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Alone

by Norman Douglas · English · Gutenberg #7380 · 463,352 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Alone

Author: Norman Douglas


        
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7380]
                Most recently updated: June 15, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7380

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALONE ***




Produced by Tonya Allen, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team










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

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