Part 22

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

"When I am dead," he always says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olevano

I have loafed into Olevano.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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