My train drew near to the Via Reggio platform on a day between two of the
harvests of a hot September; the sea was burning blue, and there were a
sombreness and a gravity in the very excesses of the sun as his fires
brooded deeply over the serried, hardy, shabby, seaside ilex-woods. I
had come out of Tuscany and was on my way to the Genovesato: the steep
country with its profiles, bay by bay, of successive mountains grey with
olive-trees, between the flashes of the Mediterranean and the sky; the
country through the which there sounds the twanging Genoese language, a
thin Italian mingled with a little Arabic, more Portuguese, and much
French. I was regretful at leaving the elastic Tuscan speech, canorous
in its vowels set in emphatic _l's_ and _m's_ and the vigorous soft
spring of the double consonants. But as the train arrived its noises
were drowned by a voice declaiming in the tongue I was not to hear again
for months--good Italian. The voice was so loud that one looked for the
audience: Whose ears was it seeking to reach by the violence done to
every syllable, and whose feelings would it touch by its insincerity? The
tones were insincere, but there was passion behind them; and most often
passion acts its own true character poorly, and consciously enough to
make good judges think it a mere counterfeit. Hamlet, being a little
mad, feigned madness. It is when I am angry that I pretend to be angry,
so as to present the truth in an obvious and intelligible form. Thus
even before the words were distinguishable it was manifest that they were
spoken by a man in serious trouble who had false ideas as to what is
convincing in elocution.
When the voice became audibly articulate, it proved to be shouting
blasphemies from the broad chest of a middle-aged man--an Italian of the
type that grows stout and wears whiskers. The man was in _bourgeois_
dress, and he stood with his hat off in front of the small station
building, shaking his thick fist at the sky. No one was on the platform
with him except the railway officials, who seemed in doubt as to their
duties in the matter, and two women. Of one of these there was nothing
to remark except her distress. She wept as she stood at the door of the
waiting-room. Like the second woman, she wore the dress of the
shopkeeping class throughout Europe, with the local black lace veil in
place of a bonnet over her hair. It is of the second woman--O
unfortunate creature!--that this record is made--a record without sequel,
without consequence; but there is nothing to be done in her regard except
so to remember her. And thus much I think I owe after having looked,
from the midst of the negative happiness that is given to so many for a
space of years, at some minutes of her despair. She was hanging on the
man's arm in her entreaties that he would stop the drama he was enacting.
She had wept so hard that her face was disfigured. Across her nose was
the dark purple that comes with overpowering fear. Haydon saw it on the
face of a woman whose child had just been run over in a London street. I
remembered the note in his journal as the woman at Via Reggio, in her
intolerable hour, turned her head my way, her sobs lifting it. She was
afraid that the man would throw himself under the train. She was afraid
that he would be damned for his blasphemies; and as to this her fear was
mortal fear. It was horrible, too, that she was humpbacked and a dwarf.
Not until the train drew away from the station did we lose the clamour.
No one had tried to silence the man or to soothe the woman's horror. But
has any one who saw it forgotten her face? To me for the rest of the day
it was a sensible rather than a merely mental image. Constantly a red
blur rose before my eyes for a background, and against it appeared the
dwarf's head, lifted with sobs, under the provincial black lace veil. And
at night what emphasis it gained on the boundaries of sleep! Close to my
hotel there was a roofless theatre crammed with people, where they were
giving Offenbach. The operas of Offenbach still exist in Italy, and the
little town was placarded with announcements of _La Bella Elena_. The
peculiar vulgar rhythm of the music jigged audibly through half the hot
night, and the clapping of the town's-folk filled all its pauses. But
the persistent noise did but accompany, for me, the persistent vision of
those three figures at the Via Reggio station in the profound sunshine of
the day.