The shopkeeper called it, affectionately, a little Mexican; and
little, for a Mexican, it may have been. But in this Europe of ours,
where space is limited and the scale smaller, the little Mexican was
portentous, a giant among hats. It hung there, in the centre of the
hatter’s window, a huge black aureole, fit for a king among devils.
But no devil walked that morning through the streets of Ravenna; only
the mildest of literary tourists. Those were the days when very large
hats seemed in my eyes very desirable, and it was on my head, all
unworthy, that the aureole of darkness was destined to descend. On my
head; for at the first sight of the hat, I had run into the shop, tried
it on, found the size correct, and bought it, without bargaining, at a
foreigner’s price. I left the shop with the little Mexican on my head,
and my shadow on the pavements of Ravenna was like the shadow of an
umbrella pine.
The little Mexican is very old now, and moth-eaten and green. But I
still preserve it. Occasionally, for old associations’ sake, I even
wear it. Dear Mexican! it represents for me a whole epoch of my life.
It stands for emancipation and the first year at the university.
It symbolises the discovery of how many new things, new ideas, new
sensations!--of French literature, of alcohol, of modern painting,
of Nietzsche, of love, of metaphysics, of Mallarmé, of syndicalism,
and of goodness knows what else. But, above all, I prize it because
it reminds me of my first discovery of Italy. It re-evokes for me, my
little Mexican, all the thrills and astonishments and virgin raptures
of that first Italian tour in the early autumn of 1912. Urbino, Rimini,
Ravenna, Ferrara, Modena, Mantua, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Venice--my
first impressions of all these fabulous names lie, like a hatful of
jewels, in the crown of the little Mexican. Shall I ever have the heart
to throw it away?
And then, of course, there is Tirabassi. Without the little Mexican
I should never have made Tirabassi’s acquaintance. He would never
have taken me, in my small unemphatic English hat, for a painter. And
I should never, in consequence, have seen the frescoes, never have
talked with the old Count, never heard of the Colombella. Never....
When I think of that, the little Mexican seems to me more than ever
precious.
It was, of course, very typical of Tirabassi to suppose, from the size
of my hat, that I must be a painter. He had a neat military mind that
refused to accept the vague disorder of the world. He was for ever
labelling and pigeon-holing and limiting his universe; and when the
classified objects broke out of their pigeon-holes and tore the labels
from off their necks, Tirabassi was puzzled and annoyed. In any case,
it was obvious to him from the first moment he saw me in the restaurant
at Padua, that I must be a painter. All painters wear large black
hats. I was wearing the little Mexican. Ergo, I was a painter. It was
syllogistic, unescapable.
He sent the waiter to ask me whether I would do him the honour of
taking coffee with him at his table. For the first moment, I must
confess, I was a little alarmed. This dashing young lieutenant of
cavalry--what on earth could he want with me? The most absurd fancies
filled my mind: I had committed, all unconsciously, some frightful
solecism; I had trodden on the toes of the lieutenant’s honour, and he
was about to challenge me to a duel. The choice of weapons, I rapidly
reflected, would be mine. But what--oh, what on earth should I choose?
Swords? I had never learnt to fence. Pistols? I had once fired six
shots at a bottle, and missed it with every shot. Would there be time
to write one or two letters, make some sort of a testament about my
personal belongings? From this anguish of mind the waiter, returning a
moment later with my fried octopus, delivered me. The Lieutenant Count,
he explained in a whisper of confidence, had a villa on the Brenta,
not far from Strà. A villa--he spread out his hands in a generous
gesture--full of paintings. Full, full, full. And he was anxious that
I should see them, because he felt sure that I was interested in
paintings. Oh, of course--I smiled rather foolishly, for the waiter
seemed to expect some sort of confirmatory interpolation from me--I
_was_ interested in paintings; very much. In that case, said the
waiter, the Count would be delighted to take me to see them. He left
me, still puzzled, but vastly relieved. At any rate, I was not being
called upon to make the very embarrassing choice between swords and
pistols.
Surreptitiously, whenever he was not looking in my direction, I
examined the Lieutenant Count. His appearance was not typically Italian
(but then what is a typical Italian?). He was not, that is to say,
blue-jowled, beady-eyed, swarthy, and aquiline. On the contrary, he had
pale ginger hair, grey eyes, a snub nose, and a freckled complexion. I
knew plenty of young Englishmen who might have been Count Tirabassi’s
less vivacious brothers.
He received me, when the time came, with the most exquisite courtesy,
apologising for the unceremonious way in which he had made my
acquaintance. “But as I felt sure,” he said, “that you were interested
in art, I thought you would forgive me for the sake of what I have to
show you.” I couldn’t help wondering why the Count felt so certain
about my interest in art. It was only later, when we left the
restaurant together, that I understood; for, as I put on my hat to go,
he pointed with a smile at the little Mexican. “One can see,” he said,
“that you are a real artist.” I was left at a loss, not knowing what to
answer.
After we had exchanged the preliminary courtesies, the Lieutenant
plunged at once, entirely for my benefit I could see, into a
conversation about art. “Nowadays,” he said, “we Italians don’t take
enough interest in art. In a modern country, you see....” He shrugged
his shoulders, leaving the sentence unfinished. “But I don’t think
that’s right. I adore art. Simply adore it. When I see foreigners
going round with their guide-books, standing for half an hour in front
of one picture, looking first at the book, then at the picture”--and
here he gave the most brilliantly finished imitation of an Anglican
clergyman conscientiously “doing” the Mantegna chapel: first a glance
at the imaginary guide-book held open in his two hands, then, with
the movement of a chicken that drinks, a lifting of the face towards
an imaginary fresco, a long stare between puckered eyelids, a falling
open of the mouth, and finally a turning back of the eyes towards the
inspired pages of Baedeker--“when I see them, I feel ashamed for us
Italians.” The Count spoke very earnestly, feeling, no doubt, that his
talent for mimicry had carried him a little too far. “And if they stand
for half an hour looking at the thing, I go and stand there for an
hour. That’s the way to understand great art. The only way.” He leaned
back in his chair and sipped his coffee. “Unfortunately,” he added,
after a moment, “one hasn’t got much time.”
I agreed with him. “When one can only get to Italy for a month at a
stretch, like myself....”
“Ah, but if only I could travel about the world like you!” The Count
sighed. “But here I am, cooped up in this wretched town. And when I
think of the enormous capital that’s hanging there on the walls of my
house....” He checked himself, shaking his head. Then, changing his
tone, he began to tell me about his house on the Brenta. It sounded
altogether too good to be true. Carpioni, yes--I could believe in
frescoes by Carpioni; almost any one might have those. But a hall by
Veronese, but rooms by Tiepolo, all in the same house--that sounded
incredible. I could not help believing that the Count’s enthusiasm for
art had carried him away. But, in any case, to-morrow I should be able
to judge for myself; the Count had invited me to lunch with him.
We left the restaurant. Still embarrassed by the Count’s references
to my little Mexican, I walked by his side in silence up the arcaded
street.
“I am going to introduce you to my father,” said the Count. “He, too,
adores the arts.”
More than ever I felt myself a swindler. I had wriggled into the
Count’s confidence on false pretences; my hat was a lie. I felt that
I ought to do something to clear up the misunderstanding. But the
Count was so busy complaining to me about his father that I had no
opportunity to put in my little explanation. I didn’t listen very
attentively, I confess, to what he was saying. In the course of a year
at Oxford, I had heard so many young men complain of their fathers. Not
enough money, too much interference--the story was a stale one. And
at that time, moreover, I was taking a very high philosophical line
about this sort of thing. I was pretending that people didn’t interest
me--only books, only ideas. What a fool one can make of oneself at that
age!
“_Eccoci_,” said the Count. We halted in front of the Café Pedrochi.
“He always comes here for his coffee.”
And where else, indeed, should he come for his coffee? Who, in Padua,
would go anywhere else?
We found him sitting out on the terrace at the farther end of the
building. I had never, I thought, seen a jollier-looking old gentleman.
The old Count had a red weather-beaten face, with white moustaches
bristling gallantly upwards and a white imperial in the grand
Risorgimento manner of Victor Emmanuel the Second. Under the white
tufty eyebrows, and set in the midst of a webwork of fine wrinkles,
the eyes were brown and bright like a robin’s. His long nose looked,
somehow, more practically useful than the ordinary human nose, as
though made for fine judicial sniffing, for delicate burrowing and
probing. Thick set and strong, he sat there solidly in his chair, his
knees apart, his hands clasped over the knob of his cane, carrying
his paunch with dignity, nobly I had almost said, before him. He was
dressed all in white linen--for the weather was still very hot--and his
wide grey hat was tilted rakishly forward over his left eye. It gave
one a real satisfaction to look at him; he was so complete, so perfect
in his kind.
The young Count introduced me. “This is an English gentleman.
Signor....” He turned to me for the name.
“Oosselay,” I said, having learnt by experience that that was as near
as any Italian could be expected to get to it.
“Signor Oosselay,” the young Count continued, “is an artist.”
“Well, not exactly an artist,” I was beginning; but he would not let me
make an end.
“He is also very much interested in ancient art,” he continued.
“To-morrow I am taking him to Dolo to see the frescoes. I know he will
like them.”
We sat down at the old Count’s table; critically he looked at me and
nodded. “_Benissimo_,” he said, and then added, “Let’s hope you’ll be
able to do something to help us sell the things.”
This was startling. I looked in some perplexity towards the young
Count. He was frowning angrily at his father. The old gentleman had
evidently said the wrong thing; he had spoken, I guessed, too soon. At
any rate, he took his son’s hint and glided off serenely on another
tack.
“The fervid phantasy of Tiepolo,” he began rotundly, “the cool,
unimpassioned splendour of Veronese--at Dolo you will see them
contrasted.” I listened attentively, while the old gentleman thundered
on in what was evidently a set speech. When it was over, the young
Count got up; he had to be back at the barracks by half-past two. I
too made as though to go; but the old man laid his hand on my arm.
“Stay with me,” he said. “I enjoy your conversation infinitely.” And
as he himself had hardly ceased speaking for one moment since first I
set eyes on him, I could well believe it. With the gesture of a lady
lifting her skirts out of the mud (and those were the days when skirts
still had to be lifted) the young Count picked up his trailing sabre
and swaggered off, very military, very brilliant and glittering, like
a soldier on the stage, into the sunlight, out of sight.
The old man’s bird-bright eyes followed him as he went. “A good
boy, Fabio,” he said, turning back to me at last, “a good son.” He
spoke affectionately; but there was a hint, I thought, in his smile,
in the tone of his voice, a hint of amusement, of irony. It was as
though he were adding, by implication, “But good boys, after all,
are fools to be so good.” I found myself, in spite of my affectation
of detachment, extremely curious about this old gentleman. And he,
for his part, was not the man to allow any one in his company to
remain for long in splendid isolation. He insisted on my taking an
interest in his affairs. He told me all about them--or at any rate all
about some of them--pouring out his confidences with an astonishing
absence of reserve. Next to the intimate and trusted friend, the
perfect stranger is the best of all possible confidants. There is
no commercial traveller, of moderately sympathetic appearance, who
has not, in the course of his days in the train, his evenings in the
parlours of commercial hotels, been made the repository of a thousand
intimate secrets--even in England. And in Italy--goodness knows
what commercial travellers get told in Italy. Even I, a foreigner,
speaking the language badly, and not very skilful anyhow in conducting
a conversation with strangers, have heard queer things in the
second-class carriages of Italian trains.... Here, too, on Pedrochi’s
terrace I was to hear queer things. A door was to be left ajar, and
through the crack I was to have a peep at unfamiliar lives.
“What I should do without him,” the old gentleman continued, “I really
don’t know. The way he manages the estate is simply wonderful.” And
he went rambling off into long digressions about the stupidity of
peasants, the incompetence and dishonesty of bailiffs, the badness
of the weather, the spread of phylloxera, the high price of manure.
The upshot of it all was that, since Fabio had taken over the estate,
everything had gone well; even the weather had improved. “It’s such a
relief,” the Count concluded, “to feel that I have some one in charge
on whom I can rely, some one I can trust, absolutely. It leaves me
free to devote my mind to more important things.”
I could not help wondering what the important things were; but it would
have been impertinent, I felt, to ask. Instead, I put a more practical
question. “But what will happen,” I asked, “when your son’s military
duties take him away from Padua?”
The old Count gave me a wink and laid his forefinger, very
deliberately, to the side of his long nose. The gesture was rich with
significance. “They never will,” he said. “It’s all arranged. A little
_combinazione_, you know. I have a friend in the Ministry. His military
duties will always keep him in Padua.” He winked again and smiled.
I could not help laughing, and the old Count joined in with a joyous
ha-ha that was the expression of a profound satisfaction, that was, as
it were, a burst of self-applause. He was evidently proud of his little
_combinazione_. But he was prouder still of the other combination,
about which he now confidentially leaned across the table to tell me.
It was decidedly the subtler of the two.
“And it’s not merely his military duties,” he said, wagging at me the
thick, yellow-nailed forefinger which he had laid against his nose,
“it’s not merely his military duties that’ll keep the boy in Padua.
It’s his domestic duties. He’s married. I married him.” He leaned back
in his chair, and surveyed me, smiling. The little wrinkles round his
eyes seemed to be alive. “That boy, I said to myself, must settle down.
He must have a nest, or else he’ll fly away. He must have roots, or
else he’ll run. And his poor old father will be left in the lurch.
He’s young, I thought, but he must marry. He _must_ marry. At once.”
And the old gentleman made great play with his forefinger. It was
a long story. His old friend, the Avvocato Monaldeschi, had twelve
children--three boys and nine girls. (And here there were digressions
about the Avvocato and the size of good Catholic families.) The
eldest girl was just the right age for Fabio. No money, of course;
but a good girl and pretty, and very well brought up and religious.
Religious--that was very important, for it was essential that Fabio
should have a large family--to keep him more effectually rooted, the
old Count explained--and with these modern young women brought up
outside the Church one could never be certain of children. Yes, her
religion was most important; he had looked into that very carefully
before selecting her. Well, the next thing, of course, was that Fabio
should be induced to select her. It had been a matter of bringing
the horse to water _and_ making him drink. Oh, a most difficult and
delicate business! For Fabio prided himself on his independence; and he
was obstinate, like a mule. Nobody should interfere with his affairs,
nobody should make him do what he didn’t want to. And he was so touchy,
he was so pig-headed that often he wouldn’t do what he really wanted,
merely because somebody else had suggested that he ought to do it. So
I could imagine--the old Count spread out his hands before me--just
how difficult and delicate a business it had been. Only a consummate
diplomat could have succeeded. He did it by throwing them together
a great deal and talking, meanwhile, about the rashness of early
marriages, the uselessness of poor wives, the undesirability of wives
not of noble birth. It worked like a charm; within four months, Fabio
was engaged; two months later he was married, and ten months after that
he had a son and heir. And now he was fixed, rooted. The old gentleman
chuckled, and I could fancy that I was listening to the chuckling
of some old white-haired tyrant of the quattrocento, congratulating
himself on the success of some peculiarly ingenious stroke of policy--a
rich city induced to surrender itself by fraud, a dangerous rival lured
by fair words into a cage and trapped. Poor Fabio, I thought; and also,
what a waste of talent!
Yes, the old Count went on, now he would never go. He was not like his
younger brother, Lucio. Lucio was a rogue, _furbo_, sly; he had no
conscience. But Fabio had ideas about duty, and lived up to them. Once
he had engaged himself, he would stick to his engagements, obstinately,
with all the mulishness of his character. Well, now he lived on the
estate, in the big painted house at Dolo. Three days a week he came
into Padua for his military duties, and the rest of his time he devoted
to the estate. It brought in, now, more than it had ever done before.
But goodness knew, the old man complained, that was little enough.
Bread and oil, and wine and milk, and chickens and beef--there was
plenty of those and to spare. Fabio could have a family of fifty and
they would never starve. But ready money--there wasn’t much of that.
“In England,” the Count concluded, “you are rich. But we Italians....”
He shook his head.
I spent the next quarter of an hour trying to persuade him that we were
not all millionaires. But in vain. My statistics, based on somewhat
imperfect memories of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, carried no conviction.
In the end I gave it up.
The next morning Fabio appeared at the door of my hotel in a large,
very old and very noisy Fiat. It was the family machine-of-all-work,
bruised, scratched, and dirtied by years of service. Fabio drove it
with a brilliant and easy recklessness. We rushed through the town,
swerving from one side of the narrow street to the other, with a
disregard for the rules of the road which, in a pedantic country like
England, would have meant at the least a five-pound fine and an
endorsed licence. But here the Carabiniers, walking gravely in couples
under the arcades, let us pass without comment. Right or left--after
all, what did it matter?
“Why do you keep the silencer out?” I shouted through the frightful
clamour of the engine.
Fabio slightly shrugged his shoulders. “_È piu allegro così_,” he
answered.
I said no more. From a member of this hardy race which likes noise,
which enjoys discomfort, a nerve-ridden Englishman could hardly hope to
get much sympathy.
We were soon out of the town. Trailing behind us a seething white
wake of dust and with the engine rattling off its explosions like a
battery of machine-guns, we raced along the Fusina road. On either hand
extended the cultivated plain. The road was bordered by ditches, and
on the banks beyond, instead of hedges, stood rows of little pollards,
with grape-laden vines festooned from tree to tree. White with the
dust, tendrils, fruit, and leaves hung there like so much goldsmith’s
work sculptured in frosted metal, hung like the swags of fruit and
foliage looped round the flanks of a great silver bowl. We hurried
on. Soon, on our right hand, we had the Brenta, sunk deep between the
banks of its canal. And now we were at Strà. Through gateways rich
with fantastic stucco, down tunnels of undeciduous shade, we looked
in a series of momentary glimpses into the heart of the park. And now
for an instant the statues on the roof of the villa beckoned against
the sky and were passed. On we went. To right and left, on either bank
of the river, I got every now and then a glimpse of some enchanting
mansion, gay and brilliant even in decay. Little baroque garden houses
peeped at me over walls; and through great gates, at the end of powdery
cypress avenues, half humorously, it seemed, the magniloquent and
frivolous façades soared up in defiance of all the rules. I should have
liked to do the journey slowly, to stop here and there, to look, to
savour at leisure; but Fabio disdained to travel at anything less than
fifty kilometres to the hour, and I had to be content with momentary
and precarious glimpses. It was in these villas, I reflected, as
we bumped along at the head of our desolation of white dust, that
Casanova used to come and spend the summer; seducing the chamber-maids,
taking advantage of terrified marchionesses in _calèches_ during
thunderstorms, bamboozling soft-witted old senators of Venice with
his fortune-telling and black magic. Gorgeous and happy scoundrel! In
spite of my professed detachment, I envied him. And, indeed, what was
that famous detachment but a disguised expression of the envy which
the successes and audacities of a Casanova must necessarily arouse in
every timid and diffident mind? If I lived in splendid isolation, it
was because I lacked the audacity to make war--even to make entangling
alliances. I was absorbed in these pleasing self-condemnatory thoughts,
when the car slowed down and came to a standstill in front of a huge
imposing gate. Fabio hooted impatiently on his horn; there was a scurry
of footsteps, the sound of bolts being drawn, and the gate swung
open. At the end of a short drive, very large and grave, very chaste
and austere, stood the house. It was considerably older than most of
the other villas I had seen in glimpses on our way. There was no
frivolousness in its façade, no irregular grandiloquence. A great block
of stuccoed brick; a central portico approached by steps and topped
with a massive pediment; a row of rigid statues on the balustrade above
the cornice. It was correctly, coldly even, Palladian. Fabio brought
the car to a halt in front of the porch. We got out. At the top of the
steps stood a young woman with a red-headed child in her arms. It was
the Countess with the son and heir.
The Countess impressed me very agreeably. She was slim and tall--two
or three inches taller than her husband; with dark hair, drawn back
from the forehead and twisted into a knot on the nape of her neck;
dark eyes, vague, lustrous, and melancholy, like the eyes of a gentle
animal; a skin brown and transparent like darkened amber. Her manner
was gentle and unemphatic. She rarely gesticulated; I never heard her
raise her voice. She spoke, indeed, very little. The old Count had told
me that his daughter-in-law was religious, and from her appearance
I could easily believe it. She looked at you with the calm, remote
regard of one whose life mostly goes on behind the eyes.
Fabio kissed his wife and then, bending his face towards the child, he
made a frightful grimace and roared like a lion. It was all done in
affection; but the poor little creature shrank away, terrified. Fabio
laughed and pinched its ear.
“Don’t tease him,” said the Countess gently. “You’ll make him cry.”
Fabio turned to me. “That’s what comes of leaving a boy to be looked
after by women. He cries at everything. Let’s come in,” he added.
“At present we only use two or three rooms on the ground floor, and
the kitchen in the basement. All the rest is deserted. I don’t know
how these old fellows managed to keep up their palaces. I can’t.” He
shrugged his shoulders. Through a door on the right of the portico
we passed into the house. “This is our drawing-room and dining-room
combined.”
It was a fine big room, nobly proportioned--a double cube, I
guessed--with doorways of sculptured marble and a magnificent fireplace
flanked by a pair of nymphs on whose bowed shoulders rested a sloping
overmantel carved with coats of arms and festoons of foliage.
Round the walls ran a frieze, painted in grisaille; in a graceful
litter of cornucopias and panoplies, goddesses sumptuously reclined,
cherubs wriggled and flew. The furniture was strangely mixed. Round
a sixteenth-century dining-table that was a piece of Palladian
architecture in wood, were ranged eight chairs in the Viennese
secession style of 1905. A large chalet-shaped cuckoo clock from
Bern hung on the wall between two cabinets of walnut, pilastered and
pedimented to look like little temples, and with heroic statuettes in
yellow boxwood, standing in niches between the pillars. And then the
pictures on the walls, the cretonnes with which the arm-chairs were
covered! Tactfully, however, I admired everything, new as well as old.
“And now,” said the Count, “for the frescoes.”
I followed him through one of the marble-framed doorways and found
myself at once in the great central hall of the villa. The Count turned
round to me. “There!” he said, smiling triumphantly with the air of one
who has really succeeded in producing a rabbit out of an empty hat.
And, indeed, the spectacle was sufficiently astonishing.
The walls of the enormous room were completely covered with frescoes
which it did not need much critical judgment or knowledge to perceive
were genuine Veroneses. The authorship was obvious, palpable. Who else
could have painted those harmoniously undulating groups of figures set
in their splendid architectural frame? Who else but Veronese could
have combined such splendour with such coolness, so much extravagant
opulence with such exquisite suavity?
“_È grandioso!_” I said to the Count.
And indeed it was. Grandiose; there was no other word. A rich triumphal
arcade ran all round the room, four or five arches appearing on
each wall. Through the arches one looked into a garden; and there,
against a background of cypresses and statues and far-away blue
mountains, companies of Venetian ladies and gentlemen gravely disported
themselves. Under one arch they were making music; through another,
one saw them sitting round a table, drinking one another’s health in
glasses of red wine, while a little blackamoor in a livery of green
and yellow carried round the silver jug. In the next panel they were
watching a fight between a monkey and a cat. On the opposite wall a
poet was reading his verses to the assembled company, and next to him
Veronese himself--the self-portrait was recognisable--stood at his
easel, painting the picture of an opulent blonde in rose-coloured
satin. At the feet of the artist lay his dog; two parrots and a monkey
were sitting on the marble balustrade in the middle distance.
I gazed with delight. “What a marvellous thing to possess!” I
exclaimed, fairly carried away by my enthusiasm. “I envy you.”
The Count made a little grimace and laughed. “Shall we come and look at
the Tiepolos?” he asked.
We passed through a couple of cheerful rooms by Carpioni--satyrs
chasing nymphs through a romantic forest and, on the fringes of a
seascape, a very eccentric rape of mermaids by centaurs--to step
across a threshold into that brilliant universe, at once delicate and
violently extravagant, wild and subtly orderly, which Tiepolo, in the
last days of Italian painting, so masterfully and magically created.
It was the story of Eros and Psyche, and the tale ran through three
large rooms, spreading itself even on to the ceilings, where, in a
pale sky dappled with white and golden clouds, the appropriate deities
balanced themselves, diving or ascending through the empyrean with that
air of being perfectly at home in their element which seems to belong,
in nature, only to fishes and perhaps a few winged insects and birds.
Fabio had boasted to me that, in front of a picture, he could outstare
any foreigner. But I was such a mortally long time admiring these
dazzling phantasies that in the end he quite lost patience.
“I wanted to show you the farm before lunch,” he said, looking at his
watch. “There’s only just time.” I followed him reluctantly.
We looked at the cows, the horses, the prize bull, the turkeys. We
looked at the tall, thin haystacks, shaped like giant cigars set on
end. We looked at the sacks of wheat in the barn. For lack of any
better comment I told the Count that they reminded me of the sacks of
wheat in English barns; he seemed delighted.
The farm buildings were set round an immense courtyard. We had explored
three sides of this piazza; now we came to the fourth, which was
occupied by a long, low building pierced with round archways and, I was
surprised to see, completely empty.
“What’s this?” I asked, as we entered.
“It _is_ nothing,” the Count replied. “But it might, some day, become
... _chi sa_?” He stood there for a moment in silence, frowning
pensively, with the expression of Napoleon on St. Helena--dreaming of
the future, regretting past opportunities for ever lost. His freckled
face, ordinarily a lamp for brightness, became incongruously sombre.
Then all at once he burst out--damning life, cursing fate, wishing to
God he could get away and do something instead of wasting himself here.
I listened, making every now and then a vague noise of sympathy. What
could I do about it? And then, to my dismay, I found that I could do
something about it, that I was expected to do something. I was being
asked to help the Count to sell his frescoes. As an artist, it was
obvious, I must be acquainted with rich patrons, museums, millionaires.
I had seen the frescoes; I could honestly recommend them. And now there
was this perfected process for transferring frescoes on to canvas. The
walls could easily be peeled of their painting, the canvases rolled up
and taken to Venice. And from there it would be the easiest thing in
the world to smuggle them on board a ship and get away with them. As
for prices--if he could get a million and a half of lire, so much the
better; but he’d take a million, he’d even take three-quarters. And
he’d give me ten per cent, commission....
And afterwards, when he’d sold his frescoes, what would he do? To
begin with--the Count smiled at me triumphantly--he’d turn this
empty building in which we were now standing into an up-to-date
cheese-factory. He could start the business handsomely on half a
million, and then, using cheap female labour from the country round,
he could be almost sure of making big profits at once. In a couple of
years, he calculated, he’d be netting eighty or a hundred thousand a
year from his cheeses. And then, ah then, he’d be independent, he’d
be able to get away, he’d see the world. He’d go to Brazil and the
Argentine. An enterprising man with capital could always do well out
there. He’d go to New York, to London, to Berlin, to Paris. There was
nothing he could not do.
But meanwhile the frescoes were still on the walls--beautiful, no doubt
(for, the Count reminded me, he adored art), but futile; a huge capital
frozen into the plaster, eating its head off, utterly useless. Whereas,
with his cheese-factory....
Slowly we walked back towards the house.
I was in Venice again in the September of the following year, 1913.
There were, I imagine, that autumn, more German honeymoon-couples, more
parties of rucksacked Wander-Birds than there had ever been in Venice
before. There were too many, in any case, for me; I packed my bag and
took the train for Padua.
I had not originally intended to see young Tirabassi again. I didn’t
know, indeed, how pleased he would be to see me. For the frescoes,
so far as I knew, at any rate, were still safely on the walls, the
cheese-factory still remote in the future, in the imagination. I had
written to him more than once, telling him that I was doing my best,
but that at the moment, etcetera, etcetera. Not that I had ever held
out much hope. I had made it clear from the first that my acquaintance
among millionaires was limited, that I knew no directors of American
museums, that I had nothing to do with any of the international picture
dealers. But the Count’s faith in me had remained, none the less,
unshaken. It was the little Mexican, I believe, that inspired so much
confidence. But now, after my letters, after all this lapse of time
and nothing done, he might feel that I had let him down, deceived him
somehow. That was why I took no steps to seek him out. But chance
overruled my decision. On the third day of my stay in Padua, I ran into
him in the street. Or rather he ran into me.
It was nearly six o’clock, and I had strolled down to the Piazza del
Santo. At that hour, when the slanting light is full of colour and the
shadows are long and profound, the great church, with its cupolas and
turrets and campaniles, takes on an aspect more than ever fantastic
and oriental. I had walked round the church, and now I was standing at
the foot of Donatello’s statue, looking up at the grim bronze man, the
ponderously stepping beast, when I suddenly became aware that some one
was standing very close behind me. I took a step to one side and turned
round. It was Fabio. Wearing his famous expression of the sightseeing
parson, he was gazing up at the statue, his mouth open in a vacant and
fish-like gape. I burst out laughing.
“Did I look like that?” I asked.
“Precisely.” He laughed too. “I’ve been watching you for the last ten
minutes, mooning round the church. You English! Really....” He shook
his head.
Together we strolled up the Via del Santo, talking as we went.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to do anything about the frescoes,” I said.
“But really....” I entered into explanations.
“Some day, perhaps.” Fabio was still optimistic.
“And how’s the Countess?”
“Oh, she’s very well,” said Fabio, “considering. You know she had
another son three or four months after you came to see us.”
“No?”
“She’s expecting another now.” Fabio spoke rather gloomily, I thought.
More than ever I admired the old Count’s sagacity. But I was sorry, for
his son’s sake, that he had not a wider field in which to exercise his
talents.
“And your father?” I asked. “Shall we find him sitting at Pedrochi’s,
as usual?”
Fabio laughed. “We shall not,” he said significantly. “He’s flown.”
“Flown?”
“Gone, vanished, disappeared.”
“But where?”
“Who knows?” said Fabio. “My father is like the swallows; he comes and
he goes. Every year.... But the migration isn’t regular. Sometimes he
goes away in the spring; sometimes it’s the autumn, sometimes it’s the
summer.... One fine morning his man goes into his room to call him
as usual, and he isn’t there. Vanished. He might be dead. Oh, but he
isn’t.” Fabio laughed. “Two or three months later, in he walks again,
as though he were just coming back from a stroll in the Botanical
Gardens. ‘Good evening. Good evening.’” Fabio imitated the old Count’s
voice and manner, snuffing the air like a war-horse, twisting the ends
of an imaginary white moustache. “‘How’s your mother? How are the
girls? How have the grapes done this year?’ Snuff, snuff. ‘How’s Lucio?
And who the devil has left all this rubbish lying about in my study?’”
Fabio burst into an indignant roar that made the loiterers in the Via
Roma turn, astonished, in our direction.
“And where does he go?” I asked.
“Nobody knows. My mother used to ask, once. But she soon gave it up. It
was no good. ‘Where have you been, Ascanio?’ ‘My dear, I’m afraid the
olive crop is going to be very poor this year.’ Snuff, snuff. And when
she pressed him, he would fly into a temper and slam the doors.... What
do you say to an aperitif?” Pedrochi’s open doors invited. We entered,
chose a retired table, and sat down.
“But what do you suppose the old gentleman does when he’s away?”
“Ah!” And making the richly significant gesture I had so much admired
in his father, the young Count laid his finger against his nose and
slowly, solemnly winked his left eye.
“You mean...?”
Fabio nodded. “There’s a little widow here in Padua.” With his extended
finger the young Count described in the air an undulating line. “Nice
and plump. Black eyes. I’ve noticed that she generally seems to be
out of town just at the time the old man does his migrations. But it
may, of course, be a mere coincidence.” The waiter brought us our
vermouth. Pensively the young Count sipped. The gaiety went out of
his open, lamp-like face. “And meanwhile,” he went on slowly and in
an altered voice, “I stay here, looking after the estate, so that the
old man can go running round the world with his little pigeon--_la sua
colombella_.” (The expression struck me as particularly choice.) “Oh,
it’s funny, no doubt,” the young Count went on. “But it isn’t right.
If I wasn’t married, I’d go clean away and try my luck somewhere else.
I’d leave him to look after everything himself. But with a wife and two
children--three children soon--how can I take the risk? At any rate,
there’s plenty to eat as long as I stay here. My only hope,” he added,
after a little pause, “is in the frescoes.”
Which implied, I reflected, that his only hope was in me; I felt sorry
for him.
In the spring of 1914 I sent two rich Americans to look at Fabio’s
villa. Neither of them made any offer to buy the frescoes; it would
have astonished me if they had. But Fabio was greatly encouraged by
their arrival. “I feel,” he wrote to me, “that a beginning has now been
made. These Americans will go back to their country and tell their
friends. Soon there will be a procession of millionaires coming to see
the frescoes. Meanwhile, life is the same as ever. Rather worse, if
anything. Our little daughter, whom we have christened Emilia, was born
last month. My wife had a very bad time and is still far from well,
which is very troublesome.” (It seemed a curious adjective to use, in
the circumstances. But coming from Fabio, I understood it; he was one
of those exceedingly healthy people to whom any sort of illness is
mysterious, unaccountable, and above all extraordinarily tiresome and
irritating.) “The day before yesterday my father disappeared again. I
have not yet had time to find out if the Colombella has also vanished.
My brother, Lucio, has succeeded in getting a motor-bicycle out of him,
which is more than I ever managed to do. But then I was never one for
creeping diplomatically round and round a thing, as he can do.... I
have been going very carefully into the cheese-factory business lately,
and I am not sure that it might not be more profitable to set up a
silk-weaving establishment instead. When you next come, I will go into
details with you.”
But it was a very long time before I saw Padua and the Count again....
The War put an end to my yearly visits to Italy, and for various
reasons, even when it was over, I could not go south again as soon as
I should have liked. Not till the autumn of 1921 did I embark again on
the Venice express.
It was in an Italy not altogether familiar that I now found myself--an
Italy full of violence and bloodshed. The Fascists and the Communists
were still busily fighting. Roaring at the head of their dust-storms,
the motor-lorries, loaded with cargoes of singing boys, careered
across the country in search of adventure and lurking Bolshevism.
One stood respectfully in the gutter while they passed; and through
the flying dust, through the noise of the engine, a snatch of that
singing would be blown back: “_Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di
bellezza...._” (Youth, youth, springtime of beauty). Where but in
Italy would they have put such words to a political song? And then the
proclamations, the manifestos, the denunciations, the appeals! Every
hoarding and blank wall was plastered with them. Between the station
and Pedrochi’s I walked through a whole library of these things.
“Citizens!” they would begin. “A heroic wind is to-day reviving the
almost asphyxiated soul of our unhappy Italy, overcome by the poisonous
fumes of Bolshevism and wallowing in ignoble abasement at the feet of
the Nations.” And they finished, for the most part, with references to
Dante. I read them all with infinite pleasure.
I reached Pedrochi’s at last. On the terrace, sitting in the very
corner where I had seen him first, years before, was the old Count.
He stared at me blankly when I saluted him, not recognising me at
all. I began to explain who I was; after a moment he cut me short,
almost impatiently, protesting that he remembered now, perfectly well.
I doubted very much whether he really did; but he was too proud to
confess that he had forgotten. Meanwhile, he invited me to sit at his
table.
At a first glance, from a distance, I fancied that the old Count had
not aged a day since last I saw him. But I was wrong. From the street,
I had only seen the rakish tilt of his hat, the bristling of his white
moustache and imperial, the parted knees, the noble protrusion of the
paunch. But now that I could look at him closely and at leisure, I saw
that he was in fact a very different man. Under the tilted hat his face
was unhealthily purple; the flesh sagged into pouches. In the whites
of his eyes, discoloured and as though tarnished with age, the little
broken veins showed red. And, lustreless, the eyes themselves seemed
to look without interest at what they saw. His shoulders were bent as
though under a weight, and when he lifted his cup to his lips his hand
trembled so much that a drop of coffee splashed on to the table. He
was an old man now, old and tired.
“How’s Fabio?” I asked; since 1916 I had had no news of him.
“Oh, Fabio’s well,” the old Count answered, “Fabio’s very well. He has
six children now, you know.” And the old gentleman nodded and smiled
at me without a trace of malice. He seemed quite to have forgotten
the reasons for which he had been at so much pains to select a good
Catholic for a daughter-in-law. “Six,” he repeated. “And then, you
know, he did very well in the war. We Tirabassi have always been
warriors.” Full of pride, he went on to tell me of Fabio’s exploits and
sufferings. Twice wounded, special promotion on the field of battle,
splendid decorations. He was a major now.
“And do his military duties still keep him in Padua?”
The old gentleman nodded, and suddenly there appeared on his face
something like the old smile. “A little _combinazione_ of mine,” he
said, and chuckled.
“And the estate?” I asked.
Oh, that was doing all right, everything considered. It had got rather
out of hand during the war, while Fabio was at the front. And then,
afterwards, there had been a lot of trouble with the peasants; but
Fabio and his Fascists were putting all that to rights. “With Fabio on
the spot,” said the old gentleman, “I have no anxieties.” And then he
began to tell me, all over again, about Fabio’s exploits in the war.
The next day I took the tram to Strà, and after an hour agreeably spent
in the villa and the park, I walked on at my leisure towards Dolo. It
took me a long time to get there, for on this occasion I was able to
stop and look for as long as I liked at all the charming things on
the way. Casanova seemed, now, a good deal less enviable, I noticed,
looking inwards on myself, than he had when last I passed this way. I
was nine years older.
The gates were open; I walked in. There stood the house, as grave and
ponderous as ever, but shabbier than when I saw it last. The shutters
needed painting, and here and there the stucco was peeling off in
scabs. I approached. From within the house came a cheerful noise of
children’s laughter and shouting. The family, I supposed, was playing
hide-and-seek, or trains, or perhaps some topical game of Fascists
and Communists. As I climbed the steps of the porch, I could hear the
sound of small feet racing over the tiled floors; in the empty rooms
footsteps and shouting strangely echoed. And then suddenly, from the
sitting-room on the right, came the sound of Fabio’s voice, furiously
shouting, “Oh, for God’s sake,” it yelled, “keep those wretched
children quiet.” And then, petulantly, it complained, “How do you
expect me to do accounts with this sort of thing going on?” There was
at once a profound and as it were unnatural silence; then the sound of
small feet tiptoeing away, some whispering, a little nervous laugh. I
rang the bell.
It was the Countess who opened the door. She stood for a moment
hesitatingly, wondering who I was; then remembered, smiled, held out
her hand. She had grown, I noticed, very thin, and with the wasting of
her face, her eyes seemed to have become larger. Their expression was
as gentle and serene as ever; she seemed to be looking at me from a
distance.
“Fabio will be delighted to see you,” she said, and she took
me through the door on the right of the porch straight into the
sitting-room. Fabio was sitting at the Palladian table in front of a
heap of papers, biting the end of his pencil.
Even in his grey-green service uniform the young Count looked
wonderfully brilliant, like a soldier on the stage. His face was still
boyishly freckled, but the skin was deeply lined; he looked very much
older than when I had seen him last--older than he really was. The
open cheerfulness, the shining, lamp-like brightness were gone. On
his snubby-featured face he wore a ludicrously incongruous expression
of chronic melancholy. He brightened, it is true, for a moment when I
appeared; I think he was genuinely glad to see me.
“_Caspita!_” he kept repeating. “_Caspita!_” (It was his favourite
expression of astonishment, an odd, old-fashioned word.) “Who would
have thought it? After all this time!”
“And all the eternity of the war as well,” I said.
But when the first ebullition of surprise and pleasure subsided, the
look of melancholy came back.
“It gives me the spleen,” he said, “to see you again; still travelling
about; free to go where you like. If you knew what life was like
here....”
“Well, in any case,” I said, feeling that I ought, for the Countess’s
sake, to make some sort of protest, “in any case the war’s over, and
you have escaped a real revolution. That’s something.”
“Oh, you’re as bad as Laura,” said the Count impatiently. He looked
towards his wife, as though hoping that she would say something. But
the Countess went on with her sewing without even looking up. The
Count took my arm. “Come along,” he said, and his tone was almost
one of anger. “Let’s take a turn outside.” His wife’s religious
resignation, her patience, her serenity angered him, I could see, like
a reprimand--tacit, indeed, and unintentionally given, but none the
less galling.
Along the weed-grown paths of what had once, in the ancient days of
splendour, been the garden, slowly we walked towards the farm. A few
ragged box-trees grew along the fringes of the paths; once there had
been neat hedges. Poised over a dry basin a Triton blew his waterless
conch. At the end of the vista a pair of rapes--Pluto and Proserpine,
Apollo and Daphne--writhed desperately against the sky.
“I saw your father yesterday,” I said. “He looks aged.”
“And so he ought,” said Fabio murderously. “He’s sixty-nine.”
I felt uncomfortably that the subject had become too serious for
light conversation. I had wanted to ask after the Colombella; in the
circumstances, I decided that it would be wiser to say nothing about
her. I repressed my curiosity. We were walking now under the lea of the
farm buildings.
“The cows look very healthy,” I said politely, looking through an
open doorway. In the twilight within, six grey rumps plastered with
dry dung presented themselves in file; six long leather tails swished
impatiently from side to side. Fabio made no comment; he only grunted.
“In any case,” he went on slowly, after another silence, “he can’t live
much longer. I shall sell my share and clear off to South America,
family or no family.” It was a threat against his own destiny, a
threat of which he must have known the vanity. He was deceiving himself
to keep up his spirits.
“But I say,” I exclaimed, taking another and better opportunity to
change the conversation, “I see you have started a factory here after
all.” We had walked round to the farther side of the square. Through
the windows of the long low building which, at my last visit, had stood
untenanted, I saw the complicated shapes of machines, rows of them
in a double line down the whole length of the building. “Looms? Then
you decided against cheese? And the frescoes?” I turned questioningly
towards the Count. I had a horrible fear that, when we got back to the
house, I should find the great hall peeled of its Veroneses and a blank
of plaster where once had been the history of Eros and Psyche.
“Oh, the frescoes are still there, what’s left of them.” And in spite
of Fabio’s long face, I was delighted at the news. “I persuaded my
father to sell some of his house property in Padua, and we started this
weaving business here two years ago. Just in time,” Fabio added, “for
the Communist revolution.”
Poor Fabio, he had no luck. The peasants had seized his factory and had
tried to possess themselves of his land. For three weeks he had lived
at the villa in a state of siege, defending the place, with twenty
Fascists to help him, against all the peasants of the countryside. The
danger was over now; but the machines were broken, and in any case it
was out of the question to start them again; feeling was still too
high. And what, for Fabio, made it worse was the fact that his brother
Lucio, who had also got a little capital out of the old man, had gone
off to Bulgaria and invested it in a bootlace factory. It was the only
bootlace factory in the country, and Lucio was making money hand over
fist. Free as air he was, well off, with a lovely Turkish girl for a
mistress. For Fabio, the Turkish girl was evidently the last straw.
“_Una Turca, una vera Turca_,” he repeated, shaking his head. The
female infidel symbolised in his eyes all that was exotic, irregular,
undomestic; all that was not the family; all that was remote from Padua
and the estate.
“And they were such beautiful machines,” said Fabio, pausing for a
moment to look in at the last of the long line of windows. “Whether
to sell them, whether to wait till all this has blown over and have
them put right and try to start again--I don’t know.” He shrugged his
shoulders hopelessly. “Or just let things slide till the old man dies.”
We turned the corner of the square and began to walk back towards the
house. “Sometimes,” he added, after a silence, “I don’t believe he ever
will die.”
The children were playing in the great hall of the Veroneses. The
majestic double doors which gave on to the portico were ajar; through
the opening we watched them for a moment without being seen. The
family was formed up in order of battle. A red-headed boy of ten or
eleven led the van, a brown boy followed. Then came three little
girls, diminishing regularly in size like graded pearls; and finally
a little toddling creature in blue linen crawlers. All six of them
carried shouldered bamboos, and they were singing in ragged unison to
a kind of trumpet call of three notes: “_All’ armi i Fascisti; a morte
i Comunisti; a basso i Socialisti_”--over and over again. And as they
sang they marched, round and round, earnestly, indefatigably. The huge
empty room echoed like a swimming-bath. Remote under their triumphal
arches, in their serene world of fantastic beauty, the silken ladies
and gentlemen played their music, drank their wine; the poet declaimed,
the painter poised his brush before the canvas; the monkeys clambered
among the Roman ruins, the parrots dozed on the balustrades. “_All’
armi i Fascisti, a morte i Comunisti...._” I should have liked to stand
there in silence, merely to see how long the children would continue
their patriotic march. But Fabio had none of my scientific curiosity;
or if he ever had, it had certainly been exhausted long before the last
of his children was born. After indulging me for a moment with the
spectacle, he pushed open the door and walked in. The children looked
round and were immediately silent. What with his bad temper and his
theory of education by teasing, they seemed to be thoroughly frightened
of their father.
“Go on,” he said, “go on.” But they wouldn’t; they obviously couldn’t,
in his terrifying presence. Unobtrusively they slipped away.
Fabio led me round the painted room. “Look here,” he said, “and look
here.” In one of the walls of the great hall there were half a dozen
bullet holes. A chip had been taken off one of the painted cornices;
one lady was horribly wounded in the face; there were two or three
holes in the landscape, and a monkey’s tail was severed. “That’s our
friends, the peasants,” Fabio explained.
In the Carpioni rooms all was still well; the satyrs still pursued
their nymphs, and in the room of the centaurs and the mermaids, the men
who were half horses still galloped as tumultuously as ever into the
sea, to ravish the women who were half fish. But the tale of Eros and
Psyche had suffered dreadfully. The exquisite panel in which Tiepolo
had painted Psyche holding up the lamp to look at her mysterious lover
was no more than a faint, mildewy smudge. And where once the indignant
young god had flown upwards to rejoin his Olympian relatives (who
still, fortunately, swam about intact among the clouds on the ceiling)
there was nothing but the palest ghost of an ascending Cupid, while
Psyche weeping on the earth below was now quite invisible.
“That’s our friends the French,” said Fabio. “They were quartered here
in 1918, and they didn’t trouble to shut the windows when it rained.”
Poor Fabio! Everything was against him. I had no consolation to offer.
That autumn I sent him an art critic and three more Americans. But
nothing came of their visits. The fact was that he had too much to
offer. A picture--that might easily have been disposed of. But what
could one do with a whole houseful of paintings like this?
The months passed. About Easter time of the next year I had another
letter from Fabio. The olive crop had been poor. The Countess was
expecting another baby and was far from well. The two eldest children
were down with measles, and the last but one had what the Italians call
an “asinine cough.” He expected all the children to catch both diseases
in due course. He was very doubtful now if it would ever be worth while
to restart his looms; the position of the silk trade was not so sound
as it had been at the end of 1919. If only he had stuck to cheese,
as he first intended! Lucio had just made fifty thousand lire by a
lucky stroke of speculation. But the female infidel had run off with a
Rumanian. The old Count was ageing rapidly; when Fabio saw him last,
he had told the same anecdote three times in the space of ten minutes.
With these two pieces of good news--they were for him, I imagine, the
only bright spots in the surrounding gloom--Fabio closed his letter.
I was left wondering why he troubled to write to me at all. It may be
that he got a certain lacerating satisfaction by thus enumerating his
troubles.
That August there was a musical festival in Salzburg. I had never
been in Austria; the occasion seemed to me a good one. I went, and
I enjoyed myself prodigiously. Salzburg at the moment is all in
the movement. There are baroque churches in abundance; there are
Italianate fountains; there are gardens and palaces that mimic in their
extravagantly ponderous Teutonic way the gardens and palaces of Rome.
And, choicest treasure of all, there is a tunnel, forty feet high,
bored through a precipitous crag--a tunnel such as only a Prince Bishop
of the seventeenth century could have dreamed of, having at either
end an arch of triumph, with pilasters, broken pediments, statues,
scutcheons, all carved out of the living rock--a masterpiece among
tunnels, and in a town where everything, without being really good, is
exquisitely “amusing,” the most amusing feature of all. Ah, decidedly,
Salzburg is in the movement.
One afternoon I took the funicular up to the castle. There is a
beer-terrace under the walls of the fortress from which you get a view
that is starred in Baedeker. Below you on one side lies the town,
spread out in the curving valley, with a river running through it,
like a small and German version of Florence. From the other side of
the terrace you look out over a panorama that makes no pretence to
Italianism; it is as sweetly and romantically German as an air out of
Weber’s _Freischütz_. There are mountains on the horizon, spiky and
blue like mountains in a picture book; and in the foreground, extending
to the very foot of the extremely improbable crag on which the castle
and the beer-garden are perched, stretches a flat green plain--miles
upon miles of juicy meadows dotted with minusculous cows, with here and
there a neat toy farm, or, more rarely, a cluster of dolls’ houses,
with a spire going up glittering from the midst of them.
I was sitting with my blond beer in front of this delicious and
slightly comical landscape, thinking comfortably of nothing in
particular, when I heard behind me a rapturous voice exclaiming,
“Bello, bello!” I looked round curiously--for it seemed to me somehow
rather surprising to hear Italian spoken here--and saw one of those
fine sumptuous women they admire so much in the South. She was a _bella
grassa_, plump to the verge of overripeness and perilously near middle
age; but still in her way exceedingly handsome. Her face had the
proportions of an iceberg--one-fifth above water, four-fifths below.
Ample and florid from the eyes downwards, it was almost foreheadless;
the hair began immediately above the brows. The eyes themselves were
dark, large, and, for my taste, at least, somewhat excessively tender
in expression. I took her in in a moment and was about to look away
again when her companion, who had been looking at the view on the other
side, turned round. It was the old Count.
I was far more embarrassed, I believe, than he. I felt myself blushing,
as our eyes met, as though it were I who had been travelling about the
world with a Colombella and he who had caught me in the act. I did
not know what to do--whether to smile and speak to him, or to turn
away as though I had not recognised him, or to nod from a distance and
then, discreetly, to disappear. But the old Count put an end to my
irresolution by calling out my name in astonishment, by running up to
me and seizing my hand. What a delight to see an old friend! Here of
all places! In this God-forsaken country--though it was cheap enough,
didn’t I find? He would introduce me to a charming compatriot of his
own, an Italian lady he had met yesterday in the train from Vienna.
I was made known to the Colombella, and we all sat down at my table.
Speaking resolutely in Italian, the Count ordered two more beers.
We talked. Or rather the Count talked; for the conversation was a
monologue. He told us anecdotes of the Italy of fifty years ago; he
gave us imitations of the queer characters he had known; he even, at
one moment, imitated the braying of an ass--I forget in what context;
but the braying remains vividly in my memory. Snuffing the air between
every sentence, he gave us his views on women. The Colombella screamed
indignant protests, dissolved herself in laughter. The old Count
twisted his moustaches, twinkling at her through the network of his
wrinkles. Every now and then he turned in my direction and gave me a
little wink.
I listened in astonishment. Was this the man who had told the same
anecdote three times in ten minutes? I looked at the old Count. He
was leaning towards the Colombella whispering something in her ear
which made her laugh so much that she had to wipe the tears from her
eyes. Turning away from her, he caught my eye; smiling, he shrugged
his shoulders as though to say, “These women! What imbeciles, but how
delicious, how indispensable!” Was this the tired old man I had seen a
year ago sitting on Pedrochi’s terrace? It seemed incredible.
“Well, good-bye, _a rivederci_.” They had to get down into the town
again. The funicular was waiting.
“I’m delighted to have seen you,” said the old Count, shaking me
affectionately by the hand.
“And so am I,” I protested. “Particularly delighted to see you so well.”
“Yes, I’m wonderfully well now,” he said, blowing out his chest.
“And young,” I went on. “Younger than I am! How have you done it?”
“Aha!” The old Count cocked his head on one side mysteriously.
More in joke than in earnest, “I believe you’ve been seeing Steinach in
Vienna,” I said. “Having a rejuvenating operation.”
For all reply, the old Count raised the forefinger of his right hand,
laying it first to his lips, then along the side of his nose, and as he
did so he winked. Then clenching his fist, and with his thumb sticking
rigidly up, he made a complicated gesture which would, I am sure, for
an Italian, have been full of a profound and vital significance. To me,
however, unfamiliar with the language of signs, the exact meaning was
not entirely clear. But the Count offered no verbal explanation. Still
without uttering a word, he raised his hat; then laying his finger once
more to his lips, he turned and ran with an astonishing agility down
the steep path towards the little carriage of the funicular, in which
the Colombella had already taken her seat.