many
strokes of luck! Once I found a purse--

The little structure here was barred and deserted. I had no company save
a couple of ravens who, after assuring themselves, with that infernal
cunning of theirs, that I carried no gun, became as friendly as could be
expected of such solemn fowls. They are always in pairs--incurably
monogamous; whereas the carrion crow, for reasons of its own, has a
fondness for living in trios. This ménage à trois may have subtle
advantages and seems to be a step in the direction of the truly social
habits of the rook; it enables them to fight with more success against
their enemies, the hawks, and fosters, likewise, a certain
lightheartedness which the sententious raven lacks. No one who has
watched the aerial antics of a triplet of carrion crows can deny them a
sense of fun.

After an hour's contemplation of the beauties of nature I descended once
more through that ilex grove to Serrone. And now it began to grow
decidedly warm. The wide depression between this village and Olevano
used to be timbered and is still known as la selva or la foresta. Vines
now occupy the whole ground. If they had only left a few trees by the
wayside! Walking along, I encountered a sportsman who said he was on the
look-out for a hare. Always that hare! They might as well lie in wait
for the Great Auk. Not long ago, an old visionary informed me that he
had killed a hare beside the Ponte Milvio at Rome. Hares at Ponte
Milvio! They reminded me of those partridges in Belgrave Square. In my
younger days there was not a general in the British army who had not (1)
shot partridges in Belgrave Square and (2) been the chosen lover of
Queen Isabella of Spain....

Up to the castle, in the afternoon, for a final chat. We sit under the
vine near the entrance of that decayed stronghold, while babies and hens
scramble about the exposed rock; he talks, as usual, about the war. He
can talk of nothing else. No wonder. One son is maimed for life; the
other has been killed outright, and it looks as if no amount of
ironmongery (medals, etc.) would ever atone for the loss. This happy
land is full of affliction. Mourning everywhere, and hardships and
bitterness and ruined homes. Vineyards are untilled, olives unpruned,
for lack of labourers. It will take years to bring the soil back into
its old state of productivity. One is pained to see decent folk
suffering for a cause they fail to understand, for something that
happens beyond their ken, something dim and distant--unintelligible to
them as that Libyan expedition. None the less, he tells me, there is not
a single deserter in Olevano. An old warrior-brood, these men of
Latium....

Thence onward and upward, towards evening by that familiar path, for a
second farewell visit to Giulio's farm. It is a happy homestead, an
abode of peace, with ample rooms and a vine-wreathed terrace that
overlooks the smiling valley to the south. A mighty bush of rosemary
stands at the door. The mother is within, cooking the evening meal for
her man and the elder boys who work in the fields so long as a shred of
daylight flits about the sky. The little ones are already half asleep,
tired with a long day's playing in the sunshine.

Here is my favourite, Alberto, an adorable cherub and the pickle of the
family. I can see at a glance that he has been up to mischief. Alberto
is incorrigible. No amount of paternal treatment will do him any good.
He hammers nails into tables and into himself, he tumbles down from
trees, he throws stones at the girls and cuts himself with knives and
saws; he breaks things and loses things, and chases the hens
about--disobeys all the time. Every day there is some fresh disaster and
fresh chastisement. Two weeks ago he was all but run over by the big
station motor--pulled out from the wheels in the nick of time; that scar
across his forehead will remain for life, a memento of childish
naughtiness. Alberto understands me thoroughly. He is glad to see me.
But a certain formality must be gone through; every time we meet there
is a moment of shy distrust, while the ice has to be broken afresh--he
must assure himself that I have not changed since our last encounter.
Everything, apparently, is in order to-night, for he curls up
comfortably on my knee and is soon fast asleep, all his little tragedies
forgotten.

"It appears you like children," says the mother.

"I like this one, because he is never out of trouble. He reminds me of
myself. I shall steal him one of these days, and carry him off to Rome.
From there we will walk on foot to Brindisi, along an old track called
the Via Appia. It will require two of three years, for I mean to stop a
day, or perhaps a week, at every single tavern along the road. Then I
will write a book about it; a book to make myself laugh with, when I am
grown too old for walking."

"Giulio is big enough."

"I'll wait."

No chance of undertaking such a trip in these times of war, when a
foreigner is liable to be arrested at every moment. Besides, how far
would one get, with Giulio? Nevermore to Brindisi! As far as Terracina;
possibly even to Formia. There, at Formia, we would remain for the rest
of our natural lives, if the wine at the Albergo della Quercia is
anything like what it used to be; there, at Formia, we would pitch our
tent, enacting every day, or perhaps twice a day, our celebrated
Faun-and-Silenus entertainment for the diversion of the populace. I have
not forgotten Giulio's besetting sin. How nearly he made me exceed the
measure of sobriety at Rojate!...

Night descends. I wander homewards. Under the trees of the driving-road
fireflies are dancing; countrymen return in picturesque groups, with
mules and children, from their work far afield; that little owl, the
aluco, sits in the foliage overhead, repeating forever its plaintive
note. The lights of Artena begin to twinkle.

This Artena, they say, had such a sorry reputation for crime and
brigandage that the authorities at one time earnestly considered the
proposition of razing it to the ground. Then they changed their minds.
It seemed more convenient to have evil-doers all collected into one
place than scattered about the country. To judge by the brightness of
the lamps at this distance of twelve miles, the brigands have evidently
spared no expense in the matter of street-illumination.

And now the lights of Segni station are visible, down in the malarious
valley, where the train passes from Rome to Naples. Every night I have
beheld them from my window; every night they tinged my thoughts with a
soft sadness, driving them backwards, northwards--creating a link
between present and past. Now, for the last time, I see them and recall
those four journeys along that road; four, out of at least a hundred;
only four, but in what rare company!




Valmontone

Back to Valmontone.

At Zagarolo, where you touch the Rome-Naples line, I found there was no
train to this place for several hours. A merchant of straw hats from
Tuscany, a pert little fellow, was in the same predicament; he also had
some business to transact at Valmontone. How get there? No conveyance
being procurable on account of some local fair or festival, we decided
to walk. A tiresome march, in the glow of morning. The hatter, after
complaining more or less articulately for an hour, was reduced to groans
and almost tears; his waxed moustache began to droop; he vowed he was
not accustomed to this kind of exercise. Would I object to carrying his
bundle of hats for him? I objected so vigorously that he forthwith gave
up all hope. But I allowed him to rest now and then by the wayside. I
also offered him, gratis, the use of a handful of my choicest Tuscan
blasphemies, [16] for which he was much obliged. Most of them were
unfamiliar to him. He had been brought up by his mother, he explained.
They seemed to make his burden lighter.

Despite wondrous stretches of golden broom, this is rather a cheerless
country, poorly cultivated, and still bearing the traces of mediaeval
savagery and insecurity. It looks unsettled. One would like to sit down
here and let the centuries roll by, watching the tramp of Roman legions
and Papal mercenaries and all that succession of proud banners which
have floated down this ancient Via Labiena.

That rock-like structure, visible in the morning hours from Olevano, is
a monstrous palace containing, among other things, a training school for
carbineers. Attached thereto is a church whose interior has an unusual
shape, the usual smell, and a tablet commemorating a visit from Pius IX.

There is a beautiful open space up here, with wide views over the
surrounding country. It gives food for thought. What an ideal spot, one
says, for the populace to frequent on the evenings of these sultry days!
It is empty at that hour, utterly deserted. Now why do they prefer to
jostle each other in the narrow, squalid and stuffy lane lower down? One
would like to know the reason for this preference. I enquired, and was
told that the upper place was not sufficiently well-lighted. The
explanation is not wholly convincing, for they have the lighting
arrangements in their own hands, and could easily afford the outlay. It
may be that they like to remain close to the shops and to each other's
doors for conversational purposes, since it is a fact that, socially
speaking, the more restricted the area, the more expansive one grows. We
broaden out, in proportion as the environment contracts. A psychological
reason....

I leaned in the bright sunshine over the parapet of this terrace,
looking at Artena near-by. It resembled, now, a cluster of brown grapes
clinging to the hillside. An elderly man, clean-shaven, with scarred and
sallow face, drew nigh and, perceiving the direction of my glance,
remarked gravely:

"Artena."

"Artena," I repeated.

He extracted half a toscano cigar from his waistcoat pocket, and began
to smoke with great gusto. A man of means, I concluded, to be able to
smoke at this hour of an ordinary week-day. He was warmly dressed, with
flowing brown tie and opulent vest and corduroy trousers. His feet were
encased in rough riding-boots. Some peasant proprietor, very likely, who
rode his own horses. Was he going to tell me anything of interest about
Artena? Presumably not. He said never another word, but continued to
smile at me rather wearily. I tried to enliven the conversation by
pointing to a different spot on the hills and observing:

"Segni."

"Segni," he agreed.

His cigar had gone out, as toscanos are apt to do. He applied a match,
and suddenly remarked:

"Velletri."

"Velletri."

We were not making much progress. A good many sites were visible from
here, and at this rate of enumeration the sun might well set on our
labours.

"How about all those deserters?" I inquired.

There was a fair number of them, he said. Young fellows from other
provinces who find their way hither across country, God knows how. It
was a good soil for deserters--brushwood, deep gullies, lonely stretches
of land, and, above all, la tradizione. The tradition, he explained, of
that ill-famed forest of Velletri, now extirpated. The deserters were
nearly all children--the latest conscripts; a grown man seldom deserts,
not because he would not like to do so, but because he has more
"judgment" and can weigh the risks. The roads were patrolled by police.
A few murders had taken place; yes, just a few murders; one or two
stupid people who resented their demands for money or food--

He broke off with another weary smile.

"You have had malaria," I suggested.

"Often."

The fact was patent, not only from his sallow face, but from the
peculiar manner....

They brought in a deserter that very afternoon. He lay groaning at the
bottom of a cab, having broken his leg in jumping down from somewhere.
The rest of the conveyance was filled to overflowing with carbineers. A
Sicilian, they said. The whole populace followed the vehicle uphill,
reverently, as though attending a funeral. "He is little," said a woman,
referring either to his size or his age.

An hour later there was a discussion anent the episode in the
fashionable café of Valmontone. A citizen, a well-dressed man, possibly
a notary, put the case for United Italy, for intervention against
Germany, for military discipline and the shooting of cowardly deserters,
into a few phrases so clear, so convincing, that there was a general
burst of approval. Then another man said:

"I hate those Sicilians; I have good personal reasons for hating them.
But no Sicilian fears death. If they are not brilliant soldiers, they
certainly make first-class assassins, which is only another branch of
the same business. This boy deserts not because he is afraid of death,
but because he still owes a debt. He feels he ought to do something to
repay his parents who nursed him when he was a child, and not be
sacrificed to that kidnapping camorra of blackguards out yonder"--and he
pointed with his thumb, spitting contemptuously the while, in the
direction of Rome.

Nobody had any comment to make on this speech. Not a word of protest was
raised. The man was entitled to an opinion like everybody else, and
might even have obtained his share of approval had the victim been a
native. He was only a Sicilian--an outsider. What is one to say of this
patriarchal, or parochial, attitude? The enlargement of Italy's
boundaries--Albania, Cyrenaica, Asia Minor and so forth--is an ideal
that few Italians bother their heads about. They are not sufficiently
dense--not yet. [17] To found a world-empire like the British or Roman
calls for a certain bullet-headed crassness. One has only to look at the
Germans, who have been trying to do so for some time past. That
collecting mania.... One single boy who collects postage stamps can
infect his whole school with the complaint, and make them all jealous of
his fine specimens. England has been collecting, for many centuries,
islands and suchlike; she is paying the penalty of her acquisitive
mania. She has infected others with the craze and cannot help incurring
their envy, seeing that they are now equally acquisitive, but less
fortunate. All the good specimens are gone!

That Pergola tavern deserves its name, the courtyard being overhung with
green vines and swelling clusters of grapes. The host is a canny old
boy, up to any joke and any devilry, I should say. He had already taken
a fancy to me on my first visit, for I cured his daughter Vanda of a
raging toothache by the application of glycerine and carbolic acid. We
went into his cellar, a dim tunnel excavated out of the soft tufa, from
whose darkest and chilliest recesses he drew forth a bottle of excellent
wine--it might have lain on a glacier, so cold it was. How thoughtful of
Providence to deposit this volcanic stuff within a stone's-throw of your
dining-table! Nobody need ice his wine at the Pergola.

After a capital repast I sallied forth late at night and walked,
striving to resemble a rich English tourist who has lost his way, along
the lonely road to Artena, in order to be assassinated by the deserters
or, failing that, to hear at least what these fellows have got to say
for themselves. My usual luck! Not a deserter was in sight.

Of my sleeping accommodation with certain old ladies, of what happened
to their little dog and of other matters trivial to the verge of
inanity, I may discourse upon the occasion of some later visit to
Valmontone. For this, the second, was by no means the last. Meanwhile,
we proceed southwards.




Sant' Agata, Sorrento

Siren-Land revisited....

A delightful stroll, yesterday, with a wild youngster from the village
of Torco--what joy to listen to analphabetics for a change: they are
indubitably the salt of the earth--down that well-worn track to
Crapolla, only to learn that my friend Garibaldi, the ancient fisherman,
the genius loci, has died in the interval; thence by boat to the lonely
beach of Recomone (sadly noting, as we passed, that the rock-doves at
the Grotto delle Palumbe are now all extirpated), where, for the sake of
old memories, I indulged in a bathe and then came across an object rare
in these regions, a fragment of grey Egyptian granite, relic of some
pagan temple and doubtless washed up here in a wintry gale; thence, for
a little light refreshment, to Nerano; thence to that ill-famed "House
of the Spirits" where my Siren-Land was begun in the company of one who
feared no spirits--victim, already, of this cursed war, but then a
laughter-loving child--and down to the bay and promontory of Ierate,
there to make the unwelcome discovery that certain hideous quarrying
operations on the neighbouring hill have utterly ruined the charm of
this once secluded site; thence laboriously upwards, past that line of
venerable goat-caves, to the summit of Mount San Costanzo.

Nothing has changed. The bay of Naples lay at my feet as of old, flooded
in sunshine.

There is a small outdoor cistern here. Peering into its darkness through
an aperture in the roof, I noticed that there was water at the bottom;
out of the water projected a stone; on the stone, a prisoner for life,
sat the most disconsolate lizard imaginable. It must have tumbled
through the chink, during some scuffle with a companion, into this humid
cell, swum for refuge to that islet and there remained, feeding on the
gnats which live in such places. I observed that its tail had grown to
an inordinate length--from disuse, very likely; from lack of the usual
abrasion against shrubs and stones. An unenviable fate for one of these
restless and light-loving creatures, never again to see the sun; to live
and die down here, all alone in the dank gloom, chained, as it were, to
a few inches of land amid a desolation of black water.

It took my thoughts back to what I saw two days ago while climbing in
the torrid hour of noon up that shadeless path where the vanilla-scented
orchids grow--the path which runs from Sant' Elia past the shattered
Natural Arch to Fontanella. Here, at the hottest turning of the road,
sat a woman in great distress. Beside her was a pink pig she had been
commissioned to escort down to the farm of Sant' Elia. This beast was
suffering hellish torments from the heat and vainly endeavouring, with
frenzied grunts of despair, to excavate for itself a hollow in the earth
under a thinly clothed myrtle bush. I told the woman of shade lower
down. She said she knew about it, but the pig--the pig refused to move!
It had been engaged upon this hopeless occupation, without a moment's
respite, for an hour or more; nothing would induce it to proceed a step
further; it had plainly made up its mind to find shelter here from the
burning rays, or die. And of shelter there was none.

What would not this pig (I now thought) have given to be transported
into the lizard's cool aquatic paradise; and the lizard, into that
scorching sunlight!...

It was not to muse upon the miseries of the animal creation that I have
revisited these shores. I came to puzzle once more over the site of that
far-famed Athene temple which gave its name to the whole promontory.
Now, after again traversing the ground with infinite pleasure, I fail to
find any reason for changing what I wrote years ago in a certain
pamphlet which some scholar, glancing through these pages and anxious to
explore for himself a spot of such celebrity in ancient days, is so
little likely to see that he may not be sorry if I here recapitulate its
arguments. Others will be well advised to pass over what follows.

Let me begin by saying that the temple, in every probability, stood at
the Punta Campanella facing Capri, the actual headland of the Sorrentine
peninsula, where--apart from every other kind of evidence--you may pick
up to this day small terra-cotta figures of Athene, made presumably to
be carried away as keepsakes by visitors to the shrine.

Now for alternative suggestions.

Strabo tells us that the temple was placed on the akron of the
promontory; that is, the summit of Mount San Costanzo where we are now
standing. (He elsewhere describes it as being "on the straits.") This
summit is nearly 500 metres above the sea-level, and here no antique
building seems ever to have been erected. No traces of old life are
visible save some fragments of Roman pottery which may have found their
way up in early Byzantine days, even as modern worshippers carry up the
ephemeral vessels popularly called "caccavelle" [18] and scatter them
about. With the exception of one fragment of white Pentelic marble, no
materials of an early period have been incorporated into the masonry of
the little chapel or the walls of the fields below. It is incredible
that no vestige of a structure like the Athene temple should remain on a
spot of this kind, so favourably situated as regards immunity from
depredations, owing to its isolated and exalted position. The
rock-surface around the summit has not undergone that artificial
levelling which an edifice of this importance would necessitate; the
terrace is of mediaeval construction, as can be seen by its supporting
walls. No doubt the venerable Christian sanctuary there has been
frequently repaired and modified; on the terrace-level to the south can
be seen the foundations of an earlier chapel, and the slopes are
littered with broken bricks, Sorrentine tufa, and old battuto floors.
But there is no trace of antique workmanship or material, nor has the
rocky path leading up to the shrine been demarcated with chisel-cuts in
the ancient fashion. The sister-summit of La Croce is equally
unproductive of classical relics.

We must therefore conclude that Strabo was mistaken. And why not? His
accounts of many parts of the Roman world are surprisingly accurate,
but, according to Professor Pais, "of Italy Strabo seems to have known
merely the road which leads from Brindisi to Rome, the road between Rome
and Naples and Pozzuoli, and the coast of Etruria between Rome and
Populonia." If so, he probably saw no more of the district than can be
seen from Naples. He attributes the foundation of this Athene temple to
Odysseus: statements of such a kind make one wonder whether the earlier
portions of his lost history were more critical than other old treatises
which have survived.

So much for Strabo.

Seduced by a modern name, which means nothing more or less than "a
temple"--strong evidence, surely--I was inclined to locate the Athene
shrine at a spot called Ierate (marked also as Ieranto on some maps, and
popularly pronounced Ghiérate the Greek aspirate still surviving) which
lies a mile or more eastwards of the Punta Campanella and faces south.
"Hieron," I thought: that settles it. You may guess I was not a little
proud of this discovery, particularly when it turned out that an ancient
building actually did stand there--on the southern slope, namely, of the
miniature peninsula which juts into Ierate bay. Here I found fragments
of antique bricks, tegulae bipedales, amphoras, pottery of the lustrous
Sorrentine ware--Surrentina bibis?--pavements of opus signinum, as well
as one large Roman paving flag of the type that is found on the road
between Termini and Punta Campanella. (How came this stone here? Did the
old road from Stabiae Athene temple go round the promontory and continue
as far as Ierate along the southern slope of San Costanzo hill? No road
could pass there now; deforestation has denuded the mountain-side of its
soil, laying bare the grey rock--a condition at which its mediaeval name
of Mons Canutarius already hints.) Well, a more careful examination of
the site has convinced me that I was wrong. No temple of this
magnificence can have stood here, but only a Roman villa--one of the
many pleasure-houses which dotted these shores under the Empire.

So much for myself.


PEUTINGER'S CHART
Showing ancient road rounding the headland
and terminating at "Templum Minervae."

None the less--and this is a really curious point--an inspection of
Peutinger's Tables seems to bear out my original theory of a temple at
Ierate. For the structure is therein marked not at the Punta Campanella
but, approximately, at Ierate itself, facing south, with the road from
Stabiae over Surrentum rounding the promontory and terminating at the
temple's threshold. Capri and the Punta Campanella are plainly drawn,
though not designated by name. Much as I should like my first
speculation to be proved correct on the evidence of this old chart of
A.D. 226, I fear both of us are mistaken.

So much for Peutinger's Tables.

Beloch makes a further confusion in regard to the local topography. He
says that the "three-peaked rock" which Eratosthenes describes as
separating the gulfs of Cumae and Paestum (that is, of Naples and
Salerno) is Mount San Costanzo. I do not understand Beloch falling into
this error, for the old geographer uses the term skopelos, which is
never applied to a mountain of this size, but to cliffs projecting upon
the sea. Moreover, the landmark is there to this day. I have not the
slightest doubt that Eratosthenes meant the pinnacle of Ierate, which is
three-peaked in a remarkably, and even absurdly, conspicuous manner,
both when viewed from the sea and from the land (from the chapel of S.
M. della Neve, for instance).

Now this projecting cliff of three peaks--they are called, respectively,
Montalto, Ierate, and Mortella; Ierate for short--is not the actual
boundary between the two gulfs; not by a mile or more. No; but from
certain points it might well be mistaken for it. The ancients had no
charts like ours, and the world in consequence presented itself
differently to their senses; even Strabo, says Bunbury, "was so ignorant
of the general form and configuration of the North African coast as to
have no clear conception of the great projection formed by the
Carthaginian territory and the deep bay to the east of it"; and,
coasting along the shore line, this triple-headed skopelos, behind which
lies the inlet of Ierate, might possibly be mistaken for the
turning-point into the gulf of Naples. So it looks when viewed from the
S.E. of Capri; so also from the Siren islets--a veritable headland.

So much for Beloch and Eratosthenes.

To sum up: Strabo is wrong in saying that the temple of Athene stood on
the summit of Mount San Costanzo; I was wrong in thinking that this
temple lay at Ierate; Peutinger's Chart is wrong in figuring the
structure on the south side of the Sorrentine peninsula; Beloch is wrong
in identifying the skopelos trikoruphos of Eratosthenes with Mount San
Costanzo; Eratosthenes is wrong in locating his rock at the boundary
between the two gulfs.

The shrine of Athene lay doubtless at Campanella, whose crag is of
sufficient altitude to justify Roman poets like Statius in their
descriptions of its lofty site. So great a number of old writers concur
in this opinion--Donnorso, Persico, Giannettasio, Mazzella, Anastasio,
Capaccio--that their testimony would alone be overwhelming, had these
men been a little more careful as to what they called a "temple."
Capasso, the acutest modern scholar of these regions, places it "in the
neighbourhood of the Punta Campanella." Professor Pais, in 1900, wrote a
paper on this "Atene Siciliana" which I have not seen. The whole
question is discussed in Filangieri's recent history of Massa
(1908-1910). It also occurs to me that Strabo's term akron may mean an
extremity or point projecting into the sea (a sense in which Homer used
it), and be applicable, therefore, to the Punta Campanella.




Rome

Here we are.

That mysterious nocturnal incident peculiar to Rome has already
occurred--sure sign that the nights are growing sultry. It happens about
six times in the course of every year, during the hot season. You may
read about it in the next morning's paper which records how some young
man, often of good family and apparently in good health, was seen
behaving in the most inexplicable fashion at the hour of about 2 a.m.;
jumping, that is, in a state of Adamitic nudity, into some public
fountain. It goes on to say that the culprit was pursued by the police,
run to earth, and carried to such-and-such a hospital, where his state
of mind is to be investigated. Will our rising generation, it gravely
adds, never learn the most elementary rules of decency?

If I have not had the curiosity to inquire at one of these
establishments what has been the result of the medical examination, it
is because I will wager my last shirt that the invalid's health leaves
nothing to be desired. The genesis of the affair, I take it, is this. He
is in bed, suffering from the heat. Sleep refuses to come. He has
already passed half the night in agony, tossing on his couch during
those leaden hours when not a breath of air is astir. In any other town
he would submit to the torture, knowing it to be irremediable. But Rome
is the city of fountains. It is they who are responsible for this sad
lapse. Their sound is clear by day; after midnight, when the traffic has
died down, it waxes thunderous. He hears it through the window--hears it
perforce, since the streets are ringing with that music, and you cannot
close your ears. He listens, growing hotter and more restless every
moment. He thinks.... That splash of waters! Those frigid wavelets and
cascades! How delicious to bathe his limbs, if only for a moment, in
their bubbling wetness; he is parched with heat, and at this hour of the
night, he reflects, there will not be a soul abroad in the square. So he
hearkens to the seductive melody, conjuring up the picture of that
familiar fountain; he remembers its moistened rim and basin all alive
with jolly turmoil; he sees the miniature cataracts tumbling down in
streaks of glad confusion, till the longing grows too strong to be
controlled.

The thing must be done.

Next day he finds a handful of old donkeys solemnly inquiring into his
state of mind....

I can sympathise with that state of mind, having often undergone the
same purgatory. My room at present happens to be fairly cool; it looks
north, and the fountain down below, audible at this moment, has not yet
tempted me to any breach of decorum. Night is quiet here, save for the
squeakings of some strange animals in the upper regions of the
neighbouring Pantheon; they squeak night and day, and one would take
them to be bats, were it not that bats are supposed to be on the wing
after sunset. There are no mosquitoes in Rome--none worth talking about.
It is well. For mosquitoes have a deplorable habit of indulging in a
second meal, an early breakfast, at about four a.m.--a habit more
destructive to slumber than that regular and legitimate banquet of
theirs. No mosquitoes, and few flies. It is well.

It is more than merely well. For the mosquito, after all, when properly
fed, goes to bed like a gentleman and leaves you alone, whereas that
insatiable and petty curiousness of the fly condemns you to a
never-ending succession of anguished reflex movements. What a
malediction are those flies; how repulsive in life and in death: not to
be touched by human hands! Their every gesture is an obscenity, a
calamity. Fascinated by the ultra-horrible, I have watched them for
hours on end, and one of the most cherished projects of my life is to
assemble, in a kind of anthology, all the invectives that have been
hurled since the beginning of literature against this loathly dirt-born
insect, this living carrion, this blot on the Creator's reputation--and
thereto add a few of my own. Lucian, the pleasant joker, takes the fly
under his protection. He says, among other things, that "like an honest
man, it is not ashamed to do in public what others only do in private."
I must say, if we all followed the fly's example in this aspect, life
would at last be worth living....

Morning sleep is out of the question, owing to the tram-cars whose
clangour, both here and in Florence, must be heard to be believed. They
are fast rendering these towns uninhabitable. Can folks who cherish a
nuisance of this magnitude compare themselves, in point of refinement,
with those old Hellenic colonists who banished all noises from their
city? Nevermore! Why this din, this blocking of the roadways and general
unseemliness? In order that a few bourgeois may be saved the trouble of
using their legs. And yet we actually pride ourselves on these
detestable things, as if they were inventions to our credit. "We made
them," we say. Did we? It is not we who make them. It is they who make
us, who give us our habits of mind and body, our very thoughts; it is
these mechanical monsters who control our fates and drive us along
whither they mean us to go. We are caught in their cog-wheels--in a
process as inevitable as the revolution of the planets. No use lamenting
a cosmic phenomenon! Were it otherwise, I should certainly mope myself
into a green melancholy over the fact, the most dismal fact on earth,
that brachycephalism is a Mendelian dominant. [19] No use lamenting.
True.

But the sage will reserve to himself the right of cursing. Those morning
hours, therefore, when I would gladly sleep but for the tram-car
shrieking below, are devoted to the malediction of all modern progress,
wherein I include, with fine impartiality, every single advancement in
culture which happens to lie between my present state and that
comfortable cavern in whose shelter I soon see myself ensconced as of
yore, peacefully sucking somebody's marrow while my women, round the
corner, are collecting a handful of acorns for my dessert.... The
telephone, that diabolic invention! It might vex a man if his neighbour
possessed a telephone and he none; how would it be, if neither of them
had it? We can hardly realise, now, the blissful quietude of the
pre-telephone epoch. And the telegraph and the press! They have huddled
mankind together into undignified and unhygienic proximity; we seem to
be breathing each other's air. We know what everybody is doing, in every
corner of the earth; we are told what to think, and to say, and to do.
Your paterfamilias, in pre-telegraph days, used to hammer out a few
solid opinions of his own on matters political and otherwise. He no
longer employs his brain for that purpose. He need only open his morning
paper and in it pours--the oracle of the press, that manufactory of
synthetic fustian, whose main object consists in accustoming humanity to
attach importance to the wrong things. It furnishes him with opinions
ready made, overnight, by some Fleet Street hack at so much a column,
after a little talk with his fellows over a pint of bad beer at the
Press Club. He has been told what to say--yesterday, for instance, it
was some lurid balderdash about a steam-roller and how the Kaiser is to
be fed on dog biscuits at Saint Helena--he has been "doped" by the
editor, who gets the tip--and out he goes! unless he take it--from the
owner, who is waiting for a certain emolument from this or that caucus,
and trims his convictions to their taste. That is what the Press can do.
It vitiates our mundane values. It enables a gang to fool the country.
It cretinises the public mind. The time may come when no respectable
person will be seen touching a daily, save on the sly. Newspaper reading
will become a secret vice. As such, I fear, its popularity is not likely
to wane. Having generated, by means of sundry trite reflections of this
nature, an enviable appetite for breakfast, I dress and step out of
doors to where, at a pleasant table, I can imbibe some coffee and make
my plans for loafing through the day.

Hot, these morning hours. Shadeless the streets. The Greeks, the Romans,
the Orientals knew better than to build wide roadways in a land of
sunshine.

There exists an old book or pamphlet entitled "Napoli senza
sole"--Naples without sun. It gives instructions, they say (for I have
never seen it) how foot passengers may keep for ever in the shade at all
hours of the day; how they may reach any point of the town from another
without being forced to cross the squares, those dazzling patches of
sunlight. The feat could have been accomplished formerly even in Rome,
which was always less umbrageous than Naples. It is out of the question
nowadays. You must do as the Romans do--walk slowly and use the tram
whenever possible.

That is what I purpose to do. There is a line which will take me direct
to the Milvian bridge, where I mean to have a bathe, and then a lunch at
the restaurant across the water. Its proprietor is something of a
brigand; so am I, at a pinch. It is "honour among thieves," or "diamond
cut diamond."

Already a few enthusiasts are gathered here, on the glowing sands. But
the water is still cold; indeed, the Tiber is never too warm for me. If
you like it yet more chill, you must walk up to where the Aniene
discharges its waves whose temperature, at this season, is of a kind to
tickle up a walrus.

Whether it be due to the medley of races or to some other cause, there
is a singular variety of flesh-tints among the bathers here. I wish my
old friend Dr. Bowles could have seen it; we used to be deeply immersed,
both of us, in the question of the chromatophores, I observing their
freakish behaviour in the epidermis of certain frogs, while he studied
their action on the human skin and wrote an excellent little paper on
sunburn--a darker problem than it seems to be. [20]

These men and boys do not grow uniformly sunburnt. They display so many
different colour-shades on their bodies that an artist would be
delighted with the effect. From that peculiar milky hue which, by reason
of some pigment, contrives to resist the rays, the tints diverge; the
reds, the scarcer group, traversing every gradation from pale rose to
the ruddiest of copper--not excluding that strange marbled complexion
concerning which I cannot make up my mind whether it be a beauty or a
defect; while the xanthous tones, the yellows, pass through silvery gold
and apricot and café au lait to a duskiness approaching that of the
negro. At this season the skins are still white. Your artist must come
later--not later, however, than the end of August, for on the first of
September the bathing, be the weather never so warm, is officially, and
quite suddenly, at an end. Tiber water is declared to be "unhealthy"
after that date, and liable to give you fever; a relic of the days when
the true origin of malaria was unknown.

A glance at the papers is sufficient to prove that bathing has not yet
begun in earnest. No drowning accidents, up to the present. Later on
they come thick and fast. For this river, with its rapid current and
vindictive swirling eddies, is dangerous to young swimmers; it grips
them in its tawny coils and holds them fast, often within a few yards of
friend or parent who listens, powerless to help, to the victim's cries
of anguish and sees his arm raised imploringly out of that serpent-like
embrace. So it hurries him to destruction, only to be fished up later in
a state, as the newspapers will be careful to inform us, of "incipient
putrefaction."

A murderous flood....

That hoary, trickling structure--that fountain which has forgotten to be
a fountain, so dreamily does the water ooze through obstructive mosses
and emerald growths that dangle in drowsy pendants, like wet beards,
from its venerable lips--that fountain un-trimmed, harmonious, overhung
by ancient ilexes: where shall a more reposeful spot be found? Doubly
delicious, after the turmoil and glistening sheen by the river-bank. For
the foliage of the oaks and sycamores is such that it creates a kind of
twilight, and all around lies the tranquillity of noon. Here, on the
encircling stone bench, you may idle through the sultry hours conversing
with some favourite disciple while the cows trample up to drink amid
moist gurglings and tail-swishings. They gaze at you with gentle eyes,
they blow their sweet breath upon your cheek, and move sedately onward.
The Villa Borghese can be hushed, at such times, in a kind of
enchantment.

"You never told me why you come to Italy."

"In order," I reply, "to enjoy places like this."

"But listen. Surely you have fountains in your own country?"

"None quite so golden-green."

"Ah, it wants cleaning, doesn't it?"

"Lord, no!" I say; but only to myself. One should never pass for an
imbecile, if one can help it.

Aloud I remark:--

"Let me try to set forth, however droll it may sound, the point of view
of a certain class of people, supposing they exist, who might think that
this particular fountain ought never to be cleaned"--and there ensued a
discussion, lasting about half an hour, in the course of which I
elaborated, artfully and progressively, my own thesis, and forged, in
the teeth of some lively opposition, what struck me as a convincing
argument in favour of leaving the fountain alone.

"Then that is why you come to Italy. On account of a certain fountain,
which ought never to be cleaned."

"I said on account of places like this. And I ought to have added, on
account of moments such as these."

"Are those your two reasons?"

"Those are my two reasons."

"Then you have thought about it before?"

"Often."

One should never pass for an imbecile, if one can help it.

"But listen. Surely it is sometimes two o'clock in the afternoon, in
your country?"

"I used that word moment in a pregnant sense," I reply. "Pregnant: when
something is concealed or enclosed within. What is enclosed within this
moment? Our friendly conversation."

"But listen. Surely folks can converse in your country?"

"They can talk."

"I begin to understand why you come here. It is that difference, which
is new to me, between conversing and talking. Is the difference worth
the long journey?"

"Not to everybody, I daresay."

"Why to you?"

"Why to me? I must think about it."

One should never pass for an imbecile, if one can help it.

"What is there to think about? You said you had thought about it
already.... Perhaps there are other reasons?"

"There may be."

"There may be?"

"There must be. Are you satisfied?"

"Ought I to be satisfied before I have learnt them?"

"I find you rather fatiguing this afternoon. Did you hear about that
murder in Trastevere last night and how the police----"

"But listen. Surely you can answer a simple question. Why do you come to
Italy...?"

Why does one come here?

A periodical visit to this country seems an ordinary and almost
automatic proceeding--a part of one's regular routine, as natural as
going to the barber or to church. Why seek for reasons? They are so hard
to find. One tracks them to their lair and lo! there is another one
lurking in the background, a reason for a reason.

The craving to be in contact with beauty and antiquity, the desire for
self-expression, for physical well-being under that drenching sunshine,
which while it lasts, one curses lustily; above all, the pleasure of
memory and reconstruction at a distance. Yes; herein lies, methinks, the
secret; the reason for the reason. Reconstruction at a distance.... For
a haze of oblivion is formed by lapse of time and space; a kindly haze
which obliterates the thousand fretting annoyances wherewith the
traveller's path in every country is bestrewn. He forgets them; forgets
that weltering ocean of unpleasantness and remembers only its sporadic
islets--those moments of calm delight or fiercer joy which he would fain
hold fast for ever. He does not come here on account of a certain
fountain which ought never to be cleaned. [21] He comes for the sake of
its mirage, that sunny phantom which will rise up later, out of some
November fog in another land. Italy is a delightful place to remember,
to think and talk about. And is it not the same with England? Let us go
there as a tourist--only as a tourist. How attractive one finds its
conveniences, and even its conventionalities, provided one knows, for an
absolute certainty, that one will never be constrained to dwell among
them.

What lovely things one could say about England, in Timbuktu!

Rome is not only the most engaging capital in Europe, it is unusually
heterogeneous in regard to population. The average Parisian will assure
you that his family has lived in that town from time immemorial. It is
different here. There are few Romans discoverable in Rome, save across
the Tiber. Talk to whom you please, you will soon find that either he or
his parents are immigrants. The place is filled with hordes of
employees--many thousands of them, high and low, from every corner of
the provinces; the commoner sort, too, the waiters, carpenters,
plasterers, masons, painters, coachmen, all the railway folk--they are
hardly ever natives. Your Roman of the lower classes does not relish
labour. He can do a little amateurish shop-keeping, he is fairly good as
a cook, but his true strength, as he frankly admits, consists in eating
and drinking. That is as it should be. It befits the tone of a
metropolis that outsiders shall do its work. That undercurrent of
asperity is less noticeable here than in many towns of the peninsula.
There is something of the grande dame in Rome, a flavour of old-world
courtesy. The inhabitants are better-mannered than the Parisians; a
workday crowd in Rome is as well-dressed as a Sunday crowd in Paris. And
over all hovers a gentle weariness.

The city has undergone orgies of bloodshed and terror. Think only,
without going further back, of that pillage by the Spanish and German
soldiery under Bourbon; half a year's pandemonium. And all those other
mediaeval scourges, epidemics and floods and famines. That sirocco, the
worst of many Italian varieties: who shall calculate its debilitating
effect upon the stamina of the race? Up to quite a short time ago,
moreover, the population was malarious; older records reek of malaria;
that, assuredly, will leave its mark upon the inhabitants for years to
come. And the scorching Campagna beyond the walls, that forbidden land
in whose embrace the city lies gasping, flame-encircled, like the
scorpion in the tale....

A well-known scholar, surveying Rome with the mind's eye, is so
impressed with its "eternal" character that he cannot imagine this site
having ever been occupied otherwise than by a city. To him it seems
inevitable that these walls must always have stood where now they
stand--must have risen, he suggests, out of the earth, unaided by human
hands. Yet somebody laid the foundation-stones, once upon a time;
somebody who lived under conditions quite different from those that
supervened. For who--not five thousand, but, say, five hundred years
ago--who would have thought of building a town on a spot like this? None
but a crazy despot, some moonstruck Oriental such as the world has
known, striving to impress his dreams upon a recalcitrant nature. No
facilities for trade or commerce, no scenic beauty of landscape, no
harbour, no defence against enemies, no drinking water, no mineral
wealth, no food-supplying hinterland, no navigable river--a dangerous
river, indeed, a perpetual menace to the place--every drawback, or
nearly so, which a town may conceivably possess, and all of them huddled
into a fatally unhealthy environment, compressed in a girdle of fire and
poison. Human ingenuity has obviated them so effectually, so
triumphantly that, were green pastures not needful to me as light and
air, I, for one, would nevermore stray beyond those ancient portals....

The country visits you here. It comes in the wake of that evening breeze
which creeps about with stealthy feet, winding its way into the most
secluded courtyards and sending a sudden shiver through the frail
bamboos that stand beside your dinner-table in some heated square. Then
the zephyr departs mysteriously as it came, and leaves behind a great
void--a torrid vacuum which is soon filled up by the honey-sweet
fragrance of hay and aromatic plants. Every night this balsamic breath
invades the town, filling its streets with ambrosial suggestions. It is
one of the charms of Rome at this particular season; quite a local
speciality, for the phenomenon could never occur if the surrounding
regions were covered with suburbs or tilth or woodland--were aught save
what they are: a desert whose vegetation of coarse herbage is in the act
of withering. The Campagna once definitely dried, this immaterial feast
is at an end.

I am glad never to have discovered anyone, native or foreign, who has
been aware of the existence of this nocturnal emanation; glad because it
corroborates a theory of mine, to wit, that mankind is forgetting the
use of its nose; and not only of nose, but of eyes and ears and all
other natural appliances which help to capture and intensify the simple
joys of life. We all know the civilised, the industrial eye--how
atrophied, how small and formless and expressionless it has become. The
civilised nose, it would seem, degenerates in the other direction. Like
the cultured potato or pumpkin, it swells in size. The French are
civilised and, if we may judge by old engravings (what else are we to
take as guide, seeing that the skull affords some criterion as to shape
but not size of nose?) they certainly seem to accentuate this organ in
proportion as they neglect its use. Parisians, it strikes me, are
running to nose; they wax more rat-like every day. Here is a little
problem for anthropologists. There may be something, after all, in the
condition of Paris life which fosters the development of this peeky,
rodential countenance. Perfumery, and what it implies? There are
scent-shops galore in the fashionable boulevards, whereas I defy you to
show me a single stationer. Maupassant knew them fairly well, and one
thinks of that story of his:--

"Le parfum de Monsieur?"

"La verveine...." [22]

Speaking of the French, I climbed those ninety odd stairs the other day
to announce my arrival in Italy to my friend Mrs. N., who, being vastly
busy at that moment and on no account to be disturbed, least of all by a
male, sent word to say that I might wait on the terrace or in that
microscopic but well-equipped library of hers. I chose the latter, and
there browsed upon "Emaux et Camées" and the "Fleurs du Mal" which
happened, as was meet and proper, to lie beside each other.

Strange reading, at this distance of time. These, I thought--these are
the things which used to give us something of a thrill.

If they no longer provide that sensation, it may well be that we have
absorbed their spirit so thoroughly into our system that we forget
whence we drew it. They have become part of ourselves. Even now, one
cannot help admiring Gautier's precision of imagery, his gift of being
quaint and yet lucid as a diamond; one pictures those crocodiles
fainting in the heat, and notes, too, whence the author of the "Sphinx"
drew his hard, glittering, mineralogical flavour. The verse is not so
much easy as facile. And not all the grace of internals can atone for
external monotony. That trick--that full stop at the end of nearly every
fourth line--it impairs the charm of the music and renders its flow
jerky; coming, as it does, like an ever-repeated blow, it grows
wearisome to the ear, and finally abhorrent.

Baudelaire, in form, is more cunning and variegated. He can also delve
down to deeps which the other never essayed to fathom. "Fuyez l'infini
que vous portez en vous"--a line which, in my friend's copy of the book,
had been marked on the margin with a derisive exclamation-point. (It
gave me food for thought, that exclamation-point.) But, as to substance,
he contains too many nebulosities and abstractions for my taste; a
veritable mist of them, out of which emerges--what? The figure of one
woman. Reading these "Fleurs du Mal" we realise, not for the first time,
that there is something to be said in favour of libertinage for a poet.
We do not need Petrarca, much less the Love-Letters of a Violinist--no,
we do not need those Love-Letters at all--to prove that a master can
draw sweet strains from communion with one mistress, from a lute with
one string; a formidable array of songsters, on the other hand, will
demonstrate how much fuller and richer the melody grows when the
instrument is provided with the requisite five, the desirable fifty.
Monogamous habits have been many a bard's undoing.

Twenty years' devotion to that stupid and spiteful old cat of a
semi-negress! They make one conscious of the gulf between the logic of
the emotions and that other one--that logic of the intellect which ought
to shape our actions. Here was Baudelaire, a man of ruthless
self-analysis. Did he never see himself as others saw him? Did he never
say: "You are making a fool of yourself"?

Be sure he did.

You are making a fool of yourself: are not those the words I ought to
have uttered when, standing in the centre of the Piazza del Popolo--the
sunny centre: so it had been inexorably arranged--I used to wait and
wait, with eyes glued to the clock hard by, in the slender shadow of
that obelisque which crawled reluctantly, like the finger of fate, over
the burning stones?

And I crawled with it, more than content.

Days of infatuation!

I never pass that way now without thanking God for a misspent youth. Why
not make a fool of yourself? It is good fun while it lasts; it yields
mellow mirth for later years, and are not our fellow-creatures, those
solemn buffoons, ten times more ridiculous? Where is the use of
experience, if it does not make you laugh? The Logic of the
Intellect--what next! If any one had treated me to such tomfoolery while
standing there, petrified into a pillar of fidelity in that creeping
shadow, I should have replied gravely:

"The Logic of the Intellect, my dear Sir, is incompatible with
situations like mine. It was not invented for so stupendous a crisis. I
am waiting for my negress--can't you understand?--and she is already
seven minutes late...."

A flaming morning, forestaste of things to come.

I find myself, after an early visit to the hospital where things are
doing well, glancing down, towards midday, into Trajan's Forum, as one
looks into some torrid bear-pit.

Broken columns glitter in the sunshine; the grass is already withered to
hay. Drenched in light and heat, this Sahara-like enclosure is
altogether devoid of life save for the cats. The majority are dozing in
a kind of torpor, or moribund, or dead. My experiences in the hospital
half an hour ago dispose me, perhaps, to regard this menagerie in a more
morbid fashion than usual. To-day, in particular, it seems as if all the
mangy and decrepit cats of Rome had given themselves a rendezvous on
this classic soil; cats of every colour and every age--quite young ones
among them; all, one would say, at the last gasp of life. This pit, this
crater of flame, is their "Home for the Dying." Once down here, nothing
matters any more. They are safe at last from their old enemies, from
dogs and carriages and boys. Waiting for death, they move about in a
stupid and dazed manner. Sunlight streams down upon their bodies. One
would think they preferred to expire in the shade of some pillar or
slab. Apparently not. Apparently it is all the same. It matters nothing
where one dies.

There is one immediately below me, a moth-eaten desiccated
tortoiseshell; its eyes are closed and a red tongue hangs out of the
mouth. I drop a small pebble. It wakes up and regards me stoically for a
moment. Nothing more.

These cats have lost their all--their self-respect. Grace and ardour,
sleekness of coat and buoyancy of limbs are gone out of them. Tails are
knotted with hunger and neglect; bones protrude through the skin. So
they strew the ground in discomposed, un-catlike attitudes, while the
sun burns through their parched anatomy. Do they remember their
kittenish pranks, those moonlight ecstasies on housetops, that morsel
snatched from a fishmonger's barrow and borne through the crowded
traffic in a series of delirious leaps? Who can tell! They are not even
bored with themselves. Their fur is in patches. They are alive when they
ought to be dead. Nobody knows it better than they do. They are too ill,
too far gone, to feel any sense of shame at their present degradation.
Nothing matters! What would Baudelaire, that friend of cats, have said
to this macabre exhibition?

Yonder is an old one, giving milk to the phantom of a kitten. The parent
takes no interest in the proceedings; she lies prone, her head on the
ground. Her eyes have a stony look. Is she dead? Possibly. Her own
kitten? Who cares! Her neighbour, once white but now earth-coloured,
rises stiffly as though dubious whether the joints are still in working
order. What does she think of doing? It would seem she has formed no
plan. She walks up to the mother, peers intently into her face, then
sits apart on her haunches and begins gazing at the sun. Presently she
rises anew and proceeds five or six paces for no imaginable
reason--collapses; falls, quite abruptly, on her side. There she lies,
flat, like a playing-card.

A sinister aimlessness pervades the actions of those that move at all.
The shadow of death is upon these creatures in the scorching sunshine.
They stare at columns of polished granite, at a piece of weed, at one
another, as though they had never seen such things before. They totter
about on tip-toe; they yawn and forget to shut their mouths. Here is
one, stretching out a hind leg in a sustained cramp; another is
convulsed with nervous twitchings; another scratches the earth in a kind
of mechanical trance. One would say she was preparing a grave for
herself. The saddest of all is an old warrior with mighty jowl and a
face that bears the scars of a hundred fights. One eye has been lost in
some long-forgotten encounter. Now they walk over him, kittens and all,
and tread about his head, as if he were a hillock of earth, while his
claws twitch resentfully with rage or pain. Too ill to rise!

Most of them are thus stretched out blankly, in a faint. Are they
suffering? Hungry or thirsty? [23] I believe they are past troubling
about such things. It is time to die. They know it....

"L'albergo dei gatti," says a cheery voice at my side--some countryman,
who has also discovered Trajan's Forum to be one of the sights of Rome.
"The cats' hotel. But," he adds, "I see no restaurant attached to it."

That reminds me: luncheon-time.

Via Flaminia--what a place for luncheon! True; but this is one of the
few restaurants in Rome where, nowadays, a man is not in danger of being
simultaneously robbed, starved, and poisoned. Things have come to a
pretty pass. This starvation-fare may suit a saint and turn his thoughts
heavenwards. Mine it turns in the other direction. Here, at all events,
the food is straightforward. Our hostess, a slow elderly woman, is
omnipresent; one realises that every dish has been submitted to her
personal inspection. A primeval creature; heaviness personified. She
moves in fateful fashion, like the hand of a clock. The crack of doom
will not avail to accelerate that relentless deliberation. She reminds
me of a cousin of mine famous for his imperturbable calm who, when his
long curls once caught fire from being too near a candle, sleepily
remarked to a terrified wife: "I think you might try to blow it out."

But where shall a man still find those edible maccheroni--those that
were made in the Golden Age out of pre-war-time flour?

Such things are called trifles.... Give me the trifles of life, and keep
the rest. A man's health depends on trifles; and happiness on health.
Moreover, I have been yearning for them for the last five months. Hope
deferred maketh the heart sick.... There are none in Rome. Can they be
found anywhere else?

Mrs. Nichol: she might know. She has the gift of knowing about things
one would never expect her to know. If only one could meet her by
accident in the street! For at such times she is gay and altogether at
your disposal. She is up to any sport, out of doors. To break upon her
seclusion at home is an undertaking reserved for great occasions. The
fact is, we are rather afraid of Mrs. Nichol. The incidents of what she
describes as a tiresome life have taught her the value of masculine
frankness--ultra-masculine, I call it. She is too frank for subterfuge
of any kind. When at home, for instance, she is never "not at home." She
will always see you. She will not detain you long, if you happen to be
de trop.

This, I persuade myself, is a great occasion--my health and
happiness.... Besides, I am her oldest friend in this part of the world;
was I not on the spot when she elected, for reasons which nobody has yet
fathomed, to make Rome her domicile? Have I not more than once been
useful to her, nay, indispensable? I therefore climb, not without
trepidation, those ninety-three stairs to the very summit of the old
palace, and presently find myself ushered into the familiar twilight.

Nothing has changed since I was here some little time ago to announce my
arrival in Italy (solemn occasion), when I had to amuse myself for an
hour or so with Baudelaire in the library, Mrs. Nichol being engaged
upon "house-accounts." This time, as I enter the studio, she is playing
cards with a pretty handmaiden, amid peals of laughter. She often plays
cards. She is puffing at a cigarette in a long mouthpiece which keeps
the smoke out of her olive-complexioned face and which she holds
firm-fixed between her teeth, in a corner of the mouth, after the perky
fashion of a schoolboy. I have interrupted a game, and at once begin to
feel de trop under a glance from those smouldering grey eyes.

"It is not a trifle. It is a matter of life and death. Will you please
listen for half a minute? Then I will evaporate, and you can go on with
your ridiculous cards. The fact is, I am being assassinated by inches.
Do you know of a place where a man can get eatable macaroni nowadays?
The old kind, I mean, made out of pre-war-time flour...."

She lays her hand on the cards as though to suspend the game, and asks
the girl in Italian:

"What was the name of that place?"

"That place----"

"Oh, stupid! Where I stayed with Miranda last September. Where I tore my
skirt on the rock. Where I said something nice about the white
macaroni?"

"Soriano in Cimino."

"Soriano," echoes the mistress in a cloud of smoke. "There is a tram
from here every morning. They can put you up."

A pause follows. I would like to linger and talk to this sultry and
self-centred being; I would like to wander with her through these rooms,
imbibing their strange Oriental spirit--not your vulgar Orient, but
something classic and remote; something that savours, for aught I know,
of Indo-China, where Mrs. Nichol, in one of her immature efforts at
self-realisation, spent a few years as the wife of a high French
official, ere marrying, that is, the late lamented Nichol--another
unsuccessful venture.

Now why did she marry all these people (for I fancy there was yet an
earlier alliance of some kind)? A whim, a freak? Or did they plague her
into it? If so, I suspect they lived and died to repent their manly
persistence. She could grind any ordinary male to powder. And why has
she now flitted here, building herself this aerial bower above the old
roofs of Rome? Is she in search of happiness? I doubt whether she will
find it. She possesses that fatal craving--the craving for disinterested
affection, a source of heartache to the perfect egoist for whom
affection of this particular kind is not a necessity but a luxury, and
therefore desirable above all else--desirable, and how seldom attained!

The pause continues. I make a little movement, to attract notice. She
looks up, but only her eyes reply.

"Now, my good fellow," they seem to say, "are you blind?"

That is the drawback of Mrs. Nichol. Phenomenally absent-minded, she
always knows at a given moment exactly what she wants to do. And she
never wants to do more than one thing at a time. It is most unwomanly of
her. Any other person of her sex would have left a game of cards for the
sake of an attractive visitor like myself. Or, for that matter, an
ordinary lady would have played cards, given complicated orders to
dressmakers and servants, and entertained half a dozen men at the same
time. Mrs. Nichol cannot do these things. That hand, that rather
sunburnt little hand without a single ring on it, has not moved from the
table. No, I am not blind. It is quite evident that she wants to play
cards; only that, and nothing more.

I withdraw, stealthily.

Not downstairs. I go to linger awhile on the broad terrace where
jessamine grows in Gargantuan tubs; there I pace up and down, admiring
the cupolas and towers of Rome that gleam orange-tawny against the blue
background of distant hills. How much of its peculiar flavour a town
will draw--not from artistic monuments but from the mere character of
building materials! How many variations on one theme! This mellow Roman
travertine, for instance.... I call to mind those disconsolate places in
Cornwall with their chill slate and primary rock, the robust and
dignified bunter-sandstone of the Vosges, the satanic cheerfulness of
lava, those marble-towns that blind you with their glare, Eastern cities
of brightly tinted stucco or mere clay, the brick-towns, granite-towns,
wood-towns--how they differ in mood from one another!... Here I pace up
and down, rejoicing in the spacious sunlit prospect, and endeavouring to
disentangle from one another the multitudinous street-cries that climb
to this hanging garden in confused waves of sound. Harsh at close
quarters, they weave themselves into a mirthful symphony up here.

From that studio, too, comes a lively din--the laughter has begun again.
Mrs. Nichol is having a good time. It will be followed, I daresay, by a
period of acute depression. I shall probably be consulted with masonic
frankness about some little tragedy of the emotions which is no concern
of mine. She can be wondrously engaging at such times--like a child that
has got into trouble and takes you into its confidence.

One of these days I must write a character-sketch of Mrs. Nichol. She
foreshadows a type--represents it, very possibly--a type which will grow
commoner from day to day. She dreams of a Republic of women, vestals or
otherwise, wherefrom all men are to be excluded unless they possess
qualifications of a rather unusual nature. I think she would like to
draft a set of rules and regulations for that community. She could be
trusted, I fancy, to make them sufficiently stringent.

I think I understand, now, why a certain line in her copy of Baudelaire
was marked with that derisive exclamation-point on the margin: "Fuyez
l'infini que vous portez en vous."

"Fuyez?" it seemed to say. "Why 'fuyez'?"

Fulfil it!




Soriano

Amid clouds of dust you are whirled to Soriano, through the desert
Campagna and past Mount Soracte, in a business-like tramway--different
from that miserable Olevano affair which, being narrow gauge, can go but
slowly and even then has a frolicsome habit of jumping off the rails
every few days. From afar you look back upon the city; it lies so low as
to be invisible; over its site hovers the dome of Saint Peter, like an
iridescent bubble suspended in the sky.

This region is unfamiliar to me. Soriano lies on the slope of an immense
old volcano and conveys at first glance a somewhat ragged and sombre
impression. It was an unpleasantly warm day, but those macaroni--they
atoned for everything. So exquisite were they that I forthwith vowed to
return to Soriano, for their sake alone, ere the year should end. (I
kept my vow.) The right kind at last, of lily-like candour and
unmistakably authentic, having been purchased in large quantities at the
outbreak of hostilities by the provident hostess, who must have
anticipated a rise in price, a deterioration in quality, or both, as the
result of war.

How came Mrs. Nichol to discover their whereabouts? That is her affair.
I know not how she has managed, in so brief a space of time, to collect
such a variety of useful local information. I can only testify that on
her arrival in Rome she knew no more about the language and place than
the proverbial babe unborn, and that nowadays, when anybody is faced
with a conundrum like mine, one always hears the words: "Try Mrs.
Nichol." And how many women, by the way, would have made a note of the
particular quality of those macaroni? One in a hundred? These are
temperamental matters....

We also--for of course I took a friend with me, a well-preserved old
gentleman of thirty-two, whose downward career from a brilliant youth
into hopeless mediocrity has been watched, by both of us, with
philosophic unconcern--we also consumed a tender chicken, a salad
containing olive oil and not the usual motor-car lubricant, an omelette
made with genuine butter, and various other items which we enjoyed
prodigiously, eating, one would think, not only for the seven lean years
just past but for seven--yea, seventy times seven--lean years to come.
So great a success was this open-air meal that my companion, a
case-hardened Roman, was obliged to confess:

"It seems one fares better in the province than at home. You could not
get such bread in Rome, not if you offered fifty francs a pound."

As for myself, I had lost all interest in the bread by this time, but
grown fairly intimate with the wine, a rosy muscatel, faintly
sparkling--very young, but not altogether innocent.

There were flies, however, and dogs, and children. We ought to have
remained indoors. Thither we retired for coffee and cigars and a
liqueur, of the last of which my friend refused to partake. He fears and
distrusts all liqueurs; it is one of his many senile traits. The stuff
proved, to my surprise, to be orthodox Strega, likewise a rarity
nowadays.

It is a real shame--what is happening to Strega at this moment. It has
grown so popular that the country is flooded with imitations. There must
be fifty firms manufacturing shams of various degrees of goodness and
badness; I have met their travellers in the most unexpected places. They
reproduce the colour of Strega, its minty flavour --everything, in
short, except the essential: its peculiar strength of aroma and of
alcohol. They can afford to sell this poison at half the price of the
original, and your artful restaurateur keeps an old bottle or two of the
real product which he fills up, when empty, out of some hidden but
never-failing barrel of the fraudulent mixture round the corner,
charging you, of course, the full price of true Strega. If you complain,
he proudly points to the bottle, the cork, the label: all authentic! No
wonder foreigners, on tasting these concoctions, vow they will never
touch Strega again....

We had a prolonged argument, over the coffee, about this Strega
adulteration, during which I tried to make my friend comprehend how I
thought the grievance ought to be remedied. How? By an injunction. That
was the way to redress these wrongs. You obtain an injunction, I said,
such as the French Chartreuse people obtained against the manufacturers
of the Italian "Certosa," which was thereafter obliged to change its
name to "Val D'Emma." More than once I endeavoured to set forth, in
language intelligible to his understanding, what an injunction
signified; more than once I explained how well-advised the Strega
Company would be to take this course.

In vain!

He always missed my point. He always brought in some personal element,
whereas I, as usual, confined myself to general lines, to the principle
of the thing. Italians are sometimes unfathomably obtuse.

"But what is an injunction?" he repeated.

"If you were a little younger, there might be some hope for you. I would
then try to explain it again, for the fiftieth time. Instead of that,
what do you say to taking a nap?"

"Ah! You have eaten too much."

"Not at all. But please to note that I am tired of explaining things to
people who refuse to understand."

"No doubt, no doubt. Yes. A little sleep might freshen you up."

"And perhaps inspire you with another subject of conversation."

In the little hotel there were no rooms available just then wherein we
might have slumbered, and another apartment higher up the street
promising lively sport for which we were disinclined at that hour, we
moved laboriously into the chestnut woods overhead. Fine old timber,
part of that mysterious Ciminian forest which still covers a large
tract, from within whose ample shade one looks downhill towards the
distant Orte across a broiling stretch of country. There were golden
orioles here, calling to each other from the tree-tops. My friend,
having excavated himself a couch among the troublesome prickly seeds of
this plant, was soon snoring--another senile trait--snoring in a
rhythmical bass accompaniment to their song. I envied him. How some
people can sleep! It is a thing worth watching. They shut their eyes,
and forget to be awake. With a view to imitating his example, I wearied
myself trying to count up the number of orioles I had shot in my
bird-slaying days, and where it happened. Not more than half a dozen,
all told. They are hard to stalk, and hard to see. But of other
birds--how many! Forthwith an endless procession of massacred fowls
began to pass before my mind. One would fain live those ornithological
days over again, and taste the rapturous joy with which one killed that
first nutcracker in the mountain gulley; the first wall-creeper which
fluttered down from the precipice hung with icicles; the Temminck's
stint--victim of a lucky shot, late in the evening, on the banks of the
reservoir; the ruff, the grey-headed green woodpecker, the yellow-billed
Alpine jackdaw, that lanius meridionalis----

And all those slaughtered beasts--those chamois, first and foremost,
sedulously circumvented amid snowy crags. Where are now their horns, the
trophies? The passion for such sport died out slowly and for no clearly
ascertainable reason, as did, in its turn, the taste for art and
theatres and other things. Sheer satiety, a grain of pity, new
environments--they may all help to explain what was, in its essence, a
molecular change in the brain, driving one to explore new departments of
life.

And now latterly, for some reason equally obscure, the natural history
fancy has revived after lying dormant so long. It may be those three
months spent on the pavements of Florence which incline one's thoughts
to the country and wild things. Social reasons too--a certain weariness
of humanity, and more than weariness; a desire to avoid contact with
creatures Who kill each other so gracelessly and in so doing--for the
killing alone would pass--invoke specially manufactured systems of
ethics and a benevolent God overhead. What has one in common with such
folk?

That may be why I feel disposed to forget mankind and take rambles as of
yore; minded to shoulder a gun and climb trees and collect birds, and
begin, of course, a new series of "field notes." Those old jottings were
conscientiously done and registered sundry things of import to the
naturalist; were they accessible, I should be tempted to extract
therefrom a volume of solid zoological memories in preference to these
travel-pages that register nothing but the crosscurrents of a mind which
tries to see things as they are. For the pursuit brought one into
relations not only with interesting birds and beasts, but with men.

There was Mr. H. of the Linnean Society, whose waxed moustache curled
round upon itself like an ammonite. A great writer of books was Mr. H.,
and a great collector of them. He collected, among other things, a rare
monograph belonging to me and dealing with the former distribution of
the beaver in Bavaria (we were both absorbed in beavers). Nothing I
could do or say would induce him to disgorge it again; he had always
lent it to a friend, who was just on the point of returning it, etc.
etc. Bitterly grieved, I not only forgave him, but put him into
communication with my friend Dr. Girtanner of St. Gallen, another
beaver--and marmot--specialist. It stimulated his love of Swiss zoology
to such an extent that he straightway borrowed a still rarer pamphlet of
mine, J. J. Tschudi's "Schweizer Echsen," which I likewise never saw
again. What an innocent one was! Where is now the man who will induce me
to lend him such books?

In those days I held a student's ticket at the South Kensington Museum,
an institution I enriched with specimens of rana graeca from near Lake
Stymphalus, and lizards from the Filfla rock, and toads from a volcanic
islet (toads, says Darwin, are not found on volcanic islets), and slugs
from places as far apart as Santorin and the Shetlands and Orkneys,
whither I went in search of Asterolepis and the Great Skua. The last
gift was a seal from the fresh-water lake of Saima in Finland. Who ever
heard of seals living in sweet land-locked waters? This was one of my
happiest discoveries, though the delight of my friend the Curator was
tempered by the fact that this particular specimen happened to be an
immature one, and did not display any pronounced race-characters. I have
early recollections of the rugged face and lovely Scotch accent of Tam
Edwards, the Banffshire naturalist; and much later ones of J. Young,
[24] who gave me a circumstantial account of how he found the first snow
bunting's nest in Sutherlandshire; I recall the Rev. Mathew (? Mathews)
of Gumley, an ardent Leicestershire ornithologist, whose friendship I
gained at a tender age on discovering the nest of a red-legged
partridge, from which I took every one of the thirteen eggs. "Surely six
would have been enough," he said--a remark which struck me as rather
unreasonable, seeing that French partridges were not exactly as common
as linnets. He afterwards showed me his collection of birdskins,
dwelling lovingly, for reasons which I cannot remember, upon that of a
pin-tail duck.

He it was who told me that no collector was worth his salt until he had
learnt to skin his own birds. Fired with enthusiasm, I took lessons in
taxidermy at the earliest possible opportunity--from a grimy old
naturalist in one of the grimiest streets of Manchester, a man who
relieved birds of their jackets in dainty fashion with one hand, the
other having been amputated and replaced by an iron hook. During that
period of initiation into the gentle art, the billiard-room at "The
Weaste," Manchester, was converted every morning, for purposes of study,
into a dissecting-room, a chamber of horrors, a shambles, where headless
trunks and brains and gouged-out eyes of lapwings and other "easy" birds
(I had not yet reached the arduous owl-or-titmouse stage of the
profession) lay about in sanguinary morsels, while the floor was
ankle-deep in feathers, and tables strewn with tweezers, lancets,
arsenical paste, corrosive sublimate and other paraphernalia of the
trade. The butler had to be furiously tipped.

There were large grounds belonging to this estate, fields and woodlands
once green, then blackened with soot, and now cut up into allotments and
built over. Here, ever since men could remember--certainly since the
place had come into the possession of the never-to-be-forgotten Mr.
Edward T.--a kingfisher had dwelt by a little streamlet of artificial
origin which supported a few withered minnows and sticklebacks and dace.
This kingfisher was one of the sights of the domain. Visitors were taken
to see it. The bird, though sometimes coy, was generally on view.
Nevertheless it was an extremely prudent old kingfisher; to my infinite
annoyance, I never succeeded in destroying it. Nor did I even find its
nest, an additional source of grief. Lancashire naturalists may be
interested to know that this bird was still on the spot in the 'eighties
(I have the exact date somewhere [25])--surely a noteworthy state of
affairs, so near the heart of a smoky town like Manchester.

Later on I learnt to slay kingfishers--the first victim falling to my
gun on a day of rain, as it darted across a field to avoid the windings
of a brook. I also became a specialist at finding their nests. Birds are
so conservative! They are at your mercy, if you care to study their
habits. The golden-crested wren builds a nest which is almost invisible;
once you have mastered the trick, no gold-crest is safe. I am sorry,
now, for all those plundered gold-crests' eggs. And the rarer ones--the
grey shrike, that buzzard of the cliff (the most perilous scramble of
all my life), the crested titmouse, the serin finch on the apple tree,
that first icterine warbler whose five eggs, blotched with purple and
quite unfamiliar at the time, gave me such a thrill of joy that I nearly
lost my foothold on the swerving alder branch----

At this point, my meditations were suddenly interrupted by a vigorous
grunt or snort; a snort that would have done credit to an enraged tapir.
My friend awoke, refreshed. He rubbed his eyes, and looked round.

"I remember!" he began, sitting up. "I remember everything. Are you
feeling better? I hope so. Yes. Exactly. Where were we? An
injunction--what did you say?"

At it again!

"I said it was the drawback of old people that they never know when they
have had enough of an argument."

"But what is an injunction?"

"How many more times do you wish me to make that clear? Shall I begin
all over again? Have it your way! When you go into Court and ask the
judge to do something to prevent a man from doing something he wants to
do when you do not want him to do it. Like that, more or less."

"So I gather. But I confess I do not see why a man should not do
something he wants to do just because you want him not to do it. You
might as well go into Court and ask the judge to do something to make a
man do something he does not want to do just because you want him to do
it."

"Ah, but he must not, in this case. Good Lord, have I not explained that
a thousand times already? You always miss my point. It is illegal, don't
you understand? Illegal, illegal."

"Anybody can say that. It would be a very natural thing to say, under
the circumstances. I should say it myself! Now just take my advice. You
go and tell your brother----"

"My brother? It is not my brother. You are quite beside the point. Why
introduce this personal element? It is the Strega Company. Strega, a
liqueur. I am talking about a commercial concern obtaining an
injunction. Burroughs and Wellcome--they got injunctions on the same
grounds. I know a great deal of such things, though I don't talk about
them all day long as other people would, if they possessed half my
knowledge. A company, don't you see? An injunction. A liqueur. Please to
note that I am talking about a company, a company. Have I now made
myself clear, or how many more times----"

"One would think he was at least your brother, from the way you take his
part. Let us say he is a friend, then; some never-to-be-mentioned friend
who is interested in a shady liqueur business and now wants to make a
judge do something to make a man do something----"

"Wrong again! To prevent a man doing something----"

"--Wants to do something to make a judge do something to prevent a man
doing something he wants to do because he does not want him to do it. Is
that right? Very well. You tell your friend that no Italian judge is
going to do dirty work of that kind for nothing."

"Dirty work. God Almighty! I don't want any judge to do dirty work----"

"No doubt, no doubt. I am quite convinced you don't. But your priceless
friend does. Come now! Why not be open about it?"

"Open about what?"

"It is positively humiliating for me to be treated like this, after all
the years we have known each other. I wish you would try to cultivate
the virtue of frankness. You are far too secretive. Something will
really have to be done about it."

"A company, a company."

"A company consists of a certain number of human beings. Why make
mysteries about one of them? It may happen to the best of mankind to be
mixed up----"

"Mixed up----"

"You are going to be disagreeable about my choice of words. Have it your
way! We all know you think you can talk better Italian than the Pope. My
own father, I was going to say, has been involved in some pretty dirty
work in the course of his professional career----"

"No doubt, no doubt."

"And please to note that he is as good a man as any brother of yours."

"You always miss my point."

"Now try to be truthful, for once in your life. Out with it!"

"A liqueur."

"Is that all? Sleep does not seem to have sharpened your wits to any
great extent."

"I was not asleep. I was thinking about eggs. A company."

"A company? You are waking up. Anything else?"

"An injunction...."

A distinguished writer some years ago started a crusade in favour of
pure English. He wished to counteract those influences which are forever
at work debasing the standard of language; whether, as he seemed to
think, that standard should be inalterably fixed, is yet another
question. For in literature as in conversation there is a "pure English"
for every moment of history; that of our childhood is different from
to-day's; and to adopt the tongue of the Bible or Shakespeare, because
it happens to be pure, looks like setting back the hands of the clock.
Men would surely be dull dogs if their phraseology, whether written or
spoken, were to remain stagnant and unchangeable. We think well of
Johnson's prose. Yet the respectable English of our own time will bear
comparison with his; it is more agile and less infected with Latinisms;
why go back to Johnson? Let us admire him as a landmark, and pass on!
Some literary periods may deserve to be called good, others bad; so be
it. Were there no bad ones, there would be no good ones, and I see no
reason why men should desire to live in a Golden Age of literature, save
in so far as that millennium might coincide with a Golden Age of living.
I doubt, in the first place, whether they would be even aware of their
privilege; secondly, every Golden Age grows fairer when viewed from a
distance. Besides, and as a general consideration, it strikes me that a
vast deal of mischief is involved in these arbitrary divisions of
literature into golden or other epochs; they incite men to admire some
mediocre writers and to disparage others, they pervert our natural
taste, and their origin is academic laziness.

Certain it is that every language worthy of the name should be in a
state of perennial flux, ready and avid to assimilate new elements and
be battered about as we ourselves are--is there anything more charming
than a thoroughly defective verb?--fresh particles creeping into its
vocabulary from all quarters, while others are silently discarded. There
is a bar-sinister on the escutcheon of many a noble term, and if, in an
access of formalism, we refuse hospitality to some item of questionable
repute, our descendants may be deprived of a linguistic jewel. Is the
calamity worth risking when time, and time alone, can decide its worth?
Why not capture novelties while we may, since others are dying all the
year round; why not throw them into the crucible to take their chance
with the rest of us? An English word is no fossil to be locked up in a
cabinet, but a living thing, liable to the fate of all such things.
Glance back into Chaucer and note how they have thriven on their own
merits and not on professorial recommendations; thriven, or perished, or
put on new faces!

I would make an exception to this rule. Foreign importations which do
not belong to us by right, idioms we have enticed from over the sea for
one reason or another, ought to remain, as it were, stereotyped. They
are respected guests and cannot decently be jostled in our crowd; let
them be jostled in their own; here, on British soil, they should be
allowed to retain that primal signification which, in default of a
corresponding English term, they were originally taken over to express.

What prompts me to this exordium is the discovery that a few pages back,
with a blameworthy hankering after the picturesque, I have grossly
misused a foreign word. Those cats in Trajan's Forum at Rome are nowise
a "macabre exhibition"; they are not macabre in the least; they are sad,
or saddening. The charnel-house flavour is absent.

My apologies to the French language, to the cats, and to the reader....

Now whoever wishes to see a truly macabre exhibition at Rome may visit
the Peruvian mummies in the Kircher Museum. It is characteristic of the
spirit in which guide-books are written that, while devoting long
paragraphs to some worthless picture of a hallucinated venerable, they
hardly utter a word about these most remarkable and gruesome objects.

Those old Peruvians, like the Egyptians, had necrophilous leanings. They
cultivated an unwholesome passion for corpses, and called it religion.
Many museums contain such relics from the New World in various attitudes
of discomfort; frequently seated, as though trying to be at rest after
life's long journey. No two are alike; and all are horrible of aspect.
Some have been treated with balsam to preserve the softer parts; others
are shrivelled. Some are filled with chopped straw, like any stuffed
crocodile in a show; others contain precious coca-leaves and powdered
fragments of shell, which were doubtless placed there so that the
defunct might receive nourishment up to the time when his soul should
once more have rejoined the body. Every one knows, furthermore, that
these American ancients were fond of playing tricks with the shape of
the skull--a custom which was forbidden by the Synod of Lima in 1585 and
which Hippocrates describes as being practised among the inhabitants of
the Crimea. [26] It adds considerably to their ghastly appearance.

One looks at them and asks oneself: what are they now, these gentle
Incas who loved the arts and music, these children of the Sun, whose
civic acquirements amazed their conquerors? They have contrived to
transform themselves into something quite unusual. Staring orbits and
mouths agape, colour-patches here and there, morsels of muscle and hair
attached to contorted limbs--they suggest a half-way house, a loathsome
link, between a living man and his skeleton; and not only a link between
them, but a grim caricature of both. Some have been coated with varnish.
They glisten infamously. Picture a decrepit and rather gaunt relative of
your own, writhing in a fit, stark naked, and varnished all over----

Different are these mummies from those of the tenaciously unimaginative
and routine-bound Egyptians. Theirs are dead as a door-nail; torpid
lumps, undistinguishable one from the other. Here we have a rare
phenomenon--life, and individuality, after death. They are more
noteworthy than the cowled and desiccated monks of Italy or Sicily, or
at least differently so; undraped, for the most part, though some of
them may be seen, mere skin-covered heads, peering with dismal coyness
out of a brown sack. And the jabbering teeth.... We dream as children of
night-terrors, of goblins and phantoms that start out of the gloom and
flit about with hideous grimaces. They are gone, while yet we shudder at
that momentary flash of grizzliness; intangibilities, whose image is not
easily detained. To see spectral visions embodied, and ghosts made
flesh, one should come here. Had the excruciating operation of embalming
been performed upon live men and women, their poses could hardly have
been more multifariously agonised; and an aesthete may speculate as to
how far such objects offend, in expression of blank misery and horror,
against the canons of what is held to be artistically desirable. The
nearest approach to them in human craftsmanship, and as regards
Auffassung, are perhaps some little Japanese wood-carvings whose
creators, labouring consciously, likewise overstepped the boundaries of
the grotesque and indulged in nightmarish effects of line similar to
those which the old Peruvians, all unconsciously, have achieved upon the
bodies of their dear friends and relatives....

Drive swiftly thence, if you are in the mood, as you should be, for
something at the other pole of feeling, to view that wonder, the
kneeling boy at the Museo delle Terme. Headless and armless though he
be, he displays as much vitality as the Peruvians; every inch of the
body is alive, and one may well marvel at the skill of the artist who,
during his interminable task of sculpture, held fast the model's
fleeting outline--so fleeting, at that particular age of life, that
every month, and every week, brings about new conditions of surface and
texture. A child of Niobe? Very likely. There is suffering also here, a
suffering different from theirs; struck by the Sun-God's arrow, he is in
the act of sinking to earth. Over this tension broods a divine calm.
Here is the antidote to mummified Incas.




Alatri

What brought me to Alatri?

Memories of a conversation, by Tiber banks, with Fausto, who was born
here and vaunted it to be the fairest city on earth. Rome was quite a
passable place, but as to Alatri----

"You never saw such walls in all your life. They are not walls. They are
precipices. And our water is colder than the Acqua Marcia."

"Walls and water say little to me. But if the town produces other
citizens like yourself----"

"It does indeed! I am the least of the sons of Alatri."

"Then it must be worthy of a visit...."

In the hottest hour of the afternoon they deposited me outside the city
gate at some new hotel--I forget its name--to which I promptly took an
unreasoning dislike. There was a fine view upon the mountains from the
window of the room assigned to me, but nothing could atone for that lack
of individuality which seemed to exhale from the establishment and its
proprietors. It looked as though I were to be a cypher here. Half an
hour was as much as I could endure. Issuing forth despite the heat, I
captured a young fellow and bade him carry my bags whithersoever he
pleased. He took me to the Albergo della----

The Albergo della----is a shy and retiring hostelry, invisible as such
to the naked eye, since it bears no sign of being a place of public
entertainment at all. Here was individuality, and to spare. Mine host is
an improvement even upon him of the Pergola at Valmontone; a man after
my own heart, with merry eyes, drooping white moustache and a lordly
nose--a nose of the right kind, a flame-tinted structure which must have
cost years of patient labour to bring to its present state of
blossoming. That nose! I felt as though I could dwell for ever beneath
its shadow. The fare, however, is not up to the standard of the
"Garibaldi" inn at Frosinone which I have just left.

Now Frosinone is no tourist resort. It is rather a dull little place; I
am never likely to go there again, and have therefore no reason for
keeping to myself its "Garibaldi" hotel which leaves little to be
desired, even under these distressful war-conditions. It set me
thinking--thinking that there are not many townlets of this size in
rural England which can boast of inns comparable to the "Garibaldi" in
point of cleanliness, polite attention, varied and good food, reasonable
prices. Not many; perhaps very few. One remembers a fair number of the
other kind, however; that kind where the fare is monotonous and badly
cooked, the attendance supercilious or inefficient, and where you have
to walk across a cold room at night--refinement of torture--in order to
turn out the electric light ere going to bed. That infamy is alone
enough to condemn these establishments, one and all.

Yes! And the beds; those frowsy, creaky, prehistoric wooden concerns,
always six or eight inches too short, whose mattresses have not been
turned round since they were made. What happens? You clamber into such a
receptacle and straightway roll downhill, down into its centre, into a
kind of river-bed where you remain fixed fast, while that monstrous
feather-abomination called a pillow, yielding to pressure, rises up on
either side of your head and engulfs eyes and nose and everything else
into its folds. No escape! You are strangled, smothered; you might as
well have gone to bed with an octopus. In this horrid contrivance you
lie for eight long hours, clapped down like a corpse in its coffin.
Every single bed in rural England ought to be burnt. Not one of them is
fit for a Christian to sleep in....

The days are growing hot.

A little tract of woodland surrounded by white walls and attached to the
convent on the neighbouring hill is a pleasant spot to while away the
afternoon hours. You can have it to yourself. I have all Alatri to
myself; a state of affairs which is not without its disadvantages, for,
being the only foreigner here, one is naturally watched and regarded
with suspicion. And it would be even worse in less civilised places,
where one could count for certain on trouble with some conscientious
official. So one remains on the beaten track, although my reputation
here as non-Austrian (nobody bothers about the Germans) is fairly well
established since that memorable debate, in the local cafe, with a
bootmaker who, having spent three years in America, testified publicly
that I spoke English almost as well as he did. The little newsboy of the
place, who is a universal favourite, seeing that his father, a
lithographer, is serving a stiff sentence for forgery--he brings me
every day with the morning's paper the latest gossip concerning myself.

"Mr. So-and-so still says you are a spy. It is sheer malice."

"I know. Did you tell him he might----?"

"I did. He was very angry. I also told him the remark you made about his
mother."

"Tell him again, to-morrow."

It seldom pays to be rude. It never pays to be only half rude.

In October--and we are now at midsummer--there occurred a little
adventure which shows the risks one may run at a time like this.

I was in Rome, walking homewards at about eleven at night along the
still crowded Corso and thinking, as I went along, of my impending
journey northwards for which the passport was already viséd, when there
met me a florid individual accompanied by two military officers. We
stared at one another. His face was familiar to me, though I knew not
where I had seen it. Then he introduced himself. He was a director of
the Banca d'ltalia. And was I not the gentleman who had recently been to
Orvinio? I remembered.

"The last time I was there," I said, "was about a month ago. I fancy we
had some conversation in the motor up from Mandela."

"That is so. And now, however disagreeable it may be, I feel myself
obliged to perform a patriotic duty. This is war-time. I would ask you
to be so good as to accompany us to the nearest police-station."

"Which is not far off," I replied. "There is one up the next street on
our right."

We walked there, all four of us, without saying another word. "What have
I been doing?" I wondered. Then we climbed upstairs.

Here, at a well-lighted table in a rather stuffy room, sat a delegato or
commissario--I forget which--surrounded, despite the lateness of the
hour, by one or two subordinates. He was of middle age, and not
prepossessing. He looked as if he could make himself unpleasant, though
his face was not of that actively vicious--or actively stupid: the terms
are interconvertible--kind. While scanning his countenance, during those
few moments, sundry thoughts flitted through my mind.

These then, I said to myself--these are the functionaries, whether
executive or administrative, whether Italian or English or Chinese, whom
a man is supposed to respect. Who are they? God knows. Nine-tenths of
them are in a place where they have no business to be: so much is
certain. And what are they doing, these swarms of parasites? Justifying
their salaries by inventing fresh regulations and meddlesome bye-laws,
and making themselves objectionable all round. Distrust of authority
should be the first civic duty, even as the first military duty is said
to be the reverse of it. We catch ourselves talking of the "lesson of
history." Why not take that lesson to heart? Reverence of the mandarin
destroyed the fair life of old China, which was overturned by the
Tartars not because Chinamen were too weak or depraved, but because they
were the opposite: too moral, too law-abiding, too strong in their sense
of right. They paid for their virtue with the extinction of their
wonderful culture. They ought to have known better; they ought to have
rated morality at its true worth, since it was the profoundest Chinaman
himself who said that virtue is merely etiquette--or something to that
effect.

I found myself studying the delegato's physiognomy. What could one do
with such a composite face? It is a question which often confronts me
when I see such types. It confronted me then, in a flash. How make it
more presentable, more imposing? By what alterations? Shaving that
moustache? No; his countenance could not carry the loss; it would
forfeit what little air of dignity it possessed. A small pointed beard,
an eye-glass? Possibly. Another trimming of the hair might have improved
him, but, on the whole, it was a face difficult to manipulate, on
account of its inherent insipidity and self-contradictory features; one
of those faces which give so much trouble to the barbers and valets of
European royalties.

He took down the names and addresses of all four of us, and it was then
that I missed my chance. I ought to have spoken first instead of
allowing this luscious director to begin as follows:--

"The foreign gentleman here was at Orvinio about a month ago. He admits
it himself and I can corroborate the fact, as I was there at the same
time. Orvinio is a small country place in the corner of Umbria. There is
a mountain in the neighbourhood, remote and very high--altissima! It is
called Mount Muretta and occupies a commanding situation. For reasons
which I will leave you, Signer Commissario, to investigate, this
gentleman climbed up that mountain and was observed, on the very summit,
making calculations and taking measurements with instruments."

Now why did I climb up that wretched Muretta? For an all-sufficient
reason: it was a mountain. There is no eminence in the land, from Etna
and the Gran Sasso downwards, whose appeal I can resist. A bare
wall-like patch on the summit (whence presumably the name) visible from
below and promising a lively scramble up the rock, was an additional
inducement. Precipices are not so frequent at Orvinio that one can
afford to pass them by, although this one, as a matter of fact, proved
to be a mighty tame affair. There was yet another object to my trip. I
desired to verify a legend connected with this mountain, the tradition
of a vanished castle or hamlet in its upper regions to whose former
existence the name of a certain old family, still surviving at Orvinio,
bears witness. "We are not really from Orvinio," these people will tell
you. "We are from the lost castle of the Muretta." (There is not a
vestige of a castle left. But I found one brick in the jungle which
covers, on the further side of the summit, a vast rock-slide dating, I
should say, from early mediaeval days, under whose ruins the fastness
may lie buried.) Reasons enough for visiting Muretta.

As to taking measurements--well, a man is naturally accused of a good
many things in the course of half a century. Nobody has yet gone so far
as to call me a mathematician. These "calculations and instruments" were
a local mirage; as pretty an instance of the mythopoeic faculty as one
could hope to find in our degenerate days, when gods no longer walk the
earth. [27]

The official seemed to be impressed with the fact that my accuser was
director of a bank. He inquired what I had to say.

This was a puzzle. They had sprung the thing on me rather suddenly. One
likes to have notice of such questions. Tell the truth? I am often
tempted to do so; it saves so much trouble! But truth-telling is a
matter of longitude, and the further east one goes, the more one learns
to hold in check that unnatural propensity. (Mankind has a natural love
of the lie itself. Bacon.) Which means nothing more than that one will
do well to take account of national psychology. An English functionary,
athlete or mountaineer, might have glimpsed the state of affairs. But to
climb in war-time, without any object save that of exercising one's
limbs and verifying a questionable legend, a high and remote
mountain--Muretta happens to be neither the one nor the other--would
have seemed to an Italian an incredible proceeding. I thought it better
to assume the role of accuser in my turn: an Oriental trick.

"This director," I said, "calls himself a patriot. What has he told us?
That while at Orvinio he knew a foreigner who climbed a high mountain to
make calculations with instruments. What does this admirable citizen do
with regard to such a suspicious character? He does nothing. Is there
not a barrack-full of carbineers at the entrance of the place ready to
arrest such people? But our patriotic gentleman allows the spy to walk
away, to climb fifty other mountains and take five thousand other
measurements, all of which have by this time safely reached Berlin and
Vienna. That, Signor Commissario, is not our English notion of
patriotism. I shall certainly make it my business to write and
congratulate the Banca d'Italia on possessing such a good Italian as
director. I shall also suggest that his talents would be more worthily
employed at the Banca--" (naming a notoriously pro-German establishment).

A poor speech; but it gave me the satisfaction of seeing the fellow grow
purple with fury and so picturesquely indignant that he soon reached the
spluttering stage. In fact, there was nothing to be done with him. The
delegato suggested that inasmuch as he had said his say and deposited
his address, he was at liberty to depart, whenever so disposed.

They went--he and his friends.

The other was looking serious--as serious as such a face could be made
to look. He must not be allowed to think, I decided, for once an
official begins to think he is liable to grow conscientious and
then--why, any disaster might happen, the least of them being that I
should remain in custody pending investigations. In how many more
countries was I going to be arrested for one crime or another? This joke
had lost its novelty a good many years ago.

"A pernicious person," I began, "--you have but to look at him. And now
he has invited me here in order to make a patriotic impression on his
friends, those poor little devils in uniform (a safe remark, since no
love is lost hereabouts between police and military). Such silly talk
about measurements! It should be nipped in the bud. Here you have an
intelligent young subordinate, if I mistake not. Let him drive home with
me at my expense; we will go through all papers and search for
instruments and bring everything that savours of suspicion back to this
office, together with my passport which I never carry on my person.
This, meanwhile, is my carta di soggiorno."

The document was in order. Still he hesitated. I thought of those
miserable three days' grace which were all that the French consulate had
accorded me. If the man grew conscientious, I might remain stranded in
Rome, and all that passport trouble must begin again. And to tell him of
this dilemma would make him more distrustful than ever.

I went on hastily to admit that my request might not be regular, but how
natural! Were we not allies? Was it not my duty to clear myself of such
an imputation at the earliest moment and to spare no efforts to that
end? I felt sure he could sympathise with the state of my mind, etc.
etc.

Thus I spoke while perfect innocence, mother of invention, lent wings to
my words, and while thinking all the time: You little vermin, what are
you doing here, in that chair, when you should be delving the earth or
breaking stones, as befits your kind? I tried to picture myself climbing
up Muretta with a theodolite bulging out of my pocket. A flagon of port
would have been more in my line. Calculations! It is all I can do to
control my weekly washing bill, and even for that simple operation I
like to have a quiet half hour in a room by myself. Instruments! If this
young fellow, I thought, discovers so much as an astrolabe among my
belongings, let them hang me from the ramparts at daybreak! And the
delegato, listening, was finally moved by my rhetoric, as they often
are, if you can throw not only your whole soul, but a good part of your
body, into the performance. He found the idea sufficiently reasonable.
The subordinate, as might have been expected, had nothing whatever to
do; like all of his kind, he was only in that office to evade military
service.

We drove away and, on reaching our destination, I insisted, despite his
polite remonstrances, on turning everything upside down. We made hay of
the apartment, but discovered nothing more treasonable than some rather
dry biscuits and a bottle of indifferent Marsala.

"And now I must really be going," he said. "Half-past one! He will be
surprised at my long absence."

"I am coming with you. I promised him the passport."

"Don't dream of it. To-morrow, to-morrow. You will have no trouble with
him. You can bring the passport, but he will not look at it. Yes; ten
o'clock, or eleven, or midday."

So it happened. The passport was waived aside by the official, a little
detail which, I must say, struck me as more remarkable than anything
else. He did not even unfold it.

"E stato un' equivoco," was all he condescended to say, still without a
smile. There had been a misunderstanding.

The incident was closed.

Things might have gone differently in the country. I would either have
been marched to the capital under the escort of a regiment of
carbineers, or kept confined in some rural barracks for half a century
while the authorities were making the necessary researches into the
civil status of my grandmother's favourite poet--an inquiry without
which no Latin dossier is complete.

POSTSCRIPT.--Why are there so many carbineers at Orvinio? And how many
of these myriad public guardians scattered all over the country ever
come into contact with a criminal, or even have the luck to witness a
street accident? And would the taxpayer not profit by a reduction in
their numbers? And whether legal proceedings of every kind would not
tend to diminish?

There is a village of about three hundred inhabitants not far from Rome;
fifteen carbineers are quartered there. Before they came, those
inevitable little troubles were settled by the local mayor; things
remained in the family, so to speak. Now the place has been set by the
ears, and a tone of exacerbation prevails. The natives spend their days
in rushing to Rome and back on business connected with law-suits, not a
quarter of which would have arisen but for the existence of the
carbineers. Let me not be misunderstood. Individually, these men are
nowise at fault. They desire nothing better than to be left in peace.
Seldom do they meddle with local concerns--far from it! They live in
sacerdotal isolation, austerely aloof from the populace, like a colony
of monks. The institution is to blame. It is their duty, among other
things, to take down any charge which anybody may care to prefer against
his neighbour. That done, the machinery of the law is automatically set
in motion. Five minutes' talk among the village elders would have
settled many affairs which now degenerate into legal squabbles of twice
as many years; chronic family feuds are fostered; a man who, on
reflection, would find it more profitable to come to terms with his
opponent over a glass of wine, or even to square the old syndic with a
couple of hundred francs, sees himself obliged to try the same tactics
on a judge of the high court--which calls for a different technique.

Altogether, the country is flagrantly over-policed. [28] It gives one a
queer sense of public security to see, at Rome for instance, every third
man you meet--an official, of course, of some kind--with a revolver
strapped to his belt, as if we were still trembling on the verge of
savagery in some cowboy settlement out West. Greek towns of about ten
thousand inhabitants, like Argos or Megara, have about ten municipal
guardians each, and peace reigns within their walls. How can ten men
perform duties which, in Italy, would require ten times as many? Is it a
question of climate, or national character? A question, perhaps, of
common sense--of realising that local institutions often work with less
friction and less outlay than that system of governmental centralisation
of which the carbineers are an example.

Meanwhile we are still at Alatri which, I am glad to discover, possesses
five gateways--five or even more. It is something of a relief to be away
from that Roman tradition of four. Military reasons originally, fixing
themselves at last into a kind of sacred tradition.... So it is, with
unimaginative races. Their pious sentimentalism crystallises into
inanimate objects. The English dump down Gothic piles on India's coral
strand, and the chimes of Big Ben, floating above that crowd of
many-hued Orientals, give to the white man a sense of homeliness and
racial solidarity. The French, more fluid and sensitive to the
incongruous, have introduced local colour into some of their Colonial
buildings, not without success. As to this particular Roman tradition,
it pursues one with meaningless iteration from the burning sands of
Africa to Ultima Thule. Always those four gateways!

For a short after-breakfast ramble nothing is comparable to that green
space on the summit of the citadel. Hither I wend my way every morning,
to take my fill of the panorama and meditate upon the vanity of human
wishes. The less you have seen of localities like Tiryns the more you
will be amazed at this impressive and mysterious fastness. That portal,
those blocks--what Titans fitted them into their places? Well, we have
now learnt a little something about those Titans and their methods. From
this point you can see the old Roman road that led into Alatri; it
climbs up the hill in straightforward fashion, intersecting the broad
modern "Via Romana"--a goat-track, nowadays....

These Alatri remains are wonderful--more so than many of the sites which
old Ramage so diligently explored. Why did he fail to "satisfy his
curiosity" in regard to them? He utters not a word about Alatri. Yet he
stayed at the neighbouring Frosinone and makes some good observations
about the place; he stayed at the neighbouring Ferentino and does the
same. Was he more "pressed for time" than usual? We certainly find him
"hurrying down" past Anagni near-by, of whose imposing citadel he again
says nothing whatever....

I am now, at the end of several months, beginning to know Ramage fairly
well. I hope to know him still better ere we part company, if ever we
do. It takes time, this interpretation, this process of grafting one
mind upon another. For he does not supply mere information. A fig for
information. That would be easy to digest. He supplies character, which
is tougher fare. His book, unassuming as it is, comes up to my test of
what such literature should be. It reveals a personality. It contains a
philosophy of life.

And what is the dominating trait of this old Scotsman? The historical
sense. Ancient inscriptions interested him more than anything else. He
copied many of them during his trip; fifty, I should think; and it is no
small labour, as any one who has tried it can testify, to decipher these
half-obliterated records often placed in the most inconvenient
situations (he seems to have taken no squeezes). To have busied himself
thus was to his credit in an age whose chief concern, as regards
antiquity, consisted in plundering works of art for ornamental purposes.
Ramage did not collect bric-a-brac like other travellers; he collected
knowledge of humanity and its institutions, such knowledge as
inscriptions reveal. It is good to hear him discoursing upon these
documents in stone, these genealogies of the past, with a pleasingly
sentimental erudition. He likes them not in any dry-as-dust fashion, but
for the light they throw upon the living world of his day. Speaking of
one of them he says: "It is when we come across names connected with men
who have acted an illustrious part in the world's history, that the
fatigues of such a journey as I have undertaken are felt to be
completely repaid." That is the humanist's spirit.

His equipment in the interpretation of these stones and of all else he
picked up in the way of lore and legend was of the proper kind.
Boundless curiosity, first of all. And then, an adequate apparatus of
learning. He knew his classics--knew them so well that he could always
put his finger on those particular passages of theirs which bore upon a
point of interest. We may doubtless be able to supply some apt quotation
from Virgil or Martial. It is quite a different thing remembering, and
collating, references in. Aelian or Pliny or Aristotle or Ptolemy. And
wide awake, withal; not easily imposed upon. He is not of the kind to
swallow the tales of the then fashionable cicerone's. He has critical
dissertations on sites like Cannae and the Bandusian Fountain and
Caudine Forks; and when, at Nola, they opened in his presence a
sepulchre containing some of those painted Greek vases for which the
place is famous, he promptly suspects it to be a "sepulchre prepared for
strangers," and instead of buying the vases allows them to remain where
they are "for more simple or less suspicious travellers." On the way to
Cape Leuca he passes certain mounds whose origin he believes to be
artificial and the work of a prehistoric race. I fancy his conjecture
has proved correct. On page 258, speaking of an Oscan inscription, he
mentions Mommsen, which shows that he kept himself up to date in such
researches....

Of course it would be impossible to feel any real fondness for Ramage
before one has discovered his failings and his limitations. Well, he
seems to have taken Pratilli seriously. I like this. A young fellow who,
in 1828, could have guessed Pratilli to have been the arch-forger he
was--such a young fellow would be a freak of learning. He says little of
the great writers of his age; that, too, is a weakness of youth whose
imagination lingers willingly in the past or future, but not in the
present. The Hohenstauffen period does not attract him. He rides close
to the magnificent Castel del Monte but fails to visit the site; he
inspects the castle of Lucera and says never a word about Frederick II
or his Saracens. At Lecce, renowned for its baroque buildings, he finds
"nothing to interest a stranger, except, perhaps, the church of Santa
Croce, which is not a bad specimen of architectural design." True, the
beauty of baroque had not been discovered in his day.

What pleases me less is that there occurs hardly any mention of wild
animals in these pages, and that he seems to enjoy natural scenery in
proportion as it reminds him of some passage in one of those poets whom
he is so fond of quoting. This love of poetic extracts and citations is
a mark of his period. It must have got the upper hand of him in course
of time, for we find, from the title-page of these "Nooks and Byways,"
that he was the author of "Beautiful Thoughts from Greek authors;
Beautiful Thoughts from French and Italian authors, etc."; [29] indeed,
the publication of this particular book, as late as 1868, seems to have
been an afterthought. How greatly one would prefer a few more "Nooks and
By-ways" to all these Beautiful Thoughts! He must have been at home
again, in some bleak Caledonian retreat, when the poetic flowers were
gathered. If only he had lingered longer among the classic remains of
the south, instead of rushing through them like an express train. That
mania of "pressing forward"; that fatal gift of hustle....

His body flits hither and thither, but his mind remains observant,
assimilative. It is only on reading this book carefully that one
realises how full of information it is. Ay, he notices things, does
Ramage--non-antiquarian things as well. He always has time to look
around him. It is his charm. An intelligent interest in the facts of
daily life should be one of the equipments of the touring scholar,
seeing that the present affords a key to the past. Ramage has that gift,
and his zest never degenerates into the fussiness of many modern
travellers. He can talk of sausages and silkworms, and forestry and
agriculture and sheep-grazing, and how they catch porcupines and cure
warts and manufacture manna; he knows about the evil eye and witches and
the fata morgana and the tarantula spider, about figs in ancient and
modern times and the fig-pecker bird--that bird you eat bones and all,
the focetola or beccafico (garden warbler). In fact, he has multifarious
interests and seems to have known several languages besides the
classics. He can hit off a thing neatly, as, when contrasting our
sepulchral epitaphs with those of olden days, he says that the key-note
of ours is Hope, and of theirs, Peace; or "wherever we find a river in
this country (Calabria) we are sure to discover that it is a source of
danger and not of profit." He knew these southern torrents and
river-beds! He garners information about the Jewish and Albanian
colonies of South Italy; he studies Romaic "under one of the few Greeks
who survived the fatal siege of Missolonghi" and collects words of Greek
speech still surviving at Bova and Maratea (Maratea, by the way, has a
Phoenician smack; the Greeks must have arrived later on the scene, as
they did at Marathon itself).

A shrewd book, indeed. Like many of his countrymen, he was specially
bent on economic and social questions; he is driven to the prophetic
conclusion, in 1828, that "the government rests on a very insecure
basis, and the great mass of the intelligence of the country would
gladly welcome a change." Religion and schooling are subjects near his
heart and, in order to obtain a first-hand knowledge of these things in
Italy, he enters upon a friendship, a kind of intellectual flirtation,
with the Jesuits. That is as it should be. Extremes can always respect
one another. The Jesuits, I doubt not, learnt as much from Ramage as he
from them....

I wish I had encountered this book earlier. It would have been useful to
me when writing my own pages on the country it describes. I am always
finding myself in accord with the author's opinions, even in trivial
matters such as the hopeless inadequacy of an Italian breakfast. He was
personally acquainted with several men whose names I have
mentioned--Capialbi, Zicari, Masci; he saw the Purple Codex at Rossano;
in fact, there are numberless points on which I could have quoted him
with profit. And even at an earlier time; for I once claimed to have
discovered the ruins of a Roman palace on the larger of the Siren islets
(the Galli, opposite Positano)--now I find him forestalling me by nearly
a century. It is often thus, with archaeological discoveries.

He saw, near Cotrone, that island of the enchantress Calypso which has
disappeared since his day, and would have sailed there but for the fact
that no boat was procurable. I forget whether Swinburne, who landed
here, found any prehistoric remains on the spot; I should doubt it. On
another Mediterranean island, that of Ponza, I myself detected the
relics of what would formerly have been described as the residence of
that second Homeric witch, Circe. [30]

The mention of discoveries reminds me that I have already, of course,
discovered my ideal family at Alatri. Two ideal families....

One of them dwells in what ought to be called the "Conca d'Oro," that
luxuriant tract of land beyond the monastery where the waters flow--that
verdant dale which supplies Alatri, perched on its stony hill, with
fruit and vegetables of every kind. The man is a market-gardener with
wife and children, a humble serf, Eumaeus-like, steeped in the rich
philosophy of earth and cloud and sunshine. I bring him a cigar in the
cool of the evening and we smoke on the threshold of his two-roomed
abode, or wander about those tiny patches of culture, geometrically
disposed, where he guides the water with cunning hand athwart the roots
of cabbages and salads. He is not prone to talk of his misfortunes;
intuitive civility has taught him to avoid troubling a stranger with
personal concerns.

The mother is more communicative; she suffers more acutely. They are
hopelessly poor, she tells me, and in debt; unlucky, moreover, in their
offspring. Two boys had already died. There are only two left.

"And this one here is in a bad way. He has grown too ill to work. He can
only mope about the place. Nothing stays in his stomach--nothing; not
milk, not an egg. Everything is rejected. The Alatri doctor treated him
for stomach trouble; so did he of Frosinone. It has done no good. Now
there is no more money for doctors. It is hard to see your children
dying before your eyes. Look at him! Just like those two others."

I looked at him.

"You sent him into the plains last summer?" I ventured.

"To Cisterna. One must make a little money, or starve."

"And you expect to keep your children alive if you send them to
Cisterna?"

I was astonished that the local medicine man had not diagnosed malaria.
I undertook that if she would put him into the train when next I went to
Rome, I would have him overhauled by a competent physician and packed
home again with written instructions. (I kept my word, and the good
doctor Salatino of the Via Torino--a Calabrian who knows something about
malaria--wrote out a treatment for this neglected case, no part of
which, I fear, has been observed. Such is the fatalism of the
country-folk that if drugs and injections do not work like magic they
are quietly discarded. This youth may well have gone the way of "those
other two"--who, by the by, were also sent into the Pontine
Marshes--since you cannot reject your food for ever, and grow more
anaemic every day, without producing some such result.)

Meanwhile my friendly offer caused so great a joy in the mother's heart
that I became quite embarrassed. She likened me, among other things, to
her favourite Saint.

All comparisons being odious, I turned the conversation by asking:

"And that last one?"

"Here," she said, pushing open the door of the inner room.

He lay on the couch fast asleep, in a glorious tangle of limbs, the
picture of radiant boyhood.

"This one, I think, has never been to Cisterna."

"No. He goes into the mountains with the woodcutters every morning an
hour before sunrise. It is up beyond Collepardo--seven hours' labour,
and seven hours' march there and back. The rest of the time he sleeps
like a log...."

Children from these hill-places often accompany their parents into the
plains to work; more commonly they go in droves of any number under the
charge of some local man. They are part of that immense army of
hirelings which descends annually, from the uplands of Tuscany to the
very toe of Italy, into these low-lying regions, hardly an inch of which
is fever-free. I do not know even approximately the numbers of these
migratory swarms of all ages and both sexes; let us say, to be on the
safe side, a quarter of a million. They herd down there, in the broiling
heat of summer and autumn, under conditions which are not all that could
be desired. [31] Were they housed in marble palaces and served on
platters of gold, the risk would not be diminished by a hair. How many
return infected? I have no idea. It cannot be less than sixty per cent.
How many of these perish? Perhaps five per cent. A few thousand annual
deaths are not worth talking about. What concerns the country--and what
the country, indeed, has taken seriously in hand--is this impoverishment
of its best blood; this devitalising action of malaria upon unnumbered
multitudes of healthy men, women, and children who do not altogether
succumb to its attacks.

I sometimes recognise them on the platform of Rome station--family
parties whom I have met in their country villages, now bound for
Maccarese or one of those infernal holes in the Campagna, there to earn
a little extra money with hay, or maize, or wheat, or tomatoes, or
whatever the particular crop may be. You chat with the parents; the
youngsters run up to you, all gleeful with the change of scene and the
joy of travelling by railway. I know what they will look like, when they
return to their mountains later on....

And so, discoursing of this and that, one rambles oneself into a
book....

Into half a book; for here--at Alatri, and now--midsummer, I mean to
terminate these non-serious memories and leave unrecorded the no less
insignificant events which followed up to the mornings in October, those
mornings when jackdaws came cawing past my window from the thickly
couched mists of the Borghese Gardens, and the matutinal tub began to
feel more chilly than was altogether pleasant.

Half a book: I perceive it clearly. These pages might be rounded by
another hundred or two. The design is too large for one volume; it
reminds me of those tweed suits we used to buy long ago whose pattern
was so "loud" that it "took two men to show it off." Which proves how a
few months' self-beguilement by the wayside of a beaten track can become
the subject of disquisitions without end. Maybe the very aimlessness of
such loiterings conduces to a like method of narrative. Maybe the tone
of the time fosters a reminiscential and intimately personal mood, by
driving a man for refuge into the only place where peace can still be
found--into himself. What is the use of appealing in objective fashion
to the intelligence of a world gone crazy? Say your say. Go your way.
Let them rave! We shall all be pro-German again to-morrow. [32]

Half a book: it strikes me, on reflection, as curiously appropriate. To
produce something incomplete and imperfect, a torso of a kind--is it not
symbolical of the moment? Is not this an age of torso's? We are
manufacturing them every hour by the score. How many good fellows are
now crawling about mutilated, converted into torso's? There is room for
a book on the same lines....

I glance through what has been written and detect therein an occasional
note of exacerbation and disharmony which amuses me, knowing, as I do,
its transitory nature. Dirty work, touching dirt. One cannot read for
three consecutive years of nothing but poison-gas and blood and
explosives without engendering a corresponding mood--a mood which
expresses itself in every one according to whether he thinks
individually or nationally; whether he cultivates an impartial
conscience or surrenders to that of the crowd. For the man and his race
are everlastingly tugging in different directions, and unreasoning
subservience to race-ideals has clouded many a bright intellect. How
many things a race can do which its component members, taken separately,
would blush to imitate! Our masses are now fighting for commercial
supremacy. The ideal may well be creditable to a nation. It is hardly
good enough for a gentleman. He reacts; he meditates a Gospel of Revolt
against these vulgarities; he catches himself saying, as he reads the
morning paper full of national-flag fetishism and sanguinary nonsense:
"One Beethoven symphony is a greater victory than the greatest of these,
and reasonable folks may live under any rule save that of a wind-fed
herd."

It avails nothing. The day has dawned, the day of those who pull
downwards--stranglers of individualism. Can a man subscribe to the
aspirations of a mob and yet think well of himself? Can he be black and
white? He can be what he is, what most of us are: neutral tint. Look
around you: a haze of cant and catchwords. Such things are employed on
political platforms and by the Press as a kind of pepsine, to aid our
race-stomach in digesting certain heavy doses of irrationalism. The
individual stomach soon discovers their weakening effect....

Looking back upon these months of uneventful wanderings, I became aware
of a singular phenomenon. I find myself, for some obscure reason, always
returning to the same spot. I was nine times in Rome, twice in Florence
and Viareggio and Olevano and Anticoli and Alatri and Licenza and
Soriano, five times at Valmontone, thrice at Orvinio; and if I did not
go a second time to Scanno and other places, there may be a reason for
it. Why this perpetual revisiting? How many new and interesting sites
might have been explored during that period! Adventures and discoveries
might have fallen to my lot, and been duly noted down. As it is, nothing
happened, and nothing was noted down. I have only a diary of dates to go
upon, out of which, with the help of memory and imagination, have been
extracted these pages. For generally, delving down into memory, a man
can bring up at least one clear-cut fragment, something still fervid and
flashing, a remembered voice or glimpse of landscape which helps to
unveil the main features of a scenario already relegated to the
lumber-room. And this detail will unravel the next; the scattered
elements jostle each other into place, as in the final disentangling of
some complicated fugue.

Such things will do for a skeleton. Imagination will kindly provide
flesh and blood, life, movement. Imagination--why not? One suppresses
much; why not add a little? Truth blends well with untruth, and phantasy
has been so sternly banned of late from travellers' tales that I am
growing tender-hearted towards the poor old dame; quite chivalrous, in
fact--especially on those rather frequent occasions when I find myself
unable to dispense with her services.

Yes; truth blends well with untruth. It is one of the maladies of our
age, a sign of sheer nervousness, to profess a frenzied allegiance to
truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where
graver issues are at stake. We cannot lay claim to a truthful state of
mind. In this respect the eighteenth century, for all its foppery, was
ahead of ours. What is the basic note of Horace Walpole's iridescent
worldliness--what about veracity? How one yearns, nowadays, for that
spacious and playful outlook of his; or, better still, for some
altogether Golden Age where everybody is corrupt and delightful and has
nothing whatever to do, and does it well....

My second ideal family at Alatri lives along a side path which diverges
off the main road to Ferentino. They are peasant proprietors, more
wealthy and civilised than those others, but lacking their terrestrial
pathos. They live among their own vines and fruit-trees on the hillside.
The female parent, a massive matron, would certainly never send those
winsome children into the Pontine Marshes, not for a single day, not for
their weight in gold. The father is quite an uncommon creature. I look
at him and ask myself; where have I seen that face before, so classic
and sinewy and versatile? I have seen it on Greek vases, and among the
sailors of the Cyclades and on the Bosphorus. It is a non-Latin face,
with sparkling eyes, brown hair, rounded forehead and crisply curling
beard; a legendary face. How came Odysseus to Alatri?

Not far from this homestead where I have spent sundry pleasant hours
there is a fountain gushing out of a hollow. In olden days it would have
been hung with votive offerings to the nymphs, and rightly. One
appreciates this nature-cult in a dry land. I have worshipped at many
such shrines where the water bounds forth, a living joy, out of the
rocky cleft--unlike those sluggish springs of the North that ooze
regretfully upwards, as though ready to slink home again unless they
were kicked from behind, and then trickle along, with barely perceptible
movement, amid weeds and slime.

Now this particular fountain (I think it is called acqua santa), while
nowise remarkable as regards natural beauty, is renowned for curing
every disease. It is not an ordinary rill; it has medicinal properties.
Hither those two little demons, the younger children, conducted me all
unsuspecting two days ago, desirous that I should taste the far-famed
spring.

"Try it," they said.

I refused at first, since water of every kind has a knack of disagreeing
with my weak digestion. As for them, they gulped down tumblers of it,
being manifestly inured to what I afterwards discovered to be its
catastrophic effects.

"Look at us drinking it," they went on. "Ah, how good! Delicious! It is
like Fiuggi, only better."

"Am I an invalid, to drink Fiuggi water?"

"It is not quite the same as Fiuggi. (True. I was soon wishing it had
been.) How many men would pay dearly for your privilege! Never let it be
said that you went away thirsting from this blessed spot."

"I am not thirsty just now. Not at all thirsty, thank you."

"We have seen you drink without being thirsty. Just one glass," they
pleaded. "It will make you live a hundred years."

"No. Let us talk about something else."

"No? Then what shall we tell our mother? That we brought you here, and
that you were afraid of a little mouthful of acqua santa? We thought you
had more courage. We thought you could strangle a lion."

"Something will happen," I said, as I drained that glass.

Nothing happened for a few hours.

Two days' rest is working wonders....

I profit by the occasion of this slight indisposition to glance
backwards--and forwards.

I am here, at Alatri, on the 22 June: so much is beyond contestation.

A later page of that old diary of dates. August 31: Palombara. Well I
remember the hot walk to Palombara!

August 3: Mons Lucretilis, that classical mountain from whose summit I
gazed at the distant Velino which overtops like a crystal of amethyst
all the other peaks. This was during one of my two visits to Licenza.
Pleasant days at Licenza, duly noting in the house of Horace what I have
noted with Shelley and other bards, namely, that these fellows who sing
so blithely of the simple life yet contrive to possess extremely
commodious residences; pleasant days among those wooded glens, walking
almost every morning in the footsteps of old Ramage up the valley in
whose streamlet the willow-roots sway like branches of coral--aloft
under the wild walnuts to that bubbling fountain where I used to meet my
two friends, Arcadian goat-herds, aboriginal fauns of the thickets, who
told me, amid ribald laughter, a few personal experiences which nothing
would induce me to set down here.

July 26: La Rocca. What happened at La Rocca?

October 2: Florence. What happened at Florence? A good deal, during
those noteworthy twelve hours!

Some memories have grown strangely nebulous; impossible to reconstruct,
for example, what went on during the days of drowsy discomfort at
Montecelio. A lethargy seems to have fallen on me; I lived in a dream
out of which there emerges nothing save the figure of the local
tobacconist, a ruddy type with the face of a Roman farmer, who took me
to booze with him, in broad patriarchal style, every night at a
different friend's house. Those nights at Montecelio! The mosquitoes!
The heat! Could this be the place which was famous in Pliny's day for
its grove of beeches? How I used to envy the old Montecelians their
climate!

July 23: Saracinesca. What happened? I recollect the view over the
sweltering Campagna from the dizzy castle-ruin, in whose garden I see
myself nibbling a black cherry, the very last of the season, plucked
from a tree which grows beside the wall whereon I sat. That suffices: it
gives a key to the situation. I can now conjure up the gaunt and sombre
houses of this thick-clustering stronghold; the Rembrandtesque shadows,
the streets devoid of men, the picture of some martial hero in a
cavern-like recess where I sought shelter from the heat, a black
crucifix planted in the soil below the entrance of the village--my
picture of Saracinesca is complete, in outline.

July 31: Subiaco. Precisely! A week later, then, I walk thirty-two
chilometres along the shadeless high road, an insane thing to do, to
Subiaco and back. There, in the restaurant Aniene, when all the
luncheon-guests have departed for their noonday nap, the cook of the
establishment, one of those glorious old Roman he-cooks, comes up to my
table. Did I like the boiled trout?

Rather flabby, I reply. A little tasteless. Let him try, next time, some
white vinegar in the water and a bay-leaf or two.

He pricks up his ears: we are gens du metier. I invite him to sit down
and inquire: how about a bottle of Cesanese, now that we are alone? An
excellent idea! And he, in his turn, will permit himself to offer me
certain strawberries from his own private store.

"Strawberries?" I ask. "Who ever heard of strawberries in Central Italy
on the 31 July? Why, I devoured the last cherry a week ago, and it was
only alive because it grew above the clouds."

These, he explains mysteriously, are special strawberries, brought down
from near the snow-line by a special goat-boy. They are not for the
guests, but "only for myself." Strawberries are always worth paying for;
they are mildly purging, they go well with the wine. And what a
wonderful scent they have! "You remind me of a certain Lucullo," I said,
"who was also nice about strawberries. In fact, he made a fine art of
eating and drinking."

"Your Lucullo, we may take it, was a Roman?"

"Romano di Roma."

Thus conversing with this rare old ruffian, I forget my intention of
leaving a card on Saint Scolastica. She has waited for me so long. She
can wait a little longer....

August 9: Villa Lante.

August 12: Ferento. What happened at Ferento?

Now what happened at Ferento? Let me try to reconstruct that morning's
visit.

I have clear memories of the walk from Viterbo--it would be eighteen
chilometres there and back, they told me. I had slept well in my quaint
little room with the water rushing under the window, and breakfasted in
receptive and responsive mood. I recall that trudge along the highway
and how I stepped across patches of sunlight from the shade of one
regularly planted tree into that of another. The twelfth of August....
It set me thinking of heathery moorlands and grouse, and of those
legions of flies that settle on one's nose just as one pulls the
trigger. It all seemed dim and distant here, on this parching road,
among southern fields. I was beginning to be lost in a muse as to what
these boreal flies might do with themselves during the long winter
months while all the old women of the place are knitting Shetland
underwear when, suddenly, a little tune came into my ears--a wistful
intermezzo of Brahms. It seemed to spring out of the hot earth. Such a
natural song, elvishly coaxing! Would I ever play it again? Neither
that, nor any other.

It turned my thoughts, as I went along, to Brahms and led me to
understand why no man, who cares only for his fellow-creatures, will
ever relish that music. It is an alien tongue, full of deeps and
rippling shallows uncomprehended of those who know nothing of lonely
places; full of thrills and silences such as are not encountered among
the habitations of men. It echoes the multitudinous voice of nature, and
distils the smiles and tears of things non-human. This man listened, all
alone; he overheard things to which other ears are deaf--things terrible
and sweet; the sigh of some wet Naiad by a reedy lake, the pleadings and
furies of the genii--of those that whisper in woodlands and caverns by
the sea, and ride wailing on thunder-laden clouds, and rock with ripe
laughter in sunny wildernesses. Brahms is the test. Whoso dreads
solitude will likewise dread his elemental humour.

It kept me company, this melodious and endearing fairy, till where a
path, diverging to the right, led up to the ruins already visible. There
the ethereal comrade took flight, scared, maybe, because my senses took
on a grossly mundane complexion--it is a way they have, thank
God--became absorbed, that is, in the contemplation of certain
blackberries wherewith the hedge was loaded. I thought: the tons of
blackberries that fall to earth in Italy, unheeded! And not even a
Scotsman knows what blackberries are, until he has tasted these. I am no
gourmet of such wild things; I rather agree with Goethe when he says:
"How berries taste, you must ask children." But I can sympathise with
the predilections of others, having certain predilections of my own.

Once, at a miserable place in North Ireland, region of bad whisky and
porter, they brought me at dinner some wine of which they knew
nothing--they had got it from a shipwreck or some local sale. I am
rather fond of hock. And this particular bottle bore on its label the
magic imprint of a falcon sitting on a hilltop. Connoisseurs will know
that falcon. They will understand how it came about that I remained in
the inn till the last bottle of nectar was cracked. What a shame to
leave a drop for anybody else! Once again, on a bicycle trip from Paris
to the Mediterranean, I came upon a broad, smiling meadow somewhere in
the Auvergne, thickly besprinkled with mushrooms. There was a village
hard by. In that village I remained till the meadow was close cropped.
Half a ton of mushrooms--gone. Some people are rather fond of mushrooms.
And that is the right spirit: to leave nothing but a tabula rasa for
those that come after. It hurt me to think that anybody else should have
a single one of those particular mushrooms. Let them find new ones, in
another field; not in mine.

Now what would your amateur of blackberries do in Italy? From the fate
which nearly overtook me he might save himself by specialising; by
dividing the many local varieties into two main classes and devoting his
whole attention to one or the other; to the kind such as I found on
Elba--small and round and fragrant, of ruddy hue, and palpitating with
warm sunbeams; or to that other kind, those that grow in clearings of
the Apennines where the boughs droop to earth with the weight of their
portentous clusters--swarthy as night, huge in size, oval, and fraught
with chilly mountain dews.

No true enthusiast, I feel sure, would ever be satisfied with such an
unfair division of labour--so one-sided an arrangement. He would curse
his folly for having specialised. While engaged upon one variety, he
would always be hankering after that other kind and thinking how much
better they were. What shall he do, then? Well, he might devote one year
to one species, the next to another, and so on. Or else--seeing that
every zone of altitude bears brambles at its season and that the
interval between the maturing of the extreme varieties is at least four
months--he might pilgrimage athwart the country in a vertical sense,
devouring blackberries of different flavour as he went along; he might
work his way upwards, boring a tunnel through the landscape as a beetle
drills an oak, and leaving a track of devastation in his rear--browsing
aloft from the sea-board, where brambles are black in June, through
tangled macchia and vine-clad slopes into the cooler acclivities of rock
and jungle--grazing ever upward to where, at close of September and in
the shadow of some lonely peak on which the white mantle of winter has
already fallen, he finds a few more berries struggling for warmth and
sunshine, and then, still higher up, just a few more--the last, the very
last, of their race--dwarfs of the mountains, earthward-creeping, and
frozen pink ere yet they have had time to ripen. Here, crammed to the
brim, he may retire to hibernate, curled up like a full-gorged bear and
ready to roll downhill with the melting snows and arrive at the
sea-coast in time to begin again. What a jolly life! How much better
than being Postmaster-General or Inspector of Nuisances! But such
enthusiasts are nowhere to be found. I wish they were; the world would
be a merrier place....

Here is the ruined town of Ferento, all alone on the arid brow of the
hill. Nothing human in sight. A charming spot it must have been in olden
times, when the country was more timbered; now all is bare--brown earth,
brown stones. Dutifully I inspect the ruins and, applying the method of
Zadig or something of that kind, conclude that Ferento, this particular
Ferento, was relatively unimportant and relatively modern, although so
fine a site may well have commended itself from early days as a
settlement. I pick up, namely, a piece of verde antico, a green marble
which came into vogue at a later period than many other coloured ones.
Ergo, Ferento was relatively modern as antiquities go; else this marble
would not occur there. I seek for coloured ones and find not the
smallest fragment; nothing but white. Ergo, the place was relatively
insignificant; else the reds and yellows would also be discoverable. I
observe incidentally--quite incidentally!--that the architecture
corroborates my theory; so do the guide-books, no doubt, if there are
any. Now I know, furthermore, the origin of that small slab of verde
antico which had puzzled me, mixed up, as it was, among the mosaics of
quite modern marbles in that church whither I had been conducted by a
local antiquarian to admire a certain fresco recently laid bare, and
some rather crude daubs by Romanelli.

Out again, into the path that overlooks the steep ravine. Here I find,
resting in the shadow of the wall, an aged shepherd and his flock and a
shaggy, murderous-looking dog of the Campagna breed that shows his teeth
and growls incessantly, glaring at me as if I were a wolf. "Barone" is
the brute's name. I had intended to clamber down and see whether the
rock-surface bears any traces of human workmanship; the rock-surface, I
now decide, may take care of itself. It has waited for me so long. It
can wait a little longer.

"Does that beast of yours eat Christians?"

"He? He is a perfect capo di c----. That is his trick, to prevent people
from kicking him. They think he can bite."

I produce half a cigar which he crushes up into his black clay pipe.

"Yours is not a bad life."

"One lives. But I had better times in Zurich."

He had stayed there awhile, working in some factory. He praised its
food, its beer, its conveniences.

Zurich: incongruous image! Straightway I was transported from this
harmonious desolation of Ferento; I lost sight of yonder clump of
withering thistles--thistles of recent growth; you could sit, you could
stand, in their shade--and found myself glancing over a leaden lake and
wandering about streets full of ill-dressed and ungracious folk;
escaping thence further afield, into featureless hills encrusted with
smug, tawdry villas and drinking-booths smothered under noisome
horse-chestnuts and Virginia creepers. How came they to hit upon the
ugliest tree, and the ugliest creeper, on earth? Infallible instinct!
Zurich: who shall sum up thy merciless vulgarity?

So this old man had been there.

And I remembered an expression in a book recently written by a friend of
mine who, oddly enough, had encountered some of these very Italians in
Zurich. He talks of its "horrible dead ordinariness"--some such phrase.
[33] It is apt. Zurich: fearsome town! Its ugliness is of the active
kind; it grips you by the throat and sits on your chest like a
nightmare.

I looked at the old fellow. He was sound; he had escaped the contagion.
Those others, those many hundred thousand others in Switzerland and
America--they can nevermore shake off the horrible dead ordinariness of
that life among machines. Future generations will hardly recognise the
Italian race from our descriptions. A new type is being formed, cold and
loveless, with all the divinity drained out of them.

Having a long walk before me and being due home for luncheon, I rose to
depart, and in so doing bestowed a vigorous kick upon Barone, in order
to test the truth of his master's theory. It worked. The glowering and
snarling ceased. He was a good dog--almost human. I think, with a few
more kicks, he might have grown quite friendly.

Along that hot road the spectre of Zurich pursued me, in all its
starkness. A land without atmosphere, and deficient in every element of
the picturesque, whether of man or nature. Four harsh, dominant tones,
which never overlap or intermingle: blue sky, white snow, black
fir-woods, green fields, and, if you insist upon having a fifth, then
take--yes, take and keep--that theatrical pink Alpenglühen which is
turned on at fixed hours for the delectation of gaping tourists, like a
tap of strontium light or the display of electric fluid at Schaffhausen
Falls.

"Did you observe the illumination of the Falls, sir, last night?"

"How can one avoid seeing the beastly thing?"

"Ah! Then we must add two francs to the bill."

Many are the schools of art that have grown up in England and elsewhere
and flourished side by side, vying with one another to express the
protean graces of man, of architecture and domestic interior, of earth
and sky and sea. Where is the Swiss school? Where, in any public
gallery, will you find a masterpiece which triumphantly vindicates the
charm of Swiss scenery? You will, find it vindicated only on condensed
milk tins. These folks can write. My taste in lyrics may be peculiar,
but I used to love my Leuthold--I wish I had him here at this moment;
the bold strokes of Keller, the miniature work, the cameo-like touches,
of C. F. Meyer--they can write! They would doubtless paint, were there
anything to paint. Holbein: did the landscape of Switzerland seduce him?
And Boecklin? He fled out of its welter of raw materialism. Even his
Swiss landscapes are mediterraneanized. Boecklin----

And here, as the name formulated itself, that little sprite of Brahms,
that intermezzo, once more leapt to my side out of the parched fields. I
imagine it came less for my sake than for the companionship of Boecklin.
They were comrades in the spirit; they understood. What one had heard,
the other beheld--shapes of mystery, that peer out of forest gloom and
the blue hush of midday and out of glassy waters--shapes that shudder
and laugh. No doubt you may detect a difference between Boecklin's
creations and those of classic days; it is as if the light of his
dreamings had filtered through some medium, some stained-glass window in
a Gothic church which distorted their outlines and rendered them
somewhat more grotesque. It is the hand of time. The world has aged. Yet
the shapes are young; they do but change their clothes and follow the
fashion in externals. They laugh as of old. How they laugh! No mortal
can laugh so heartily. No mortal has such good cause. Theirs is not the
serene mirth of Olympian spheres; it sounds demoniac, from the midway
region. What are they laughing at, these cheerful monsters? At the
greatest jest in the universe. At us....

That lake of Conterano--the accent is on the ante-penultima--it looked
appetising on the map, all alone out there. It attracted me strongly. I
pictured a placid expanse, an eye of blue, sleepily embowered among
wooded glens and throwing upward the gleam of its calm waters. Lakes are
so rare in Italy. During the whole of this summer I saw only one other,
fringed with the common English reed--two, rather, lying side by side,
one turbid and the other clear, and filling up two of those curious
circular depressions in the limestone. I rode past them on the watershed
behind Cineto Romano. These were sweet water. Of sulphur lakelets I also
saw two.

Sitting on a stone into which the coldness of midnight had entered
(Alatri lies at a good elevation) I awaited my companion in the dusk of
dawn. Soon enough, I knew, we should both be roasted. This half-hour's
shivering before sunrise in the square of Alatri, and listening to the
plash of the fountain, is one of those memories of the town which are
graven most clearly in my mind. I could point out, to-day, the very spot
whereon I sat.

We wandered along the Ferentino road to begin with, profiting by some
short cuts through chestnut woods; turned to the right, ever ascending,
behind that strange village of Fumone, aloft on its symmetrical hill;
thence by a mule-track onward. Many were the halts by the way. A decayed
roadside chapel with faded frescoes--a shepherd who played us some
melodies on his pipe--those wondrous red lilies, now in their prime,
glowing like lamps among the dark green undergrowth--the gateway of a
farmhouse being repaired--a reservoir of water full of newts--a
fascinating old woman who told us something about something--the distant
view upon the singular peak of Mount Cacume, they all gave us occasion
for lingering. Why not loaf and loiter in June? The days are so endless!

At last, through a gap in the landscape, we saw the lake at our feet,
simmering in the noonday beams--an everyday sheet of water, brown in
colour, with muddy banks and seemingly not a scrap of shade within
miles; one of those lakes which, by their periodical rising and sinking,
give so much trouble that there is talk, equally periodical, of draining
them off altogether. This one, they say, shifts continually and
sometimes reaches so low a level that rich crops are planted in its oozy
bed.

Here are countless frogs, and fish--tench; also a boat that belongs to
the man who rents the fishing. A sad accident happened lately with his
boat. A party of youngsters came for an outing and two boys jumped into
the tub, rowed out, and capsized it with their pranks. They were both
drowned--a painful and piteous death--a death which I have tried, by
accident, and can nowise recommend. They fished them out later from
their slimy couch, and found that they had clasped one another so
tightly in their mortal agony that it was deemed impious ever to
unloosen that embrace. So they were laid to rest, locked in each other's
arms.

While my companion told me these things we had plodded further and
further along this flat and inhospitable shore, and grown more and more
taciturn. We were hungry and thirsty and hot, for one feels the
onslaught of these first heats more acutely than the parching drought of
August. Things looked bad. The luncheon hour was long past, and our
spirits began to droop. All my mellowness took flight; I grew snappy and
monosyllabic. Was there no shade?

Yonder ... that dusky patch against the mountain? Brushwood of some
kind, without a doubt. The place seemed to be unattainable, and yet,
after an inordinate outlay of energy, we had climbed across those torrid
meadows. It proved to be a hazel copse mysteriously dark within,
voiceless, and cool as a cavern.

Be sure that he who planted these hazels on the bleak hillside was no
common son of earth, but some wise and inspired mortal. My blessings on
his head! May his shadow never grow less! Or, if that wish be already
past fulfilment, may he dwell in Elysium attended by a thousand
ministering angels, every one of them selected by himself; may he
rejoice in their caresses for evermore. Naught was amiss. All conspired
to make the occasion memorable. I look back upon our sojourn among those
verdant hazels and see that it was good--one of those moments which are
never granted knowingly by jealous fate. So dense was the leafage in the
greenest heart of the grove that not a shred of sunlight, not a particle
as large as a sixpence, could penetrate to earth. We were drowned in
shade; screened from the flaming world outside; secure--without a care.
We envied neither God nor man.

I thought of certain of my fellow-creatures. I often think of them. What
were they now doing? Taking themselves seriously and rushing about, as
usual, haggard and careworn--like those sagacious ants that scurry
hither and thither, and stare into each other's faces with a kind of
desperate imbecility, when some sportive schoolboy has kicked their
ridiculous nest into the air and upset all their solemn little
calculations.

As for ourselves, we took our ease. We ate and drank, we slumbered
awhile, then joked and frolicked for five hours on end, or possibly six.
[34] I kept no count of what was said nor how the time flew by. I only
know that when at last we emerged from our ambrosial shelter the muscles
of my stomach had grown sore from the strain of laughter, and Arcturus
was twinkling overhead.

THE END


INDEX

Abbadé, author
Abbadia San Salvatore
Abruzzi, limestone deserts
Acqua Acetosa, Rome
Acqua santa, mineral fountain, its appalling effects
Acque Vive, old Scanno
Addison, J.
Afforestation at Scanno
Agave, plant; dislikes change of scene
Alatri; its nameless tavern; citadel; ideal families at
Alban volcanoes
Alpenglühen, an abomination
Amiata, mountain
Anagni
Analphabetics, their charm
Anastasio, F.
Aniene, river
Anthology, Greek
Anticoli
Apennines, their general coloration
Argos
Aristotle
Arno river, its colour-moods
Artena
Athene (Minerva), promontory and temple
Attilio, a sagacious youngster


Bacon, misquoted
Baedeker, on wine of Scanno
Banca d'ltalia, its soi-disant director makes a fool of himself
"Barone," an almost human dog
Bathing in Tiber
Baudelaire, C.
Bears of Pescasseroli, rapid breeders
Beds in England, neolithic features of
Belgrave Square, its legendary partridges
Bellegra, village
Beloch, J.
Bennet, Dr. J. H.
Bentham, J.
Berceau, mountain
Bessel, F. W.
Betifuli, ancient Scanno
Bigio, marble
Birds, their conservative habits
Blackberries in Italy
Blasphemies, as a pick-me-up
Blind, Mathilde
Blue, basic note of Italian landscape
Board of Trade Labour Emergency Bureau, its lightning methods
Boecklin, A.
Borghese Gardens
Bournemouth
Bowles, Dr. R.
Brachycephalism, menace to humanity
Brahms, J., his inspiration
Breil
Brewster, H. B.
Buckle, H. T.
Building materials, of Florence, impart peculiar character to towns
Bunbury, E. H., quoted
Butter, French method of weighing, Italian regulations regarding

Cacume, mountain
Calypso, her island
Cammaiore
Camosciara, mountain
Campagna of Rome
Campanella, headland
Campoli Apennino
Capaccio, G. C.
Cap Martin (Mentone), a vulgarized spot
Capasso, B.
Capranica
Capri
Carbineers, good men and questionable institution
Carrara
Carrion crows, relatively gay fowls
Casamari convent
Casanova, J.
Cascine Gardens
Cats in Rome, their distressful condition
Cement floors, a detestable invention
Cemetery of Mentone of Rome; Scanno; Olevano
Censorship Department, gratifying interview at
Cervesato, A.
Chamois
Chaucer
Children, good company neglected in war-time
China, fatal morality of pre-Tartar period
Ciminian forest
Cineto Romano
Circe, nymph
Cisterna, a death-trap
Civilization, its characteristic
Civitella
Coal-supply, a sore subject in Italy
Coliseum, flora and fauna of
Collepardo
Conscience, national versus individual
Consumption on Riviera; at Olevano
Conterano, lake
Corsanico
Corsi, F.
Crapolla, sea-cove
Crinagoras, poet
Critics, spleenfully criticized
Cro-Magnon racev Cross, futility of bearing a

Darwin
Deakin, botanist
Dennis, G.
Deserters at Valmontone
Deslys, Gaby
Dewlessness, a peculiarity of Italian townsmen
Dialects of Italy
Dictionary of National Biography
Diodorus Siculus
Dohrn, Dr. A.
Donnorso, V.
Doria, A.
Dreams, recurrent; of flying
Drowning accidents
Drunkenness, not everybody's affair

Eagles
Education Office, a "Sleepy Hollow"
Edwards, Tam, naturalist
Elba
Elder tree, a venerable growth
England, to be visited as a tourist
English language, should remain in flux
Englishmen, change in race-characters; contrasted with Italians;
influence of new surroundings on
Enthusiasm, unrewarded
Eratosthenes
Eugénie, Empress
Experience, its uses

Faces, possibilities of improving
Ferentino
Ferento, ruined city
Filangieri, di Candida, R.
Flies, a curse
Florence, its river; Cascine Gardens; pavements; local blasphemies;
revisited
Fontanella, village
Food in war-time
Football worth watching
Fountains in Rome; responsible for shocking behaviour; in Villa Borghese
France, its one irremediable drawback
Frattura, village
Frosinone, "Garibaldi" hotel; visited by Ramage
Fumone
Functionaries, social parasites


Gambling instinct, correlated with religion
Gardeners, professional, imbeciles
Gargiulli, O.
Gautier, T.
Germans, at Mentone; at Levanto; save oaks of Olevano; must follow
footsteps
Ghosts, mankind surrounded by, in; away with them
Giannettasio, N. P.v Girtanner, Dr. A., beaver-specialist
Giulio, a young reprobate
Goethe, quoted
Golden Ages of literature
Gorbio
Grant Duff, M. E.
Greek words, surviving
Grimaldi caves, incident at
Grocery business, appeals to Frenchmen
Gross feeders, beware of
Grotta delle Palumbe
Guardie regie, official loafers
Gunther, Dr. A.

H., Mr., an ardent book-lover
Hares in Italy
Hebrews of military age, their enviable immunity from conscription
Henderson, Dr., an old tippler
Heredity, speculations on
Hermits in Italy
Hippocrates
Hohentwiel, mountain
Homer
Horace
Housemaid, a noteworthy
Hutton, E.

Ierate, locality
Imagination, needful to travel-literature,
Imperialism in Italy
Individual, contrasted with race
Insomnia
Intelligence, its two ingredients
Isola Liri
Italians, evolution of new type
Italy, reasons for visiting; over-policed
Ives, G.

J. O. M., a memorable type
Jefferies, R.
Johnson, S.
Johnston-Lavis, H. J.
Jovana, meadow

Keller, G.
Kew Gardens
King of Italy, protects bears
Kingfisher, a wary old one
Kneeling boy, statue
Knop, Professor

Lachner, V.
Ladbroke Grove, its enlightened children
Landlady, of Mentone; the
London variety; she of Viareggio; of Florence
Lante, Villa
La Croce, mountain
La Rocca, village
Lawrence, D. H.
Laws, raison d'etre of Italian
Leuthold, H.
Levanto, arrival at; situation; company at hotel; the local magistrate;
stroll to Monterosso
Licenza
Ligurians, their bad character
Lizard, making a friend of; a disconsolate one
Love affairs, Italian, how to conduct
Lucian
Lucretilis, mountain
Lyme Regis

Macaroni, war-time substitutes; the right kind
Maccarese, village
Machinery, cult of; depraves Italian character
Madonna della Neve, chapel
Madonna di Tranquillo, wayside shrine
Malaria
Mandela
Marbles
Mathew, Rev.
Maudsley, H.
Maupassant
Mazzella, S.
Megara
Mentone, recent transformation of; landscape; vegetation; produces dull
schoolboys; prehistoric man of
Merle blanc, a meritorious establishment
Metaphysicians, atrophied poets
Meyer, C. F.
Meysenbug, Malwida von
Michael Angelo; gets into trouble
Migration of labourers, annual
Mill, J. S.
Militarism, the modern infáme
Milvain Bridge
Mineralogy
Momio, village
Monogamous habits, bad for songsters
Mons Canutarius
Montalto, cliff
Monte-Carlo, its well-groomed flowers; lamentable episode at Casino
Montecelio
Monterosso
Mortella, cliff
Mortola, village
Mosquitoes in Rome
Moulinet
Mummies, Peruvian
Munitions Office, develops a craving for bankers
Mure of Caldwell, traveller
Muretta, mountain
Museum, Kircher; delle Terme
Music
Mythopoeic faculty, example of

Neighbours, an over-rated class
Nerano
Newspaper reading, to be discouraged
Nice
Nietzsche, his blind spot
Nightingales, too much of a good thing; cease from troubling
Ninetta, an attractive maiden
Nose, degeneration of

Odysseus at Alatri
Office-hunters, should respect their betters
Olevano, its nightingales; oak grove at; first English resident at
Opi, town
Ornithology
Orte, town
Orvinio
Ouida, her writings and character

Paestum, roses of
Pais, Prof. E.
Palombaro
Pantheon
Patriotism, chilled
Pavements, life on
Peira Cava
Perfumes, react on physiognomy
Persico, G. B.
Pescasseroli; its bears
Peutinger Table
Philosophers, contradistinguished from metaphysicians
Piccadilly Goat
Pietrasanta
Pig, in distress
Pines, at Levanto; at Viareggio
Pisa in war-time
Plaster-casts, how to dispose of
Plato
Pliny
Pollius Felix
Pontine Marshes
Ponza island, megalithic ruin on
Portovenere, marble
Potter, Major Frederick, discovers Olevano
Pottery, index of national taste
Powder magazine, explosion of
Preccia, mountain
Prehistoric races, possible reasons for their extinction
Press, the daily, its disastrous functions
"Prison, The," a Socratic dialogue

Race ideals, contrasted with individual
Ramage, Craufurd Tait, a centrifugal Scotsman, his book and umbrella;
mania for hurrying; other travels of; compared with Waterton;
on Italian country life; gets drunk; makes formal profession of
sobriety;
his tolerance; sensitive to female charms; still hustling; his
humanistic outlook; little failings; other publications; zest for
knowledge; at Licenza
Rat-hunts
Ravens, their conjugal fidelity
Reading, to be done with reverence
Recomone, inlet
Red colour, unfashionable in Italy; in favour with other races
Rhetoric, necessary to success in courtship
Rhodian marble
Ripa, a liquid poison
Rivers, Italian
Riviera, French, its inanity; typical visitors to; lack of native genius
Roccaraso
Rojate
Rolfe, Neville
Romanelli, painter
Romans and British, their world dominion; unimaginative people
Rome, changed aspect of railway station; protestant cemetery; explosion
near; its fountains; tramcar nuisance; shadelessness; disadvantages of
site; evening breeze; neglected cats; bad food; its building stone;
unpleasant experience at; dearth of apartments
Rubinstein, A.

Sagittario, stream
Saint Domenico
Saint-Jacques, chemin de
Saint-Louis, bridge
Saint Martin, his cave
Saint Michael, hermitage
Salatino, Dr.
Salis-Marschlins, U. von
San Costanzo, mountain and chapel
San Remo
San Rossore
Sant' Egidio, hermitage
Sant' Elia, farm
Saracinesca, village
Scalambra, mountain
Scanno, cemetery at; memories of; revisited
Schadona pass
Scheffel, V. von
Schopenhauer; anticipates "recognition marks"
Scolastica, Saint
Seaton
Sebastiani, A.
Segni
Self-indulgence, a debased expression
Sergi, Prof. G.
Serpentaro, oak grove
Serpents, with ears; human hatred of
Serrano, village
Serravezza
Shelley, an evangelist; at Viareggio; recommends caverns to his readers,
but lives comfortably himself
Sicilians
Siena, in winter; a Florentine's opinion of
Sirena, survival of name
Siren islets (Galli); ruin on
Sirocco in Rome
Sitting still, the true traveller's gift
Sleep, its sacred nature
Smollett
Snakes
Snow, Dr. H.
Sora
Soracte, mountain
Soriano; its pleasant tavern
Sospel
Spezia
Spy-mania in Italy
Stabiae (Castellamare)
Statius
Strabo
Strega liqueur, horribly adulterated; how to stop the scandal
Subiaco, strawberries at
Sunburn, pretty effects of
Surrentum
Swinburne, H.
Switzerland, its manifold beauties
Symonds, J. A.

Taxidermy, study of
Telephone, an abomination
Termini, village
Terrata, mountain
Theophrastus
Tiber
Tiryns, citadel
Torco, village
Trafalgar Square, its fauna
Trajan's Forum
Tramcars, an abomination
Tree-creeper, bird
Trevi Fountain
Trifles, importance of
Truth-telling, a matter of longitude; not in vogue to-day
Tuscan speech, its peculiar savour

Urquehart, D.

Valiante, Marquis
Valmontone; its upper terrace; capture of a deserter at, Pergola, tavern
Velino, mountain
Velletri
Venice
Ventimiglia, wine of
Verde antico, marble
Veroli
Via Appia; Flaminia; Labiena; Nomentana
Viareggio, an objectionable place; its Vittoria hotel; pine woods
Victorians, their perverse sense of duty
Villalago
Villetta Barrea
Viterbo
Voss, R.

Wallace, A. R.
Walpole, Horace
War, the present, local opinions concerning; repercussion on thoughtful
non-combatants; effects on agriculture War Office, pandemonium; confuses
Turkish and Russian
Waterton, C., a freak
Whistling, denotes mental vacuity
White, colour, unpopular in South Italy
Will-o'-the-wisp
Wine, red and black
Wolf, at Mentone; at Frattura
Wryneck, bird

Young, J.
Youth, should be temperate
Yucca, plant

Zagarola
"Zone of defense," drawbacks of
Zurich, its attractions

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

1. There exists a fine one, but you must go to San Remo to see it.

2. Discovered, according to Corsi, in 1547, and not to be confounded
with the yet more beautiful black and yellow Rhodian marble of the
ancients.

3. See North American Review, September, 1913. Ramage's Calabrian tour
of 1828, by the way, was an extremely risky undertaking. The few
travellers who then penetrated into this country kept to the main roads
and never moved without a military escort. One of them actually hired a
brigand as a protection.

4. Sometimes at this season there is not the smallest trickle in the
stream-bed--mere disconnected pools to show where the river was, and
will be. Then you may walk across it, even in Florence. Grant Duff says
he has seen the Arno "blue." So have I: a hepatic blue.

5. It afterwards passed into the hands of the German Crown Prince.

6. He was afterwards imprisoned for this, and has since died.

7. I am told the Florentines at no period adopted the method of the
Parisians, and that I am also wrong in saying that the older monuments
are in better condition than the new ones. We live and learn.

8. The late Henry Maudsley. He says, in one of his letters, "... I am
writing without due consideration of the interesting point. But this
possible explanation occurs to me: children are active motor machines,
always restless and moving when not asleep. When asleep, the motor
tendencies, being not quite passive, translate themselves into the
dreaming consciousness of motion, pleasant or painful, according to
bodily states pleasing or disturbing. As the muscles are almost passive
in sleep, the outlet is into dreaming activity--into dreams of flying
when bodily states are pleasant, into falling down precipices, etc.,
when they are out of sorts. This is quite a hasty reflection...."

9. "The Prison. A Dialogue." By H. B. Brewster. (Williams and Norgate,
1891.)

10. Parkstone, Dorset. July 19, 1894. "Many thanks for your reference to
Schopenhauer's remarks on Recognition Marks, which I thought I was the
first to fully point out. It is a most interesting anticipation. I do
not read German, but from what I have heard of his works he was the last
man I should have expected to make such an acute suggestion in Natural
History."

11. Written during the U-boat scare and food-restrictions.

12. Fecit! He poisoned himself with hydrocyanic acid on the 4th
November, 1920.

13. This is the same gentleman who informs us, on page 166, "I have
lived, however, very temperately, avoiding much wine." We learn from the
Dictionary of National Biography that he was born in 1803; he must
therefore have been twenty-five years old when he bemused the
coastguard. Only twenty-five; and already at this stage. We are further
told that he was tutor to somebody's son. Unhappy child!

14. Not all of them are true thistles. Abbadé's Guide to the Abruzzi
(1903) enumerates 1476 plants from this region.

15. Manifestly unfair, all this. For the rest, the critic, in speaking
of a plot, may have meant what young ladies call by that name--a love
intrigue, in which case he is to be blamed solely for misuse of a good
word. I am consoled by the New York Dial calling my plot "rightly
filmy." Nobody could have expressed it better.

16. Three spring months, at Florence, had been spent in making a
scientific collection of local imprecations--abusive, vituperative or
profane expletives; swear-words, in short--enriched with elaborate
commentary. I would gladly print this little study in folk-lore as an
appendix to the present volume, were it fit for publication.

17. Since this was written, the gospel of imperialism has made
considerable progress in the peninsula.

18. This is a survival of the Greek kakkabos. Gargiuli and others have
garnered Hellenic derivations among the place-names here, and to their
list may be added that of the rock on which stood the villa of Pollius
Felix; it is now known as Punta Calcarella, but used to be called
Petrapoli; pure Greek: Pollio's rock. There is still a mine of such
material to be exploited by all who care to study the vernacular. The
giant euphorbia, for instance, common on these hills, is locally known
as "totomaglie"; pure Greek again: tithymalos.

19. Query: whether there be no connection between brachycephalism and
this modern deification of machinery?

20. Robert L. Bowles, M.D. "Sunburn on the Alps" (Alpine Journal,
November, 1888) and "The Influence of Light on the Skin" (British
Journal of Dermatology, No. 105, Vol. 9).

21. It has now been cleaned--with inevitable results.

22. Maupassant himself was partial to scents. See his valet's diary.

23. Since this was written (1917) the condition of these beasts has
improved. Somebody now feeds them--which could hardly have been expected
during those stressful times of war, when bread barely sufficed for the
human population. They are also fewer in numbers. Their owners, I fancy,
can afford to keep them at home once more.

24. This is my last (7 July, 1894) and somewhat mysterious letter from
the old fellow. "The question you ask is one of great ornithological
importance and I believe has never been worked out, but I am absolutely
afraid to ask any questions in the British Museum, as they jump at an
idea and cut the ground from under the original man's feet. This I
regret to say is my experience. I have been asked what does it matter
who makes the discovery? I reply, 'Render unto Caesar, etc.' If you are
going to work it out, keep it dark. The British Museum have not the
necessary specimens--in this country I believe it is not known how the
change takes place. I tried some years ago to work it out with live
specimens, but failed because I could not get young birds. Now in answer
to your question, my belief is that the young bird moults into the
winter plumages direct and that this is changed into the full plumage in
spring either by a spring moult or by a shedding of the tips of the
feathers. This is private because it is theoretical, and for your
private use to verify...."

Of the Finland seal, by the way, Dr. Günther wrote: "The skin differs in
nothing from that of Phoca foetida. In the skull I observe that the
nasal bones are conspicuously narrower than in typical specimens from
the northern coasts. There is also a remarkable thinness of bone, a want
of osseous substance; but it is impossible to say whether this is due to
altered physical conditions or should be accounted for by the youth of
the specimen, or whether it is an individual peculiarity."

25. Winter 1882-1883; possibly later.

26. The centre of this usage, so far as Europe is concerned, seems to
have been the Caucasus.

27. I have been there since, and vainly endeavoured to track the legend
to its lair. Its only possible foundation is that I possessed the
ordinary tourists' map of the district.

28. Add to all the other varieties, now, the countless legions of the
guardie regie, which threaten to absorb the entire youth of Italy. At
this moment there is a distressing dearth of housing accommodation all
over the peninsula; in Rome alone, they say, apartments are needed for
10,000 practically homeless persons, and a mathematician may calculate
the number of houses required to contain them. How shall they ever be
built, if all the potential builders are loafing about in uniforms at
the public expense?

29. Some of these Beautiful Thoughts went through more than one edition.

30. From an old article: "I was pleased to observe on Ponza the relics
of a great pre-Roman civilization. Above the town, where the cemetery
now stands, is a likely site for a citadel, and on examining it from the
sea I noticed, sure enough, a few blocks of prehistoric structure of the
so-called Cyclopean type underneath a corner of the cemetery wall. There
is a portion in better preservation between the 'Baths of Pilate' and
the harbour, where a little path winds up from the sea. The blocks are
joined without mortar, and some of them are over a metre in length. This
megalithic wall may be taken to be contemporaneous with similar works of
defence found in various parts of Italy, but I believe its existence on
Ponza has not yet been recorded. Livy says that Volscians inhabited the
island till they were supplanted by the Romans, and a tradition
preserved by Strabo and Virgil locates here the palace of the
enchantress Circe, who transformed the companions of Ulysses into
bristly swine...." Some one may have anticipated me here again, as did
Salis-Marschlins in the eighteenth century with those roses of Passtum
whose disappearance Ramage, like every one else, laments--those roses
which I thought I was the first to re-discover. They grow on the spot in
considerable quantities, though one needs good eyes to see them. They
are not flourishing as of yore, being dwarfs not more than a few inches
in height. One which I carried away and kept three years in a pot and
six more in the earth grew to a length of about sixteen feet, and is
probably alive at this moment, I never saw a flower.

31. For the abject condition of these slaves (such they are) see Chapter
VII of The Roman Campagna by Arnaldo Cervesato.

32. Written in 1917.

33. D.H. Lawrence: Twilight in Italy.

34. The title Alone strikes me, on reflection, as rather an inapt one
for this volume. Let it stand!