Alone Part 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As to taking measurements--well, a man is naturally accused of a good many things in the course of half a century. n.o.body has yet gone so far as to call me a mathematician. These "calculations and instruments" were a local mirage; as pretty an instance of the mythopoeic faculty as one could hope to find in our degenerate days, when G.o.ds no longer walk the earth. [27]

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

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

"This director," I said, "calls himself a patriot. What has he told us?

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

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

They went--he and his friends.

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

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

This, meanwhile, is my carta di soggiorno."

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

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

etc.

Thus I spoke while perfect innocence, mother of invention, lent wings to my words, and while thinking all the time: You little vermin, what are you doing here, in that chair, when you should be delving the earth or breaking stones, as befits your kind? I tried to picture myself climbing up Muretta with a theodolite bulging out of my pocket. A flagon of port would have been more in my line. Calculations! It is all I can do to control my weekly washing bill, and even for that simple operation I like to have a quiet half hour in a room by myself. Instruments! If this young fellow, I thought, discovers so much as an astrolabe among my belongings, let them hang me from the ramparts at daybreak! And the delegato, listening, was finally moved by my rhetoric, as they often are, if you can throw not only your whole soul, but a good part of your body, into the performance. He found the idea sufficiently reasonable.

The subordinate, as might have been expected, had nothing whatever to do; like all of his kind, he was only in that office to evade military service.

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

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

"I am coming with you. I promised him the pa.s.sport."

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

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

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

The incident was closed.

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

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

There is a village of about three hundred inhabitants not far from Rome; fifteen carbineers are quartered there. Before they came, those inevitable little troubles were settled by the local mayor; things remained in the family, so to speak. Now the place has been set by the ears, and a tone of exacerbation prevails. The natives spend their days in rushing to Rome and back on business connected with law-suits, not a quarter of which would have arisen but for the existence of the carbineers. Let me not be misunderstood. Individually, these men are nowise at fault. They desire nothing better than to be left in peace.

Seldom do they meddle with local concerns--far from it! They live in sacerdotal isolation, austerely aloof from the populace, like a colony of monks. The inst.i.tution is to blame. It is their duty, among other things, to take down any charge which anybody may care to prefer against his neighbour. That done, the machinery of the law is automatically set in motion. Five minutes' talk among the village elders would have settled many affairs which now degenerate into legal squabbles of twice as many years; chronic family feuds are fostered; a man who, on reflection, would find it more profitable to come to terms with his opponent over a gla.s.s of wine, or even to square the old syndic with a couple of hundred francs, sees himself obliged to try the same tactics on a judge of the high court--which calls for a different technique.

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

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

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

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

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

And what is the dominating trait of this old Scotsman? The historical sense. Ancient inscriptions interested him more than anything else. He copied many of them during his trip; fifty, I should think; and it is no small labour, as any one who has tried it can testify, to decipher these half-obliterated records often placed in the most inconvenient situations (he seems to have taken no squeezes). To have busied himself thus was to his credit in an age whose chief concern, as regards antiquity, consisted in plundering works of art for ornamental purposes.

Ramage did not collect bric-a-brac like other travellers; he collected knowledge of humanity and its inst.i.tutions, such knowledge as inscriptions reveal. It is good to hear him discoursing upon these doc.u.ments in stone, these genealogies of the past, with a pleasingly sentimental erudition. He likes them not in any dry-as-dust fashion, but for the light they throw upon the living world of his day. Speaking of one of them he says: "It is when we come across names connected with men who have acted an ill.u.s.trious part in the world's history, that the fatigues of such a journey as I have undertaken are felt to be completely repaid." That is the humanist's spirit.

His equipment in the interpretation of these stones and of all else he picked up in the way of lore and legend was of the proper kind.

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

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

What pleases me less is that there occurs hardly any mention of wild animals in these pages, and that he seems to enjoy natural scenery in proportion as it reminds him of some pa.s.sage in one of those poets whom he is so fond of quoting. This love of poetic extracts and citations is a mark of his period. It must have got the upper hand of him in course of time, for we find, from the t.i.tle-page of these "Nooks and Byways,"

that he was the author of "Beautiful Thoughts from Greek authors; Beautiful Thoughts from French and Italian authors, etc."; [29] indeed, the publication of this particular book, as late as 1868, seems to have been an afterthought. How greatly one would prefer a few more "Nooks and By-ways" to all these Beautiful Thoughts! He must have been at home again, in some bleak Caledonian retreat, when the poetic flowers were gathered. If only he had lingered longer among the cla.s.sic remains of the south, instead of rushing through them like an express train. That mania of "pressing forward"; that fatal gift of hustle....

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

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

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

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

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

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