"Yours is not a bad life."
"One lives. But I had better times in Zurich."
He had stayed there awhile, working in some factory. He praised its
food, its beer, its conveniences.
Zurich: incongruous image! Straightway I was transported from this
harmonious desolation of Ferento; I lost sight of yonder clump of
withering thistles--thistles of recent growth; you could sit, you could
stand, in their shade--and found myself glancing over a leaden lake and
wandering about streets full of ill-dressed and ungracious folk;
escaping thence further afield, into featureless hills encrusted with
smug, tawdry villas and drinking-booths smothered under noisome
horse-chestnuts and Virginia creepers. How came they to hit upon the
ugliest tree, and the ugliest creeper, on earth? Infallible instinct!
Zurich: who shall sum up thy merciless vulgarity?
So this old man had been there.
And I remembered an expression in a book recently written by a friend of
mine who, oddly enough, had encountered some of these very Italians in
Zurich. He talks of its "horrible dead ordinariness"--some such phrase.
[33] It is apt. Zurich: fearsome town! Its ugliness is of the active
kind; it grips you by the throat and sits on your chest like a
nightmare.
I looked at the old fellow. He was sound; he had escaped the contagion.
Those others, those many hundred thousand others in Switzerland and
America--they can nevermore shake off the horrible dead ordinariness of
that life among machines. Future generations will hardly recognise the
Italian race from our descriptions. A new type is being formed, cold and
loveless, with all the divinity drained out of them.
Having a long walk before me and being due home for luncheon, I rose to
depart, and in so doing bestowed a vigorous kick upon Barone, in order
to test the truth of his master's theory. It worked. The glowering and
snarling ceased. He was a good dog--almost human. I think, with a few
more kicks, he might have grown quite friendly.
Along that hot road the spectre of Zurich pursued me, in all its
starkness. A land without atmosphere, and deficient in every element of
the picturesque, whether of man or nature. Four harsh, dominant tones,
which never overlap or intermingle: blue sky, white snow, black
fir-woods, green fields, and, if you insist upon having a fifth, then
take--yes, take and keep--that theatrical pink Alpenglühen which is
turned on at fixed hours for the delectation of gaping tourists, like a
tap of strontium light or the display of electric fluid at Schaffhausen
Falls.
"Did you observe the illumination of the Falls, sir, last night?"
"How can one avoid seeing the beastly thing?"
"Ah! Then we must add two francs to the bill."
Many are the schools of art that have grown up in England and elsewhere
and flourished side by side, vying with one another to express the
protean graces of man, of architecture and domestic interior, of earth
and sky and sea. Where is the Swiss school? Where, in any public
gallery, will you find a masterpiece which triumphantly vindicates the
charm of Swiss scenery? You will, find it vindicated only on condensed
milk tins. These folks can write. My taste in lyrics may be peculiar,
but I used to love my Leuthold--I wish I had him here at this moment;
the bold strokes of Keller, the miniature work, the cameo-like touches,
of C. F. Meyer--they can write! They would doubtless paint, were there
anything to paint. Holbein: did the landscape of Switzerland seduce him?
And Boecklin? He fled out of its welter of raw materialism. Even his
Swiss landscapes are mediterraneanized. Boecklin----
And here, as the name formulated itself, that little sprite of Brahms,
that intermezzo, once more leapt to my side out of the parched fields. I
imagine it came less for my sake than for the companionship of Boecklin.
They were comrades in the spirit; they understood. What one had heard,
the other beheld--shapes of mystery, that peer out of forest gloom and
the blue hush of midday and out of glassy waters--shapes that shudder
and laugh. No doubt you may detect a difference between Boecklin's
creations and those of classic days; it is as if the light of his
dreamings had filtered through some medium, some stained-glass window in
a Gothic church which distorted their outlines and rendered them
somewhat more grotesque. It is the hand of time. The world has aged. Yet
the shapes are young; they do but change their clothes and follow the
fashion in externals. They laugh as of old. How they laugh! No mortal
can laugh so heartily. No mortal has such good cause. Theirs is not the
serene mirth of Olympian spheres; it sounds demoniac, from the midway
region. What are they laughing at, these cheerful monsters? At the
greatest jest in the universe. At us....
That lake of Conterano--the accent is on the ante-penultima--it looked
appetising on the map, all alone out there. It attracted me strongly. I
pictured a placid expanse, an eye of blue, sleepily embowered among
wooded glens and throwing upward the gleam of its calm waters. Lakes are
so rare in Italy. During the whole of this summer I saw only one other,
fringed with the common English reed--two, rather, lying side by side,
one turbid and the other clear, and filling up two of those curious
circular depressions in the limestone. I rode past them on the watershed
behind Cineto Romano. These were sweet water. Of sulphur lakelets I also
saw two.
Sitting on a stone into which the coldness of midnight had entered
(Alatri lies at a good elevation) I awaited my companion in the dusk of
dawn. Soon enough, I knew, we should both be roasted. This half-hour's
shivering before sunrise in the square of Alatri, and listening to the
plash of the fountain, is one of those memories of the town which are
graven most clearly in my mind. I could point out, to-day, the very spot
whereon I sat.
We wandered along the Ferentino road to begin with, profiting by some
short cuts through chestnut woods; turned to the right, ever ascending,
behind that strange village of Fumone, aloft on its symmetrical hill;
thence by a mule-track onward. Many were the halts by the way. A decayed
roadside chapel with faded frescoes--a shepherd who played us some
melodies on his pipe--those wondrous red lilies, now in their prime,
glowing like lamps among the dark green undergrowth--the gateway of a
farmhouse being repaired--a reservoir of water full of newts--a
fascinating old woman who told us something about something--the distant
view upon the singular peak of Mount Cacume, they all gave us occasion
for lingering. Why not loaf and loiter in June? The days are so endless!
At last, through a gap in the landscape, we saw the lake at our feet,
simmering in the noonday beams--an everyday sheet of water, brown in
colour, with muddy banks and seemingly not a scrap of shade within
miles; one of those lakes which, by their periodical rising and sinking,
give so much trouble that there is talk, equally periodical, of draining
them off altogether. This one, they say, shifts continually and
sometimes reaches so low a level that rich crops are planted in its oozy
bed.
Here are countless frogs, and fish--tench; also a boat that belongs to
the man who rents the fishing. A sad accident happened lately with his
boat. A party of youngsters came for an outing and two boys jumped into
the tub, rowed out, and capsized it with their pranks. They were both
drowned--a painful and piteous death--a death which I have tried, by
accident, and can nowise recommend. They fished them out later from
their slimy couch, and found that they had clasped one another so
tightly in their mortal agony that it was deemed impious ever to
unloosen that embrace. So they were laid to rest, locked in each other's
arms.
While my companion told me these things we had plodded further and
further along this flat and inhospitable shore, and grown more and more
taciturn. We were hungry and thirsty and hot, for one feels the
onslaught of these first heats more acutely than the parching drought of
August. Things looked bad. The luncheon hour was long past, and our
spirits began to droop. All my mellowness took flight; I grew snappy and
monosyllabic. Was there no shade?
Yonder ... that dusky patch against the mountain? Brushwood of some
kind, without a doubt. The place seemed to be unattainable, and yet,
after an inordinate outlay of energy, we had climbed across those torrid
meadows. It proved to be a hazel copse mysteriously dark within,
voiceless, and cool as a cavern.
Be sure that he who planted these hazels on the bleak hillside was no
common son of earth, but some wise and inspired mortal. My blessings on
his head! May his shadow never grow less! Or, if that wish be already
past fulfilment, may he dwell in Elysium attended by a thousand
ministering angels, every one of them selected by himself; may he
rejoice in their caresses for evermore. Naught was amiss. All conspired
to make the occasion memorable. I look back upon our sojourn among those
verdant hazels and see that it was good--one of those moments which are
never granted knowingly by jealous fate. So dense was the leafage in the
greenest heart of the grove that not a shred of sunlight, not a particle
as large as a sixpence, could penetrate to earth. We were drowned in
shade; screened from the flaming world outside; secure--without a care.
We envied neither God nor man.
I thought of certain of my fellow-creatures. I often think of them. What
were they now doing? Taking themselves seriously and rushing about, as
usual, haggard and careworn--like those sagacious ants that scurry
hither and thither, and stare into each other's faces with a kind of
desperate imbecility, when some sportive schoolboy has kicked their
ridiculous nest into the air and upset all their solemn little
calculations.
As for ourselves, we took our ease. We ate and drank, we slumbered
awhile, then joked and frolicked for five hours on end, or possibly six.
[34] I kept no count of what was said nor how the time flew by. I only
know that when at last we emerged from our ambrosial shelter the muscles
of my stomach had grown sore from the strain of laughter, and Arcturus
was twinkling overhead.