AUCTOR. Patience, dear Lector, patience! I will tell it well. Besides
which I promise you it shall never be told again. I will copyright it.
Well, once there was a Learned Man who had a bargain with the Devil
that he should warn the Devil's emissaries of all the good deeds done
around him so that they could be upset, and he in turn was to have all
those pleasant things of this life which the Devil's allies usually
get, to wit a Comfortable Home, Self-Respect, good health, 'enough
money for one's rank', and generally what is called 'a happy useful
life'--_till_ midnight of All-Hallowe'en in the last year of the
nineteenth century.
So this Learned Man did all he was required, and daily would inform
the messenger imps of the good being done or prepared in the
neighbourhood, and they would upset it; so that the place he lived in
from a nice country town became a great Centre of Industry, full of
wealth and desirable family mansions and street property, and was
called in hell 'Depot B' (Depot A you may guess at). But at last
toward the 15th of October 1900, the Learned Man began to shake in his
shoes and to dread the judgement; for, you see, he had not the
comfortable ignorance of his kind, and was compelled to believe in the
Devil willy-nilly, and, as I say, he shook in his shoes.
So he bethought him of a plan to cheat the Devil, and the day before
All-Hallowe'en he cut a very small round hole in the floor of his
study, just near the fireplace, right through down to the cellar. Then
he got a number of things that do great harm (newspapers, legal
documents, unpaid bills, and so forth) and made ready for action.
Next morning when the little imps came for orders as usual, after
prayers, he took them down into the cellar, and pointing out the hole
in the ceiling, he said to them:
'My friends, this little hole is a mystery. It communicates, I
believe, with the chapel; but I cannot find the exit. All I know is,
that some pious person or angel, or what not, desirous to do good,
slips into it every day whatever he thinks may be a cause of evil in
the neighbourhood, hoping thus to destroy it' (in proof of which
statement he showed them a scattered heap of newspapers on the floor
of the cellar beneath the hole). 'And the best thing you can do,' he
added, 'is to stay here and take them away as far as they come down
and put them back into circulation again. Tut! tut!' he added, picking
up a moneylender's threatening letter to a widow, 'it is astonishing
how these people interfere with the most sacred rights! Here is a
letter actually stolen from the post! Pray see that it is delivered.'
So he left the little imps at work, and fed them from above with all
manner of evil-doing things, which they as promptly drew into the
cellar, and at intervals flew away with, to put them into circulation
again.
That evening, at about half-past eleven, the Devil came to fetch the
Learned Man, and found him seated at his fine great desk, writing. The
Learned Man got up very affably to receive the Devil, and offered him
a chair by the fire, just near the little round hole.
'Pray don't move,' said the Devil; 'I came early on purpose not to
disturb you.'
'You are very good,' replied the Learned Man. 'The fact is, I have to
finish my report on Lady Grope's Settlement among our Poor in the Bull
Ring--it is making some progress. But their condition is
heart-breaking, my dear sir; heart-breaking!'
'I can well believe it,' said the Devil sadly and solemnly, leaning
back in his chair, and pressing his hands together like a roof. 'The
poor in our great towns, Sir Charles' (for the Learned Man had been
made a Baronet), 'the condition, I say, of the--Don't I feel a
draught?' he added abruptly. For the Devil can't bear draughts.
'Why,' said the Learned Man, as though ashamed, 'just near your chair
there _is_ a little hole that I have done my best to fill up, but
somehow it seemed impossible to fill it... I don't know...'
The Devil hates excuses, and is above all practical, so he just
whipped the soul of a lawyer out of his side-pocket, tied a knot in it
to stiffen it, and shoved it into the hole.
'There!' said the Devil contentedly; 'if you had taken a piece of rag,
or what not, you might yourself... Hulloa!...' He looked down and saw
the hole still gaping, and he felt a furious draught coming up again.
He wondered a little, and then muttered: 'It's a pity I have on my
best things. I never dare crease them, and I have nothing in my
pockets to speak of, otherwise I might have brought something bigger.'
He felt in his left-hand trouser pocket, and fished out a pedant,
crumpled him carefully into a ball, and stuffed him hard into the
hole, so that he suffered agonies. Then the Devil watched carefully.
The soul of the pedant was at first tugged as if from below, then
drawn slowly down, and finally shot off out of sight.
'This is a most extraordinary thing!' said the Devil.
'It is the draught. It is very strong between the joists,' ventured
the Learned Man.
'Fiddle-sticks ends!' shouted the Devil. 'It is a trick! But I've
never been caught yet, and I never will be.'
He clapped his hands, and a whole host of his followers poured in
through the windows with mortgages, Acts of Parliament, legal
decisions, declarations of war, charters to universities, patents for
medicines, naturalization orders, shares in gold mines,
specifications, prospectuses, water companies' reports, publishers'
agreements, letters patent, freedoms of cities, and, in a word, all
that the Devil controls in the way of hole-stopping rubbish; and the
Devil, kneeling on the floor, stuffed them into the hole like a
madman. But as fast as he stuffed, the little imps below (who had
summoned a number of their kind to their aid also) pulled it through
and carted it away. And the Devil, like one possessed, lashed the
floor with his tail, and his eyes glared like coals of fire, and the
sweat ran down his face, and he breathed hard, and pushed every
imaginable thing he had into the hole so swiftly that at last his
documents and parchments looked like streaks and flashes. But the
loyal little imps, not to be beaten, drew them through into the cellar
as fast as machinery, and whirled them to their assistants; and all
the poor lost souls who had been pressed into the service were
groaning that their one holiday in the year was being filched from
them, when, just as the process was going on so fast that it roared
like a printing-machine in full blast, the clock in the hall struck
twelve.
The Devil suddenly stopped and stood up.
'Out of my house,' said the Learned Man; 'out of my house! I've had
enough of you, and I've no time for fiddle-faddle! It's past twelve,
and I've won!'
The Devil, though still panting, smiled a diabolical smile, and
pulling out his repeater (which he had taken as a perquisite from the
body of a member of Parliament), said, 'I suppose you keep Greenwich
time?'
'Certainly!' said Sir Charles.
'Well,' said the Devil, 'so much the worse for you to live in Suffolk.
You're four minutes fast, so I'll trouble you to come along with me;
and I warn you that any words you now say may be used against...'
At this point the Learned Man's patron saint, who thought things had
gone far enough, materialized himself and coughed gently. They both
looked round, and there was St Charles sitting in the easy chair.
'So far,' murmured the Saint to the Devil suavely, 'so far from being
four minutes too early, you are exactly a year too late.' On saying
this, the Saint smiled a genial, priestly smile, folded his hands,
twiddled his thumbs slowly round and round, and gazed in a fatherly
way at the Devil.
'What do you mean?' shouted the Devil.
'What I say,' said St Charles calmly; '1900 is not the last year of
the nineteenth century; it is the first year of the twentieth.'
'Oh!' sneered the Devil, 'are you an anti-vaccinationist as well? Now,
look here' (and he began counting on his fingers); 'supposing in the
year 1 B.C....'
'I never argue,' said St Charles.
'Well, all I know is,' answered the Devil with some heat, 'that in
this matter as in most others, thank the Lord, I have on my side all
the historians and all the scientists, all the universities, all
the...'
'And I,' interrupted St Charles, waving his hand like a gentleman (he
is a Borromeo), 'I have the Pope!'
At this the Devil gave a great howl, and disappeared in a clap of
thunder, and was never seen again till his recent appearance at
Brighton.
So the Learned Man was saved; but hardly; for he had to spend five
hundred years in Purgatory catechizing such heretics and pagans as got
there, and instructing them in the true faith. And with the more
muscular he passed a knotty time.
You do not see the river Po till you are close to it. Then, a little
crook in the road being passed, you come between high trees, and
straight out before you, level with you, runs the road into and over a
very wide mass of tumbling water. It does not look like a bridge, it
looks like a quay. It does not rise; it has all the appearance of
being a strip of road shaved off and floated on the water.
All this is because it passes over boats, as do some bridges over the
Rhine. (At Cologne, I believe, and certainly at Kiel--for I once sat
at the end of that and saw a lot of sad German soldiers drilling, a
memory which later made me understand (1) why they can be out-marched
by Latins; (2) why they impress travellers and civilians; (3) why the
governing class in Germany take care to avoid common service; (4) why
there is no promotion from the ranks; and (5) why their artillery is
too rigid and not quick enough. It also showed me something intimate
and fundamental about the Germans which Tacitus never understood and
which all our historians miss--they are _of necessity_ histrionic.
Note I do not say it is a vice of theirs. It is a necessity of theirs,
an appetite. They must see themselves on a stage. Whether they do
things well or ill, whether it is their excellent army with its
ridiculous parade, or their eighteenth-century _sans-soucis_ with
avenues and surprises, or their national legends with gods in wigs and
strong men in tights, they _must_ be play-actors to be happy and
therefore to be efficient; and if I were Lord of Germany, and desired
to lead my nation and to be loved by them, I should put great golden
feathers on my helmet, I should use rhetorical expressions, spout
monologues in public, organize wide cavalry charges at reviews, and
move through life generally to the crashing of an orchestra. For by
doing this even a vulgar, short, and diseased man, who dabbled in
stocks and shares and was led by financiers, could become a hero, and
do his nation good.)
LECTOR. What is all this?
AUCTOR. It is a parenthesis.
LECTOR. It is good to know the names of the strange things one meets
with on one's travels.
AUCTOR. So I return to where I branched off, and tell you that the
river Po is here crossed by a bridge of boats.
It is a very large stream. Half-way across, it is even a trifle
uncomfortable to be so near the rush of the water on the trembling
pontoons. And on that day its speed and turbulence were emphasized by
the falling rain. For the marks of the rain on the water showed the
rapidity of the current, and the silence of its fall framed and
enhanced the swirl of the great river.
Once across, it is a step up into Piacenza--a step through mud and
rain. On my right was that plain where Barbarossa received, and was
glorified by, the rising life of the twelfth century; there the
renaissance of our Europe saw the future glorious for the first time
since the twilight of Rome, and being full of morning they imagined a
new earth and gave it a Lord. It was at Roncaglia, I think in spring,
and I wish I had been there. For in spring even the Lombard plain they
say is beautiful and generous, but in summer I know by experience that
it is cold, brutish, and wet.
And so in Piacenza it rained and there was mud, till I came to a hotel
called the Moor's Head, in a very narrow street, and entering it I
discovered a curious thing: the Italians live in palaces: I might have
known it.
They are the impoverished heirs of a great time; its garments cling to
them, but their rooms are too large for the modern penury. I found
these men eating in a great corridor, in a hall, as they might do in a
palace. I found high, painted ceilings and many things of marble, a
vast kitchen, and all the apparatus of the great houses--at the
service of a handful of contented, unknown men. So in England, when we
have worked out our full fate, happier but poorer men will sit in the
faded country-houses (a community, or an inn, or impoverished
squires), and rough food will be eaten under mouldering great
pictures, and there will be offices or granaries in the galleries of
our castles; and where Lord Saxonthorpe (whose real name is
Hauptstein) now plans our policy, common Englishmen will return to the
simpler life, and there will be dogs, and beer, and catches upon
winter evenings. For Italy also once gathered by artifice the wealth
that was not of her making.
He was a good man, the innkeeper of this palace. He warmed me at his
fire in his enormous kitchen, and I drank Malaga to the health of the
cooks. I ate of their food, I bought a bottle of a new kind of sweet
wine called 'Vino Dolce', and--I took the road.
LECTOR. And did you see nothing of Piacenza?
AUCTOR. Nothing, Lector; it was raining, and there was mud. I stood in
front of the cathedral on my way out, and watched it rain. It rained
all along the broad and splendid Emilian Way. I had promised myself
great visions of the Roman soldiery passing up that eternal road; it
still was stamped with the imperial mark, but the rain washed out its
interest, and left me cold. The Apennines also, rising abruptly from
the plain, were to have given me revelations at sunset; they gave me
none. Their foothills appeared continually on my right, they
themselves were veiled. And all these miles of road fade into the
confused memory of that intolerable plain. The night at Firenzuola,
the morning (the second morning of this visitation) still cold, still
heartless, and sodden with the abominable weather, shall form no part
of this book.
Things grand and simple of their nature are possessed, as you know, of
a very subtle flavour. The larger music, the more majestic lengths of
verse called epics, the exact in sculpture, the classic drama, the
most absolute kinds of wine, require a perfect harmony of circumstance
for their appreciation. Whatever is strong, poignant, and immediate in
its effect is not so difficult to suit; farce, horror, rage, or what
not, these a man can find in the arts, even when his mood may be heavy
or disturbed; just as (to take their parallel in wines) strong Beaune
will always rouse a man. But that which is cousin to the immortal
spirit, and which has, so to speak, no colour but mere light, _that_
needs for its recognition so serene an air of abstraction and of
content as makes its pleasure seem rare in this troubled life, and
causes us to recall it like a descent of the gods.
For who, having noise around him, can strike the table with pleasure
at reading the Misanthrope, or in mere thirst or in fatigue praise
Chinon wine? Who does not need for either of these perfect things
Recollection, a variety of according conditions, and a certain easy
Plenitude of the Mind?
So it is with the majesty of Plains, and with the haunting power of
their imperial roads.
All you that have had your souls touched at the innermost, and have
attempted to release yourselves in verse and have written trash--(and
who know it)--be comforted. You shall have satisfaction at last, and
you shall attain fame in some other fashion--perhaps in private
theatricals or perhaps in journalism. You will be granted a prevision
of complete success, and your hearts shall be filled--but you must not
expect to find this mood on the Emilian Way when it is raining.
All you that feel youth slipping past you and that are desolate at the
approach of age, be merry; it is not what it looks like from in front
and from outside. There is a glory in all completion, and all good
endings are but shining transitions. There will come a sharp moment of
revelation when you shall bless the effect of time. But this divine
moment--- it is not on the Emilian Way in the rain that you should
seek it.
All you that have loved passionately and have torn your hearts asunder
in disillusions, do not imagine that things broken cannot be mended by
the good angels. There is a kind of splice called 'the long splice'
which makes a cut rope seem what it was before; it is even stronger
than before, and can pass through a block. There will descend upon you
a blessed hour when you will be convinced as by a miracle, and you
will suddenly understand the _redintegratio amoris (amoris
redintegratio,_ a Latin phrase). But this hour you will not receive in
the rain on the Emilian Way.
Here then, next day, just outside a town called Borgo, past the middle
of morning, the rain ceased.
Its effect was still upon the slippery and shining road, the sky was
still fast and leaden, when, in a distaste for their towns, I skirted
the place by a lane that runs westward of the houses, and sitting upon
a low wall, I looked up at the Apennines, which were now plain above
me, and thought over my approaching passage through those hills.
But here I must make clear by a map the mass of mountains which I was
about to attempt, and in which I forded so many rivers, met so many
strange men and beasts, saw such unaccountable sights, was imprisoned,
starved, frozen, haunted, delighted, burnt up, and finally refreshed
in Tuscany--in a word, where I had the most extraordinary and
unheard-of adventures that ever diversified the life of man.
The straight line to Rome runs from Milan not quite through Piacenza,
but within a mile or two of that city. Then it runs across the first
folds of the Apennines, and gradually diverges from the Emilian Way.
It was not possible to follow this part of the line exactly, for there
was no kind of track. But by following the Emilian Way for several
miles (as I had done), and by leaving it at the right moment, it was
possible to strike the straight line again near a village called
Medesano.
Now on the far side of the Apennines, beyond their main crest, there
happens, most providentially, to be a river called the Serchio, whose
valley is fairly straight and points down directly to Rome. To follow
this valley would be practically to follow the line to Rome, and it
struck the Tuscan plain not far from Lucca.
But to get from the Emilian Way over the eastern slope of the
Apennines' main ridge and crest, to where the Serchio rises on the
western side, is a very difficult matter. The few roads across the
Apennines cut my track at right angles, and were therefore useless. In
order to strike the watershed at the sources of the Serchio it was
necessary to go obliquely across a torrent and four rivers (the Taro,
the Parma, the Enza, and the Secchia), and to climb the four spurs
that divided them; crossing each nearer to the principal chain as I
advanced until, after the Secchia, the next climb would be that of the
central crest itself, on the far side of which I should find the
Serchio valley.
Perhaps in places roads might correspond to this track. Certainly the
bulk of it would be mule-paths or rough gullies--how much I could not
tell. The only way I could work it with my wretched map was to note
the names of towns' or hamlets more or less on the line, and to pick
my way from one to another. I wrote them down as follows: Fornovo,
Calestano, Tizzano, Colagna--the last at the foot of the final pass.
The distance to that pass as the crow flies was only a little more
than thirty miles. So exceedingly difficult was the task that it took
me over two days. Till I reached Fornovo beyond the Taro, I was not
really in the hills.
By country roads, picking my way, I made that afternoon for Medesano.
The lanes were tortuous; they crossed continual streams that ran from
the hills above, full and foaming after the rain, and frothing with
the waste of the mountains. I had not gone two miles when the sky
broke; not four when a new warmth began to steal over the air and a
sense of summer to appear in the earth about me. With the greatest
rapidity the unusual weather that had accompanied me from Milan was
changing into the normal brilliancy of the south; but it was too late
for the sun to tell, though he shone from time to time through clouds
that were now moving eastwards more perceptibly and shredding as they
moved.
Quite tired and desiring food, keen also for rest after those
dispiriting days, I stopped, before reaching Medesano, at an inn where
three ways met; and there I purposed to eat and spend the night, for
the next day, it was easy to see, would be tropical, and I should rise
before dawn if I was to save the heat. I entered.
The room within was of red wood. It had two tables, a little counter
with a vast array of bottles, a woman behind the counter, and a small,
nervous man in a strange hat serving. And all the little place was
filled and crammed with a crowd of perhaps twenty men, gesticulating,
shouting, laughing, quarrelling, and one very big man was explaining
to another the virtues of his knife; and all were already amply
satisfied with wine. For in this part men do not own, but are paid
wages, so that they waste the little they have.
I saluted the company, and walking up to the counter was about to call
for wine. They had all become silent, when one man asked me a question
in Italian. I did not understand it, and attempted to say so, when
another asked the same question; then six or seven--and there was a
hubbub. And out of the hubbub I heard a similar sentence rising all
the time. To this day I do not know what it meant, but I thought (and
think) it meant 'He is a Venetian,' or 'He is the Venetian.' Something
in my broken language had made them think this, and evidently the
Venetians (or a Venetian) were (or was) gravely unpopular here. Why, I
cannot tell. Perhaps the Venetians were blacklegs. But evidently a
Venetian, or the whole Venetian nation, had recently done them a
wrong.
At any rate one very dark-haired man put his face close up to mine,
unlipped his teeth, and began a great noise of cursing and
threatening, and this so angered me that it overmastered my fear,
which had till then been considerable. I remembered also a rule which
a wise man once told me for guidance, and it is this: 'God disposes of
victory, but, as the world is made, when men smile, smile; when men
laugh, laugh; when men hit, hit; when men shout, shout; and when men
curse, curse you also, my son, and in doubt let them always take the
first move.'
I say my fear had been considerable, especially of the man with the
knife, but I got too angry to remember it, and advancing my face also
to this insulter's I shouted, _'Dio Ladro! Dios di mi alma!
Sanguinamento! Nombre di Dios! Che? Che vole? Non sono da Venezia io!
Sono de Francia! Je m'en fiche da vestra Venezia! Non se vede che non
parlar vestra lingua? Che sono forestiere?'_ and so forth. At this
they evidently divided into two parties, and all began raging amongst
themselves, and some at me, while the others argued louder and louder
that there was an error.
The little innkeeper caught my arm over the counter, and I turned
round sharply, thinking he was doing me a wrong, but I saw him nodding
and winking at me, and he was on my side. This was probably because he
was responsible if anything happened, and he alone could not fly from
the police.
He made them a speech which, for all I know, may have been to the
effect that he had known and loved me from childhood, or may have been
that he knew me for one Jacques of Turin, or may have been any other
lie. Whatever lie it was, it appeased them. Their anger went down to a
murmur, just like soda-water settling down into a glass.
I stood wine; we drank. I showed them my book, and as my pencil needed
sharpening the large man lent me his knife for courtesy. When I got it
in my hand I saw plainly that it was no knife for stabbing with; it
was a pruning-knife, and would have bit the hand that cherished it (as
they say of serpents). On the other hand, it would have been a good
knife for ripping, and passable at a slash. You must not expect too
much of one article.
I took food, but I saw that in this parish it was safer to sleep out
of doors than in; so in the falling evening, but not yet sunset, I
wandered on, not at a pace but looking for shelter, and I found at
last just what I wanted: a little shed, with dried ferns (as it
seemed) strewed in a corner, a few old sacks, and a broken piece of
machinery--though this last was of no use to me.
I thought: 'It will be safe here, for I shall rise before day, and the
owner, if there is one, will not disturb me.'
The air was fairly warm. The place quite dry. The open side looked
westward and a little south.
The sun had now set behind the Apennines, and there was a deep
effulgence in the sky. I drank a little wine, lit a pipe, and watched
the west in silence.
Whatever was left of the great pall from which all that rain had
fallen, now was banked up on the further side of heaven in toppling
great clouds that caught the full glow of evening.
The great clouds stood up in heaven, separate, like persons; and no
wind blew; but everything was full of evening. I worshipped them so
far as it is permitted to worship inanimate things.
They domed into the pure light of the higher air, inviolable. They
seemed halted in the presence of a commanding majesty who ranked them
all in order.
This vision filled me with a large calm which a travelled man may find
on coming to his home, or a learner in the communion of wise men.
Repose, certitude, and, as it were, a premonition of glory occupied my
spirit. Before it was yet quite dark I had made a bed out of the dry
bracken, covered myself with the sacks and cloths, and very soon I
fell asleep, still thinking of the shapes of clouds and of the power
of God.
Next morning it was as I had thought. Going out before it was fully
light, a dense mist all around and a clear sky showed what the day was
to be. As I reached Medesano the sun rose, and in half-an-hour the air
was instinct with heat; within an hour it was blinding. An early Mass
in the church below the village prepared my day, but as I took coffee
afterwards in a little inn, and asked about crossing the Taro to
Fornovo--my first point--to my astonishment they shook their heads.
The Taro was impassable.
Why could it not be crossed? My very broken language made it difficult
for me to understand. They talked _oframi,_ which I thought meant
oars; but _rami,_ had I known it, meant the separate branches or
streams whereby these torrential rivers of Italy flow through their
arid beds.
I drew a boat and asked if one could not cross in that (for I was a
northerner, and my idea of a river was a river with banks and water in
between), but they laughed and said 'No.' Then I made the motion of
swimming. They said it was impossible, and one man hung his head to
indicate drowning. It was serious. They said to-morrow, or rather next
day, one might do it.
Finally, a boy that stood by said he remembered a man who knew the
river better than any one, and he, if any one could, would get me
across. So I took the boy with me up the road, and as we went I saw,
parallel to the road, a wide plain of dazzling rocks and sand, and
beyond it, shining and silhouetted like an Arab village, the group of
houses that was Fornovo. This plain was their sort of river in these
hills. The boy said that sometimes it was full and a mile wide,
sometimes it dwindled into dirty pools. Now, as I looked, a few thin
streams seemed to wind through it, and I could not understand the
danger.
After a mile or two we came to a spot in the road where a patch of
brushwood only separated us from the river-bed. Here the boy bade me
wait, and asked a group of peasants whether the guide was in; they
said they thought so, and some went up into the hillside with the boy
to fetch him, others remained with me, looking at the river-bed and at
Fornovo beyond, shaking their heads, and saying it had not been done
for days. But I did not understand whether the rain-freshet had passed
and was draining away, or whether it had not yet come down from
beyond, and I waited for the guide.
They brought him at last down from his hut among the hills. He came
with great strides, a kindly-looking man, extremely tall and thin, and
with very pale eyes. He smiled. They pointed me out to him, and we
struck the bargain by holding up three fingers each for three lira,
and nodding. Then he grasped his long staff and I mine, we bade
farewell to the party, and together we went in silence through thick
brushwood down towards the broad river-bed. The stones of it glared
like the sands of Africa; Fornovo baked under the sun all white and
black; between us was this broad plain of parched shingle and rocks
that could, in a night, become one enormous river, or dwindle to a
chain of stagnant ponds. To-day some seven narrow streams wandered in
the expanse, and again they seemed so easy to cross that again I
wondered at the need of a guide.
We came to the edge of the first, and I climbed on the guide's back.
He went bare-legged into the stream deeper and deeper till my feet,
though held up high, just touched the water; then laboriously he
climbed the further shore, and I got down upon dry land. It had been
but twenty yards or so, and he knew the place well. I had seen, as we
crossed, what a torrent this first little stream was, and I now knew
the difficulty and understood the warnings of the inn.
The second branch was impassable. We followed it up for nearly a mile
to where 'an island' (that is, a mass of high land that must have been
an island in flood-time, and that had on it an old brown village)
stood above the white bed of the river. Just at this 'island' my guide
found a ford. And the way he found it is worth telling. He taught me
the trick, and it is most useful to men who wander alone in mountains.
You take a heavy stone, how heavy you must learn to judge, for a more
rapid current needs a heavier stone; but say about ten pounds. This
you lob gently into mid-stream. _How,_ it is impossible to describe,
but when you do it it is quite easy to see that in about four feet of
water, or less, the stone splashes quite differently from the way it
does in five feet or more. It is a sure test, and one much easier to
acquire by practice than to write about. To teach myself this trick I
practised it throughout my journey in these wilds.
Having found a ford then, he again took me on his shoulders, but, in
mid-stream, the water being up to his breast, his foot slipped on a
stone (all the bed beneath was rolling and churning in the torrent),
and in a moment we had both fallen. He pulled me up straight by his
side, and then indeed, overwhelmed in the rush of water, it was easy
to understand how the Taro could drown men, and why the peasants
dreaded these little ribbons of water.
The current rushed and foamed past me, coming nearly to my neck; and
it was icy cold. One had to lean against it, and the water so took
away one's weight that at any moment one might have slipped and been
carried away. The guide, a much taller man (indeed he was six foot
three or so), supported me, holding my arm: and again in a moment we
reached dry land.
After that adventure there was no need for carrying. The third,
fourth, fifth, and sixth branches were easily fordable. The seventh
was broad and deep, and I found it a heavy matter; nor should I have
waded it but for my guide, for the water bore against me like a man
wrestling, and it was as cold as Acheron, the river of the dead. Then
on the further shore, and warning him (in Lingua Franca) of his peril,
I gave him his wage, and he smiled and thanked me, and went back,
choosing his plans at leisure.
Thus did I cross the river Taro; a danger for men.
Where I landed was a poor man sunning himself. He rose and walked with
me to Fornovo. He knew the guide.
'He is a good man,' he said to me of this friend. 'He is as good as a
little piece of bread.'
'E vero,' I answered; 'e San Cristophero.'
This pleased the peasant; and indeed it was true. For the guide's
business was exactly that of St Christopher, except that the Saint
took no money, and lived, I suppose, on air.
And so to Fornovo; and the heat blinded and confused, and the air was
alive with flies. But the sun dried me at once, and I pressed up the
road because I needed food. After I had eaten in this old town I was
preparing to make for Calestano and to cross the first high spur of
the Apennines that separated me from it, when I saw, as I left the
place, a very old church; and I stayed a moment and looked at carvings
which were in no order, but put in pell-mell, evidently chosen from
some older building. They were barbaric, but one could see that they
stood for the last judgement of man, and there were the good looking
foolish, and there were the wicked being boiled by devils in a pot,
and what was most pleasing was one devil who with great joy was
carrying off a rich man's gold in a bag. But now we are too wise to
believe in such follies, and when we die we take our wealth with us;
in the ninth century they had no way of doing this, for no system of
credit yet obtained.
Then leaving the main road which runs to Pontremoli and at last to
Spezzia, my lane climbed up into the hills and ceased, little by
little, to be even a lane. It became from time to time the bed of a
stream, then nothing, then a lane again, and at last, at the head of
the glen, I confessed to having lost it; but I noted a great rock or
peak above me for a landmark, and I said to myself--
'No matter. The wall of this glen before me is obviously the ridge of
the spur; the rock must be left to the north, and I have but to cross
the ridge by its guidance.' By this time, however, the heat overcame
me, and, as it was already afternoon, and as I had used so much of the
preceding night for my journey, I remembered the wise custom of hot
countries and lay down to sleep.
I slept but a little while, yet when I woke the air was cooler. I
climbed the side of the glen at random, and on the summit I found, to
my disgust, a road. What road could it be? To this day I do not know.
Perhaps I had missed my way and struck the main highway again. Perhaps
(it is often so in the Apennines) it was a road leading nowhere. At
any rate I hesitated, and looked back to judge my direction.
It was a happy accident. I was now some 2000 feet above the Taro.
There, before me, stood the high strange rock that I had watched from
below; all around it and below me was the glen or cup of bare hills,
slabs, and slopes of sand and stone calcined in the sun, and, beyond
these near things, all the plain of Lombardy was at my feet.
It was this which made it worth while to have toiled up that steep
wall, and even to have lost my way--to see a hundred miles of the
great flat stretched out before me: all the kingdoms of the world.
Nor was this all. There were sharp white clouds on the far northern
horizon, low down above the uncertain edge of the world. I looked
again and found they did not move. Then I knew they were the Alps.
Believe it or not, I was looking back to a place of days before: over
how many, many miles of road! The rare, white peaks and edges could
not deceive me; they still stood to the sunlight, and sent me from
that vast distance the memory of my passage, when their snows had
seemed interminable and their height so monstrous; their cold such a
cloak of death. Now they were as far off as childhood, and I saw them
for the last time.
All this I drew. Then finding a post directing me to a side road for
Calestano, I followed it down and down into the valley beyond; and up
the walls of this second valley as the evening fell I heard the noise
of the water running, as the Taro had run, a net of torrents from the
melting snows far off. These streams I soon saw below me, winding (as
those of the Taro had wound) through a floor of dry shingle and rock;
but when my road ceased suddenly some hundreds of feet above the bed
of the river, and when, full of evening, I had scrambled down through
trees to the brink of the water, I found I should have to repeat what
I had done that morning and to ford these streams. For there was no
track of any kind and no bridge, and Calestano stood opposite me, a
purple cluster of houses in the dusk against the farther mountain
side.
Very warily, lobbing stones as I had been taught, and following up and
down each branch to find a place, I forded one by one the six little
cold and violent rivers, and reaching the farther shore, I reached
also, as I thought, supper, companionship, and a bed.
But it is not in this simple way that human life is arranged. What
awaited me in Calestano was ill favour, a prison, release, base
flattery, and a very tardy meal.
It is our duty to pity all men. It is our duty to pity those who are
in prison. It is our duty to pity those who are not in prison. How
much more is it the duty of a Christian man to pity the rich who
cannot ever get into prison? These indeed I do now specially pity, and
extend to them my commiseration.
What! Never even to have felt the grip of the policeman; to have
watched his bold suspicious eye; to have tried to make a good show
under examination... never to have heard the bolt grinding in the
lock, and never to have looked round at the cleanly simplicity of a
cell? Then what emotions have you had, unimprisonable rich; or what do
you know of active living and of adventure?
It was after drinking some wine and eating macaroni and bread at a
poor inn, the only one in the place, and after having to shout at the
ill-natured hostess (and to try twenty guesses before I made her
understand that I wanted cheese), it was when I had thus eaten and
shouted, and had gone over the way to drink coffee and to smoke in a
little cafe, that my adventure befell me.
In the inn there had been a fat jolly-looking man and two
official-looking people with white caps dining at another table. I had
taken no notice of them at the time. But as I sat smoking and thinking
in the little cafe, which was bright and full of people, I noticed a
first danger-signal when I was told sullenly that 'they had no bed;
they thought I could get none in the town': then, suddenly, these two
men in white caps came in, and they arrested me with as much ease as
you or I would hold a horse.
A moment later there came in two magnificent fellows, gendarmes, with
swords and cocked hats, and moustaches _a l'Abd el Kader,_ as we used
to say in the old days; these four, the two gendarmes and two
policemen, sat down opposite me on chairs and began cross-questioning
me in Italian, a language in which I was not proficient. I so far
understood them as to know that they were asking for my papers.
'Niente!' said I, and poured out on the table a card-case, a
sketch-book, two pencils, a bottle of wine, a cup, a piece of bread, a
scrap of French newspaper, an old _Secolo,_ a needle, some thread, and
a flute--but no passport.
They looked in the card-case and found 73 lira; that is, not quite
three pounds. They examined the sketch-book critically, as behoved
southerners who are mostly of an artistic bent: but they found no
passport. They questioned me again, and as I picked about for words to
reply, the smaller (the policeman, a man with a face like a fox)
shouted that he had heard me speaking Italian _currently_ in the inn,
and that my hesitation was a blind.
This lie so annoyed me that I said angrily in French (which I made as
southern as possible to suit them):
'You lie: and you can be punished for such lies, since you are an
official.' For though the police are the same in all countries, and
will swear black is white, and destroy men for a song, yet where there
is a _droit administratif-_ that is, where the Revolution has made
things tolerable--you are much surer of punishing your policeman, and
he is much less able to do you a damage than in England or America;
for he counts as an official and is under a more public discipline and
responsibility if he exceeds his powers.
Then I added, speaking distinctly, 'I can speak French and Latin. Have
you a priest in Calestano, and does he know Latin?'
This was a fine touch. They winced, and parried it by saying that the
Sindaco knew French. Then they led me away to their barracks while
they fetched the Sindaco, and so I was imprisoned.
But not for long. Very soon I was again following up the street, and
we came to the house of the Sindaco or Mayor. There he was, an old man
with white hair, God bless him, playing cards with his son and
daughter. To him therefore, as understanding French, I was bidden
address myself. I told him in clear and exact idiom that his policemen
were fools, that his town was a rabbit-warren, and his prison the only
cleanly thing in it; that half-a-dozen telegrams to places I could
indicate would show where I had passed; that I was a common tourist,
not even an artist (as my sketch-book showed), and that my cards gave
my exact address and description.
But the Sindaco, the French-speaking Sindaco, understood me not in the
least, and it seemed a wicked thing in me to expose him in his old
age, so I waited till he spoke. He spoke a word common to all
languages, and one he had just caught from my lips.
'Tourist-e?' he said.
I nodded. Then he told them to let me go. It was as simple as that;
and to this day, I suppose, he passes for a very bilingual Mayor. He
did me a service, and I am willing to believe that in his youth he
smacked his lips over the subtle flavour of Voltaire, but I fear
to-day he would have a poor time with Anatole France.
What a contrast was there between the hour when I had gone out of the
cafe a prisoner and that when I returned rejoicing with a crowd about
me, proclaiming my innocence, and shouting one to another that I was a
tourist and had seventy-three lira on my person! The landlady smiled
and bowed: she had before refused me a bed! The men at the tables made
me a god! Nor did I think them worse for this. Why should I? A man
unknown, unkempt, unshaven, in tatters, covered with weeks of travel
and mud, and in a suit that originally cost not ten shillings; having
slept in leaves and ferns, and forest places, crosses a river at dusk
and enters a town furtively, not by the road. He is a foreigner; he
carries a great club. Is it not much wiser to arrest such a man? Why
yes, evidently. And when you have arrested him, can you do more than
let him go without proof, on his own word? Hardly!
Thus I loved the people of Calestano, especially for this strange
adventure they had given me; and next day, having slept in a human
room, I went at sunrise up the mountain sides beyond and above their
town, and so climbed by a long cleft the _second_ spur of the
Apennines: the spur that separated me from the _third_ river, the
Parma. And my goal above the Parma (when I should have crossed it) was
a place marked in the map 'Tizzano'. To climb this second spur, to
reach and cross the Parma in the vale below, to find Tizzano, I left
Calestano on that fragrant morning; and having passed and drawn a
little hamlet called Frangi, standing on a crag, I went on up the
steep vale and soon reached the top of the ridge, which here dips a
little and allows a path to cross over to the southern side.
It is the custom of many, when they get over a ridge, to begin
singing. Nor did I fail, early as was the hour, to sing in passing
this the second of my Apennine summits. I sang easily with an open
throat everything that I could remember in praise of joy; and I did
not spare the choruses of my songs, being even at pains to imitate
(when they were double) the various voices of either part.
Now, so much of the Englishman was in me that, coming round a corner
of rock from which one first sees Beduzzo hanging on its ledge (as you
know), and finding round this corner a peasant sitting at his ease, I
was ashamed. For I did not like to be overheard singing fantastic
songs. But he, used to singing as a solitary pastime, greeted me, and
we walked along together, pointing out to each other the glories of
the world before us and exulting in the morning. It was his business
to show me things and their names: the great Mountain of the
Pilgrimage to the South, the strange rock of Castel-Nuovo; in the far
haze the plain of Parma; and Tizzano on its high hill, the ridge
straight before me. He also would tell me the name in Italian of the
things to hand--my boots, my staff, my hat; and I told him their names
in French, all of which he was eager to learn.
We talked of the way people here tilled and owned ground, of the
dangers in the hills, and of the happiness of lonely men. But if you
ask how we understood each other, I will explain the matter to you.
In Italy, in the Apennines of the north, there seem to be three strata
of language. In the valleys the Italian was pure, resonant, and
foreign to me. There dwell the townsmen, and they deal down river
with the plains. Half-way up (as at Frangi, at Beduzzo, at Tizzano) I
began to understand them. They have the nasal 'n'; they clip their
words. On the summits, at last, they speak like northerners, and I was
easily understood, for they said not _'vino' _but _'vin';_ not _'duo'_
but _'du'_, and so forth. They are the Gauls of the hills. I told them
so, and they were very pleased.
Then I and my peasant parted, but as one should never leave a man
without giving him something to show by way of token on the Day of
Judgement, I gave this man a little picture of Milan, and bade him
keep it for my sake.
So he went his way, and I mine, and the last thing he said to me was
about a _'molinar'_, but I did not know what that meant.
When I had taken a cut down the mountain, and discovered a highroad at
the bottom, I saw that the river before me needed fording, like all
the rest; and as my map showed me there was no bridge for many miles
down, I cast about to cross directly, if possible on some man's
shoulders.
I met an old woman with a heap of grass on her back; I pointed to the
river, and said (in Lingua Franca) that I wished to cross. She again
used that word _'molinar',_ and I had an inkling that it meant
'miller'. I said to myself--
'Where there is a miller there is a mill. For _Ubi Petrus ibi
Ecclesia._ Where there is a mill there is water; a mill must have
motive power:' (a) I must get near the stream; (b) I must look out
for the noise and aspect of a mill.
I therefore (thanking the grass-bearing woman) went right over the
fields till I saw a great, slow mill-wheel against a house, and a sad
man standing looking at it as though it were the Procession of God's
Providence. He was thinking of many things. I tapped him on the
shoulder (whereat he started) and spoke the great word of that valley,
_'molinar'_. It opened all the gates of his soul. He smiled at me like
a man grown young again, and, beckoning me to follow, led radiantly up
the sluice to where it drew from the river.
Here three men were at work digging a better entry for the water. One
was an old, happy man in spectacles, the second a young man with
stilts in his hands, the third was very tall and narrow; his face was
sad, and he was of the kind that endure all things and conquer. I said
'_Molinar_?'' I had found him.
To the man who had brought me I gave 50 c., and so innocent and good
are these people that he said _'Pourquoi?'_ or words like it, and I
said it was necessary. Then I said to the molinar, _'Quanta?'_ and he,
holding up a tall finger, said '_Una Lira'._ The young man leapt on to
his stilts, the molinar stooped down and I got upon his shoulders, and
we all attempted the many streams of the river Parma, in which I think
I should by myself have drowned.
I say advisedly--'I should have been drowned.' These upper rivers of
the hills run high and low according to storms and to the melting of
the snows. The river of Parma (for this torrent at last fed Parma)
was higher than the rest.
Even the molinar, the god of that valley, had to pick his way
carefully, and the young man on stilts had to go before, much higher
than mortal men, and up above the water. I could see him as he went,
and I could see that, to tell the truth, there was a ford--a rare
thing in upper waters, because in the torrent-sources of rivers either
the upper waters run over changeless rocks or else over gravel and
sand. Now if they run over rocks they have their isolated shallow
places, which any man may find, and their deep--evident by the still
and mysterious surface, where fish go round and round in the hollows;
but no true ford continuous from side to side. So it is in Scotland.
And if they run over gravel and sand, then with every storm or 'spate'
they shift and change. But here by some accident there ran--perhaps a
shelf or rock, perhaps a ruin of a Roman bridge--something at least
that was deep enough and solid enough to be a true ford--and that we
followed.
The molinar--even the molinar--was careful of his way. Twice he
waited, waist high, while the man on stilts before us suddenly lost
ground and plunged to his feet. Once, crossing a small branch (for the
river here, like all these rivers, runs in many arms over the dry
gravel), it seemed there was no foothold and we had to cast up and
down. Whenever we found dry land, I came off the molinar's back to
rest him, and when he took the water again I mounted again. So we
passed the many streams, and stood at last on the Tizzanian side. Then
I gave a lira to the molinar, and to his companion on stilts 50 c.,
who said, 'What is this for?' and I said, 'You also helped.'
The molinar then, with gesticulations and expression of the eyes, gave
me to understand that for this 50 c. the stilt-man would take me up to
Tizzano on the high ridge and show me the path up the ridge; so the
stilt-man turned to me and said, _'Andiamo' _which means _'Allons'.
_But when the Italians say _'Andiamo' _they are less harsh than the
northern French who say _'Allans'; _for the northern French have three
troubles in the blood. They are fighters; they will for ever be
seeking the perfect state, and they love furiously. Hence they ferment
twice over, like wine subjected to movement and breeding acidity.
Therefore is it that when they say _'Allons'_ it is harsher than
_'Andiamo'._ My Italian said to me genially, _'Andiamo_'.
The Catholic Church makes men. By which I do not mean boasters and
swaggerers, nor bullies nor ignorant fools, who, finding themselves
comfortable, think that their comfort will be a boon to others, and
attempt (with singular unsuccess) to force it on the world; but men,
human beings, different from the beasts, capable of firmness and
discipline and recognition; accepting death; tenacious. Of her effects
the most gracious is the character of the Irish and of these Italians.
Of such also some day she may make soldiers.
Have you ever noticed that all the Catholic Church does is thought
beautiful and lovable until she comes out into the open, and then
suddenly she is found by her enemies (which are the seven capital
sins, and the four sins calling to heaven for vengeance) to be hateful
and grinding? So it is; and it is the fine irony of her present
renovation that those who were for ever belauding her pictures, and
her saints, and her architecture, as we praise things dead, they are
the most angered by her appearance on this modern field all armed,
just as she was, with works and art and songs, sometimes superlative,
often vulgar. Note you, she is still careless of art or songs, as she
has always been. She lays her foundations in something other, which
something other our moderns hate. Yet out of that something other came
the art and song of the Middle Ages. And what art or songs have you?
She is Europe and all our past. She is returning. _Andiamo._
LECTOR. But Mr _(deleted by the Censor)_ does not think so?