All happy times must end, and the happier the sooner. At one short
week’s close they hurried on to Perugia.
And how full Alan had been of Perugia beforehand! He loved every stone
of the town, every shadow of the hillsides, he told Herminia at
Florence; and Herminia started on her way accordingly well prepared to
fall quite as madly in love with the Umbrian capital as Alan himself
had done.
The railway journey, indeed, seemed extremely pretty. What a march of
sweet pictures! They mounted with creaking wheels the slow ascent up
the picturesque glen where the Arno runs deep, to the white towers of
Arezzo; then Cortona throned in state on its lonely hilltop, and girt
by its gigantic Etruscan walls; next the low bank, the lucid green
water, the olive-clad slopes of reedy Thrasymene; last of all, the sere
hills and city-capped heights of their goal, Perugia.
For its name’s sake alone, Herminia was prepared to admire the antique
Umbrian capital. And Alan loved it so much, and was so determined she
ought to love it too, that she was ready to be pleased with everything
in it. Until she arrived there—and then, oh, poor heart, what a
grievous disappointment! It was late April weather when they reached
the station at the foot of that high hill where Augusta Perusia sits
lording it on her throne over the wedded valleys of the Tiber and the
Clitumnus. Tramontana was blowing. No rain had fallen for weeks; the
slopes of the lower Apennines, ever dry and dusty, shone still drier
and dustier than Alan had yet beheld them. Herminia glanced up at the
long white road, thick in deep grey powder, that led by endless zigzags
along the dreary slope to the long white town on the shadeless hilltop.
At first sight alone, Perugia was a startling disillusion to Herminia.
She didn’t yet know how bitterly she was doomed hereafter to hate every
dreary dirty street in it. But she knew at the first blush that the
Perugia she had imagined and pictured to herself didn’t really exist
and had never existed.
She had figured in her own mind a beautiful breezy town, high set on a
peaked hill, in fresh and mossy country. She had envisaged the
mountains to her soul as clad with shady woods, and strewn with huge
boulders under whose umbrageous shelter bloomed waving masses of the
pretty pale blue Apennine anemones she saw sold in big bunches at the
street corners in Florence. She had imagined, in short, that Umbria was
a wilder Italian Wales, as fresh, as green, as sweet-scented, as
fountain-fed. And she knew pretty well whence she had derived that
strange and utterly false conception. She had fancied Perugia as one of
those mountain villages described by Macaulay, the sort of hilltop
stronghold
“That, hid by beech and pine,
Like an eagle’s nest hangs on the crest
Of purple Apennine.”
Instead of that, what manner of land did she see actually before her?
Dry and shadeless hillsides, tilled with obtrusive tilth to their
topmost summit; ploughed fields and hoary olive-groves silvering to the
wind, in interminable terraces; long suburbs, unlovely in their gaunt,
bare squalor, stretching like huge arms of some colossal cuttlefish
over the spurs and shoulders of that desecrated mountain. No woods, no
moss, no coolness, no greenery; all nature toned down to one monotonous
greyness. And this dreary desert was indeed the place where her baby
must be born, the baby predestined to regenerate humanity!
Oh, why did they ever leave that enchanted Florence!
Meanwhile Alan had got together the luggage, and engaged a ramshackle
Perugian cab; for the public vehicles of Perugia are perhaps, as a
class, the most precarious and incoherent known to science. However,
the luggage was bundled on to the top by Our Lady’s grace, without
dissolution of continuity; the lean-limbed horses were induced by
explosive volleys of sound Tuscan oaths to make a feeble and spasmodic
effort; and bit by bit the sad little cavalcade began slowly to ascend
the interminable hill that rises by long loops to the platform of the
Prefettura.
That drive was the gloomiest Herminia had ever yet taken. Was it the
natural fastidiousness of her condition, she wondered, or was it really
the dirt and foul smells of the place that made her sicken at first
sight of the wind-swept purlieus? Perhaps a little of both; for in
dusty weather Perugia is the most endless town to get out of in Italy;
and its capacity for the production of unpleasant odours is unequalled
no doubt from the Alps to Calabria. As they reached the bare white
platform at the entry to the upper town, where Pope Paul’s grim
fortress once frowned to overawe the audacious souls of the
liberty-loving Umbrians, she turned mute eyes to Alan for sympathy. And
then for the first time the terrible truth broke over her that Alan
wasn’t in the least disappointed or disgusted; he knew it all before;
he was accustomed to it and liked it! As for Alan, he misinterpreted
her glance, indeed, and answered with that sort of proprietary pride we
all of us assume towards a place we love, and are showing off to a
newcomer: “Yes, I thought you’d like this view, dearest; isn’t it
wonderful, wonderful? That’s Assisi over yonder, that strange white
town that clings by its eyelashes to the sloping hillside: and those
are the snowclad heights of the Gran Sasso beyond; and that’s
Montefalco to the extreme right, where the sunset gleam just catches
the hilltop.”
His words struck dumb horror into Herminia’s soul. Poor child, how she
shrank at it! It was clear, then, instead of being shocked and
disgusted, Alan positively admired this human Sahara. With an effort
she gulped down her tears and her sighs, and pretended to look with
interest in the directions he pointed. _She_ could see nothing in it
all but dry hillsides, crowned with still drier towns; unimagined
stretches of sultry suburb; devouring wastes of rubbish and foul
immemorial kitchen-middens. And the very fact that for Alan’s sake she
couldn’t bear to say so—seeing how pleased and proud he was of Perugia,
as if it had been built from his own design—made the bitterness of her
disappointment more difficult to endure. She would have given anything
at that moment for an ounce of human sympathy.
She had to learn in time to do without it.
They spent that night at the comfortable hotel, perhaps the best in
Italy. Next morning, they were to go hunting for apartments in the
town, where Alan knew of a suite that would exactly suit them. After
dinner, in the twilight, filled with his artistic joy at being back in
Perugia, his beloved Perugia, he took Herminia out for a stroll, with a
light wrap round her head, on the terrace of the Prefettura. The air
blew fresh and cool now with a certain mountain sharpness; for, as Alan
assured her with pride, they stood seventeen hundred feet above the
level of the Mediterranean. The moon had risen; the sunset glow had not
yet died off the slopes of the Assisi hillsides. It streamed through
the perforated belfry of San Domenico; it steeped in rose-colour the
slender and turreted shaft of San Pietro, “Perugia’s Pennon,” the
Arrowhead of Umbria. It gilded the gaunt houses that jut out upon the
spine of the Borgo hill into the valley of the Tiber. Beyond, rose
shadowy Apennines, on whose aerial flanks towns and villages shone out
clear in the mellow moonlight. Far away on their peaks faint specks of
twinkling fire marked indistinguishable sites of high hilltop castles.
Alan turned to her proudly. “Well, what do you think of that?” he asked
with truly personal interest.
Herminia could only gasp out in a half reluctant way, “It’s a beautiful
view, Alan. Beautiful; beautiful; beautiful!”
But she felt conscious to herself it owed its beauty in the main to the
fact that the twilight obscured so much of it. Tomorrow morning, the
bare hills would stand out once more in all their pristine bareness;
the white roads would shine forth as white and dusty as ever; the
obtrusive rubbish heaps would press themselves at every turn upon eye
and nostril. She hated the place, to say the truth; it was a terror to
her to think she had to stop so long in it.
Most famous towns, in fact, need to be twice seen: the first time
briefly to face the inevitable disappointment to our expectations; the
second time, at leisure, to reconstruct and appraise the surviving
reality. Imagination so easily beggars performance. Rome, Cairo, the
Nile, are obvious examples; the grand exceptions are Venice and
Florence—in a lesser degree, Bruges, Munich, Pisa. As for Umbria, ’tis
a poor thing; our own Devon snaps her fingers at it.
Moreover, to say the truth, Herminia was too fresh to Italy to
appreciate the smaller or second-rate towns at their real value. Even
northerners love Florence and Venice at first sight; those take their
hearts by storm; but Perugia, Siena, Orvieto, are an acquired taste,
like olives and caviare, and it takes time to acquire it. Alan had not
made due allowance for this psychological truth of the northern
natures. A Celt in essence, thoroughly Italianate himself, and with a
deep love for the picturesque, which often makes men insensible to dirt
and discomfort, he expected to Italianise Herminia too rapidly.
Herminia, on the other hand, belonged more strictly to the intellectual
and somewhat inartistic English type. The picturesque alone did not
suffice for her. Cleanliness and fresh air were far dearer to her soul
than the quaintest street corners, the oddest old archways; she pined
in Perugia for a green English hillside.
The time, too, was unfortunate, after no rain for weeks; for
rainlessness, besides doubling the native stock of dust, brings out to
the full the ancestral Etruscan odours of Perugia. So, when next
morning Herminia found herself installed in a dingy flat, in a morose
palazzo, in the main street of the city, she was glad that Alan
insisted on going out alone to make needful purchases of groceries and
provisions, because it gave her a chance of flinging herself on her bed
in a perfect agony of distress and disappointment, and having a good
cry, all alone, at the aspect of the home where she was to pass so many
eventful weeks of her existence.
Dusty, gusty Perugia! O baby, to be born for the freeing of woman, was
it here, was it here you must draw your first breath, in an air
polluted by the vices of centuries!