Part 18

"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.

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?"