Alone Part 13

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 I have written a sonata in four movements, opus 643, hitherto unpublished, and played the organ during divine service to a crowded congregation.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 c.o.c.k, 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 s.n.a.t.c.h a little rest out of doors, in the afternoon. A delectable path, for example, runs up behind the cemetery, bordered by b.u.t.terfly 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.n.a.logous 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sembled, 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-cla.s.s 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 p.r.o.nounces it to be "particularly good, and not degenerated." Arrived at Cutro, he is not averse to reviving his spirits with "a pretty fair modic.u.m of wine." He also lets slip--significant detail--the fact that Dr. Henderson was one of his friends, and that he travelled about with him. You may judge a man by the company he keeps. Who was this Dr.

Henderson? He was the author of "The History of Ancient Wines." Old Henderson, I should say, could be trusted to know something of local vintages.

And so far good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He never rails at anything. Had I been subjected to half the annoyances he endured, my curses would have been loud and long. Under such provocation, Ramage contents himself with reproving his tormentors in rounded phrases of oratio obliqua which savour strongly of those Latin cla.s.sics he knew so well. What he says of the countryfolk is not only polite but true, that their virtues are their own, while their vices have been fostered by the abuses of tyranny. "Whatever fault one may find with this people for their superst.i.tion and ignorance, there is a loveableness in their character which I am not utilitarian enough in my philosophy to resist." This comes of travelling off the beaten track and with an open mind; it comes of direct contact. When one remembers that he wrote in 1828 and was derived from a bigoted stock, his religious tolerance is refreshing--astonishing. He studies the observances of the poorer cla.s.ses with sympathetic eye and finds that they are "pious to a degree to which I am afraid we must grant that we have no pretensions."

That custom of suspending votive offerings in churches he does not think "worthy of being altogether condemned or ridiculed. The feeling is the same that induces us, on recovery from severe illness, to give thanks to Almighty G.o.d, either publicly in church or privately in our closets."

How many Calvinists of to-day would write like this?

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

That mania of hustling through the country....

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

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

The ladies made a great impression on his sensitive mind; yet not even they were allowed to interfere with his plans. At Strongoli the "sparkling eyes of the younger sister" proved the most attractive object in the place. He was strongly urged to remain a while and rest from his fatigues. But no; there were many reasons why he should press forward.

He therefore presses forward. At another place, too, he was waited upon by his entertainer's three daughters, the youngest of whom was one of the most entrancing girls he had ever met with--in fact, it was well that his time was limited, else "I verily believe I should have committed all kinds of follies." That is Ramage. He parts from his host with "unfeigned regret"--but--parts. His time is always limited. Bit for that craze of pressing forward, what fun he could have had!

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

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

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

Climb hence--it is not far--to the village of Civitella, now called Bellegra, a prehistoric fastness with some traces of "cyclopean"

defences. Those ancients must have had cisterns; inconceivable that springs should ever have issued from this limestone crag. You can see the women of to-day fetching water from below, from a spot which I was too lazy to investigate, where perhaps the soft tertiary rock leans upon this impervious stuff and allows the liquid to escape into the open. An unclean place is Bellegra, and loud, like all these Sabine villages, with the confused crying of little children. That multiple wail of misery will ring in your ear for days afterwards. They are more neglected by their mothers than ever, since women now have all the men's work in the fields to do. They are hungrier than ever, on account of the war which has imposed real hardships on these agricultural folk; hardships that seize them by the throat and make them sit down, with folded hands, in dumb despair: so I have seen them. How many of these unhappy babies will grow to maturity?

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

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

What recollections does that scent evoke! What hints of summer, after rain!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As to Frattura--yes, it is shattered. Vainly we tried to identify Ferdinando's abode among all that debris. The old man himself escaped the cataclysm, and now sells his wares in one of the miserable wooden shanties erected lower down. The mellow hermit at St. Egidio, of whom more on p. 171, has died; his place is taken by a worthless vagabond.

Saint Domenico and his serpents, the lonely mead of Jovana (? Jovis fanum), that bell in the church-tower of Villalago which bears the problematical date of 600 A.D.--they are all in their former places.

Mount Velino still glitters over the landscape, for those who climb high enough to see it. The cliff-swallows are there, and dippers skim the water as of old. Women, in their unhygienic costume, still carry those immense loads of wood on their heads, though payment is considerably higher than the three half-pence a day which it used to be.

Enough of Scanno!

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

I am glad to have seen Pesca.s.seroli, where we arrived at about 9 a.m.

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

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

The priests inculcate submission to the will of G.o.d. What else should they teach? But men will outgrow these doctrines of patience when suffering is too acute or too prolonged. "Anything is better than this,"

they say. Thus it comes about that these ruined regions are a goodly soil for the sowing of subversive opinions; the land reeks of ill-digested socialism.