One of the little girls told me that Silvio had so many centesimi and she
had none. I said at once:
“You don’t want any centesimi.”
As soon as these words fell from my lips, I knew I must be getting old.
And presently the Devil came up to me. He was a nice, clean old man, but
he dropped his h’s, and that was where he spoiled himself—or perhaps it
was just this that threw me off my guard, for I had always heard that the
Prince of Darkness was a perfect gentleman. He whispered to me that in
the winter the monks of St. Bernard sometimes say matins overnight.
The blue of the mountains looks bluer through the chestnuts than through
the pines. The river is snowy against the “Verdi prati e selve amene.”
The great fat tobacco plant agrees with itself if not with us; I never
saw any plant look in better health. The briar knows perfectly well what
it wants to do and that it does not want to be disturbed; it knows, in
fact, all that it cares to know. The question is how and why it got to
care to know just these things and no others. Two cheeky goats came
tumbling down upon me and demanded salt, and the man came from the
saw-mill and, with his great brown hands, scooped the mud from the dams
of the rills that watered his meadow, for the hour had come when it was
his turn to use the stream.
There were cow-bells, mountain elder-berries and lots of flowers in the
grass. There was the glacier, the roar of the river and a plaintive
little chapel on a green knoll under the great cliff of ice which cut the
sky. There was a fat, crumby woman making hay. She said:
“Buon giorno.”
And the “i o r” of the “giorno” came out like oil and honey. I saw she
wanted a gossip. She and her husband tuned their scythes in two-part,
note-against-note counterpoint; but I could hear that it was she who was
the canto fermo and he who was the counterpoint. I peered down over the
edge of the steep slippery slope which all had to be mown from top to
bottom; if hay grew on the dome of St. Paul’s these dreadful traders
would gather it in, and presently the autumn crocuses would begin to push
up their delicate, naked snouts through the closely shaven surface. I
expressed my wonder.
“Siamo esatti,” said the fat, crumby woman.
For what little things will not people risk their lives? So Smith and I
crossed the Rangitata. So Esau sold his birthright.
It was noon, and I was so sheer above the floor of the valley and the sun
was so sheer above me that the chestnuts in the meadow of Bondo squatted
upon their own shadows and the gardens were as though the valley had been
paved with bricks of various colours. The old grass-grown road ran
below, nearer the river, where many a good man had gone up and down on
his journey to that larger road where the reader and the writer shall
alike join him.