world,” chimed in a third with all the petulant ignorance of fourteen.
“If it is equal, why do they want to have it repeated so often? and if
it is not, why do they bother us with it?”
“Believe me, you fellows,” said I, resuming the discussion with the air
of a person of long experience, “you may be quite certain of it, the
whole system of instruction is wrong; and as long as the Germans are in
the country, it will be so!”
So, being fully persuaded that our failure was a protest against the
Austrian dominion, and a proof of vivid and original genius, we went
home, where, for my part, I confess I found that the first enthusiasm
soon evaporated.
My ignominious failure in this examination had a great influence on my
future. Since it was absolutely impossible for me to understand
mathematics, it was decided that very day that I was to leave school,
especially as the family finances made it necessary for me to begin
earning something as soon as might be.
It was the most sensible resolution that could have been come to, and I
had no right to oppose it; yet, I confess, I was deeply saddened by it.
My aversion to mathematics did not extend to other branches of learning,
in which I had made quite a respectable show; and besides, I loved the
school. I loved those sacred cloisters which we boys filled with life
and noise,—I loved the benches carved with our names,—even the
blackboard which had been the witness of my irreparable defeat.
I blamed Pythagoras’ theorem for it all. With some other question—who
knows?—I might just have scraped through, by the skin of my teeth, as I
had done in past years. But, as Fate would have it, it was just that
one!
I dreamt about it all night. I saw it before me—the fatal square with
its triangle atop, and the two smaller squares, one sloping to the
right, and the other to the left, and a tangle of lines, and a great
confusion of letters; and heard beating through my head like the strokes
of a hammer—BAC = NAF; RNAB = DEAB.
It was some time before I was free from that nightmare and could forget
Pythagoras and his three squares. In the long run, however, Time, who
with his sponge wipes out so many things from the book of memory, had
nearly effaced this; when, a few weeks ago, the ill-omened figure
appeared to me in one of my son’s exercise-books.
“Has this curse been transmitted to my descendants?” I exclaimed. “Poor
boy! What if the theorem of Pythagoras should be as fatal to him as it
has been to me?”
I thought I would question him about it on his return from school.
“So,” I began gravely, “you have already reached the forty-seventh
proposition of Euclid in your geometry?”
[Illustration]
“Yes, father,” he replied simply.
“A difficult theorem,” I added, shaking my head.
“Do you think so?” he asked with a smile.
“Oh! you want to boast and make me think you find it easy?”
“But I do find it easy.”
“I should like to see you try it”—the words slipped out almost
involuntarily. “It’s no use—I can’t bear vanity and boasting.”
“At once,” replied the dauntless youth. And action succeeded words. He
took a piece of paper and a pencil, and quickly traced the cabalistic
figure.
“As for demonstrations,” he began, “there are plenty to choose from. Is
it all the same to you which I take?”
“Yes,” I replied mechanically. In fact it _had_ to be all the same to
me. If there had been a hundred demonstrations I should not have known
one from the other.
“Then we’ll take the most usual one,” my mathematician went on; and
proceeded to produce the lines which Professor Roveni, of respected
memory, had made me produce twenty-seven years before, and, with the
accents of the sincerest conviction, prepared to prove to me that the
triangle BAC was equal to the triangle NAF, and so on.
“And now,” said my son, when he had finished, “we can, if you wish,
arrive at the same conclusion in another way.”
“For pity’s sake!” I exclaimed in terror, “since we have reached the
journey’s end, let us rest.”
“But I am not tired.”
Not even tired! Was the boy an embryo Newton? And yet people talk about
the principle of heredity!
“I suppose you are at the top of your class in mathematics,” I said, not
untouched by a certain reverential awe.
“No, no,” he replied. “There are two better than I. Besides, you know
very well that everybody—except downright asses—understands the
forty-seventh proposition.”
“_Except downright asses!_” After twenty-seven years I heard, from the
lips of my own son, almost the very identical words which Professor
Roveni had used on the memorable day of the examination. And this time
they were heightened by the savage irony of the added “_You know very
well!_”
I wished to save appearances, and added in haste—
“Of course I know that. I was only in fun. I hope you would not be such
a fool as to be proud of a small thing like that.”
Meanwhile, however, my Newton had repented of his too sweeping
assertion.
“After all,” he went on, with some embarrassment, “there are some who
never attend to their lesson, and then ... even if they are not
asses....”
It seemed to me that he was offering me a loophole of escape, and with a
sudden impulse of candour—
“That must be the way of it,” I said. “I suppose I never paid
attention.”
“How! You?” exclaimed my boy, reddening to the roots of his hair.
Yet ... I would bet something that, at the bottom of his heart, he was
longing to laugh.
I put my hand over his mouth.
“Hush,” I said; “we will not pursue our inquiries into detail.”
Well, the Theorem of Pythagoras has, as you see, cost me a new and very
serious humiliation. In spite of this, I no longer keep up the old
grudge. There will never be any confidence between us, but I consider it
as a family friend whom we must not treat with rudeness, though he may
not be personally congenial to ourselves.
_Enrico Castelnuovo._
_AN ECCENTRIC ORDERLY._
Of originals there is a great variety under the canopy of heaven; and I
have enjoyed the acquaintance of several, but among them all I never met
his match.
He was a Sardinian peasant, twenty years old, unable to read or write,
and a private in an infantry regiment.
The first time I saw him, at Florence, in the office of a military
journal, he inspired me with a certain sympathy. I soon understood,
however, from his looks and some of his answers, that he was a
character. His very appearance was paradoxical: seen in front, he was
one man; looked at in profile, he was another. Of the full face there
was nothing particular to remark; it was a countenance like any other;
but it seemed as though in the act of turning his head he became a
different man, and the profile had something irresistibly ludicrous
about it. The point of his chin and the tip of his nose seemed to be
trying to meet, and to be hindered by an enormous thick-lipped mouth
which was always open, and showed two rows of teeth, uneven as a file of
national guards. His eyes were scarcely larger than pin-heads, and
disappeared altogether among the wrinkles into which his face was
puckered when he laughed. His eyebrows were shaped like two circumflex
accents, and his forehead was scarcely high enough to keep his hair out
of his eyes. A friend of mine remarked to me that he seemed to be one of
Nature’s practical jokes. And yet his face expressed intelligence and
good-nature; but an intelligence which was, so to speak, sporadic, and a
good-nature entirely _sui generis_. He spoke, in a harsh, hoarse voice,
an Italian for which he had every right to claim the inventor’s patent.
“How do you like Florence?” I asked, seeing that he had arrived in that
city the day before.
“It’s not bad,” he replied.
Coming from a man who had previously only seen Cagliari, and one or two
small towns in Northern Italy, the answer seemed to savour of a certain
austerity.
“Do you like Florence or Bergamo best?”
“I arrived yesterday—I couldn’t say yet.”
The following day he made his entry into my quarters.
During the first week I was more than once within an ace of losing all
patience, and sending him back to the regiment. If he had contented
himself with understanding nothing, I could have let that pass, but the
misfortune was, that partly through the difficulty he had in
understanding my Italian, partly through the unaccustomed nature of his
tasks, he understood about half, and did everything the wrong way. Were
I to relate how he carried my razors to the publisher, and my
manuscripts ready for the press to the razor grinder; how he left a
French novel with the shoemaker, and a pair of boots to be mended at a
lady’s house, no one who had not seen him would believe me. But I cannot
refrain from relating one or two of his most marvellous exploits.
[Illustration]
At eleven in the forenoon—which was the time when the morning papers
were cried about the streets—it was my custom to send him out for some
ham for my breakfast. One morning, knowing that there was an item in the
paper that I wished to see, I said to him hurriedly, “Quick! the ham,
and the _Corriere Italiano_.” He could never take in two distinct ideas
at once. He went out, and returned shortly afterwards with the ham
wrapped up in the _Corriere_.
One morning he was present when I was showing one of my friends a
splendid military atlas, which I had borrowed from the library; and he
heard me remark to the latter: “The mischief is that one cannot see all
these maps at a glance, and has to examine each one separately. To
follow the whole course of a battle I should like to have them nailed up
on the wall in their proper order, so as to form a single diagram.” On
coming in that evening—I shudder still when I think of it—all the maps
in that atlas were neatly nailed to the wall; and, to add to my
sufferings, he appeared before me next morning, with the modestly
complacent smile of the man who expects a compliment.
But all this is nothing to what I underwent before I had succeeded in
teaching him to put my rooms in order—I do not say as I wanted them—but
in a manner remotely suggesting the presence of a rational being. For
him, the supreme art of putting things to rights consisted in piling
them one on top of the other, and his great ambition was to build them
up into structures of the greatest possible altitude. During the first
few days of his tenure of office my books formed a semicircle of towers,
which trembled at the lightest breath; the washhand basin, turned upside
down, sustained a daring pyramid of plates, cups, and saucers, at the
top of which my shaving-brush was planted; and my hats, new and old,
rose, in the form of a triumphal pillar, to a dizzy height. As a
consequence there occurred—usually at dead of night—ruinous collapses,
which made a noise like a small earthquake, and scattered my property to
such an extent that, if it had not been for the walls of the room, no
one knows where it would have brought up. To make him understand that my
tooth-brush did not belong to the genus hair-brush, and that the
pomade-jar was not the same as the vessel which contained Liebig’s
extract, required the eloquence of Cicero and the patience of Job.
I have never been able to understand whether my attempts to treat him
kindly met with any response on his part. Once only he showed a certain
solicitude for my personal welfare, and this was exhibited in a manner
quite peculiar to himself. I had been ill in bed for about a fortnight,
and neither got worse nor showed any signs of recovery. One evening he
stopped the doctor—an exceedingly touchy man—on the stairs, and asked
him, abruptly, “But, once for all, are you going to cure him, or are you
not?” The doctor lost his temper, and fairly blew him up. “It’s only
that it’s lasting rather long,” was my orderly’s sole response.
It is difficult to give any idea of the language he spoke—a mixture of
Sardinian, Lombard, and Italian, with idioms all his own; elliptical
sentences, mutilated and contracted words, verbs in the infinitive flung
about haphazard. The whole was like the talk of a man in delirium. At
the end of five or six months, by dint of attending the regimental
schools, he learnt, to my misfortune, to read and write after a fashion.
While I was out of the house he used to practise writing at my table,
and would write the same word a couple of hundred times over. Usually it
was a word he had heard me pronounce when reading, and which, for some
reason or other, had made an impression on him. One day, for instance,
he was struck by the name of Vercingetorix. When I came home in the
evening I found _Vercingetorix_ written on the margins of the
newspapers, on the backs of my proofs, on the wrappers of my books, on
my letters, on the scraps in the waste-paper basket—in every place where
he could find room for the thirteen letters beloved of his heart.
Another day the word _Ostrogoths_ touched his soul, and on the next my
rooms were invaded by the _Ostrogoths_. In like manner, a little later,
the place was full of _rhinoceroses_.
On the other hand, I was so far a gainer by this extension of knowledge
on his part, that I was no longer obliged to mark with crosses, in
differently coloured chalks, the notes I gave him to deliver to various
people. There was no way of making him remember the names; but he got to
know my correspondents as the blue lady, the black journalist, the
yellow Government official, etc.
Speaking of writing, I discovered a habit of his, much more curious than
the one I have mentioned. He had bought himself a note-book, into which
he copied, from every book that fell into his hands, the author’s
dedication to his parents or relations, taking care always to substitute
for the names of the latter those of his father, his mother, and his
brothers, to whom he imagined he was thus giving a brilliant proof of
affection and gratitude. One day I opened this book and read, among
others, the following:—“Pietro Tranci (the Sardinian peasant, his
father), born in poverty, acquired, by study and perseverance, a
distinguished place among men of learning, assisted his parents and
brothers, and worthily educated his children. To the memory of his
excellent father this book is dedicated by the author, Antonio
Tranci”—instead of Michele Lessona.
On another page he had copied the dedication of Giovanni Prati’s poems,
beginning as follows:—“To Pietro Tranci, my father, who, announcing to
the Subalpine Parliament the disaster of Novara, fell fainting to the
ground and died within a few days, I consecrate this song,” etc., etc.
What astonished me most in one who had seen so little was an absolute
lack of the feeling of wonder. During the time he was at Florence he saw
the festivities at Prince Humbert’s marriage, the opera, and the dancing
at the Pergola (he had never been inside a theatre in his life), the
Carnival, and the fantastic illumination of the Celli Avenue. He saw a
hundred other things which were quite new to him, and which ought, one
would think, to have surprised him, amused him, made him talk. Nothing
of the sort. His admiration never went beyond the formula, “Not bad!”
Santa Maria del Fiore—not bad! Giotto’s tower—not bad! the Pitti
Palace—not bad! I really believe that if the Creator in person had asked
what he thought of the universe he would have replied that it was not
bad.
From the first day of his stay to the last his mood never changed; he
continually preserved a kind of cheerful seriousness: always obedient,
always muddle-headed, always most conscientious in understanding things
the wrong way, always plunged in a kind of apathetic beatitude, always
with the same extravagance of eccentricity. On the day when his term of
service expired he scribbled away for several hours in his note-book
with the same calm as on other days. Before leaving he came to say
good-bye to me. There was not much tenderness in our parting. I asked
him if he was sorry to leave Florence. He answered, “Why not?” I asked
him if he was glad to return home. He replied with a grimace which I did
not understand.
“If you ever want anything, sir,” he said at the last moment, “write to
me, and I shall always be pleased to do anything I can for you.”
“Many thanks,” I replied.
And so he left the house, after being with me over two years, without
the slightest sign either of regret or pleasure.
I looked after him as he went downstairs.
Suddenly he turned round.
“Ah!” thought I, “now we shall see! His heart has been awakened. He is
coming back to take leave in a different sort of way!”
Instead of which—
“Lieutenant,” he said, “your shaving-brush is in the drawer of the
biggest table, sir!”
With that he disappeared.
_Edmondo de Amicis._
_A PROVINCIAL ORACLE._
... The newly-married couple settled in a small country town, where they
were not long in gaining the hearts of all the inhabitants. The more
sensible and influential people in the place thought the advent of such
wealthy residents a great piece of good fortune. “They will be of so
much advantage to the place,” was the remark made in the chemist’s shop
of an evening. It soon began to rain advantages: dinner parties,
picnics, gifts, patronage, entertainments for charitable
objects—hospitalities of all sorts; and then the balls at carnival-tide!
A dash, a gaiety, a profusion that one could neither believe nor
imagine—a splendour, the memory of which, as all the local journals put
it, “would flourish with perennial vigour in the hearts of a grateful
community.” We thought we had returned to the very flower of the golden
age of Arcadia. It was two talents, more especially, which won golden
opinions for Signor Diego among the worthy citizens of our little
borough—his magnificent expenditure and his wit. Of Attic salt he had as
much as sufficed, within a very short space of time, to pickle the whole
place; whereby it became one of the wittiest towns in the world. I do
not say that the inhabitants did not possess a great deal of wit before
he arrived; nor do I wish to hint that the conversation of the educated
persons who visited at the house of Diego was mere insipid triviality
coloured with a little presumption, and that touch of perfidy which is,
so to speak, the _sauce piquante_ of empty gossip. No, indeed! for they,
too, took their share in public life and talked politics, speaking
highly of themselves and of the party in power, and exceedingly ill of
those who were not present to hear them. But what I mean is that Signor
Diego, profiting by all that he had learnt in his travels, showed them a
more excellent—that is to say, a more Parisian way, and taught them the
great mystery of _chic_. He instructed them in all those arts of gilding
and veneering, by means of which the most contemptible trifles may be
made to appear noble and graceful. He taught them to laugh at serious
matters, but to take the most religious care—practising the worship of
themselves with unheard-of austerity and entire self-devotion—of their
hair and their coats, and the dignity of their attitudes and movements;
and to pronounce sentence with the extremest rigour on the unfortunate
who should transgress the least important of the rules established by
social etiquette.
_Mario Pratesi._
_DOCTOR PHŒBUS._
[Illustration]
Many years ago a company, with capital to back it, took a lease of the
manganese mines in the province of Valle Amena. Perhaps the “Pleasant
Valley” may at one time have deserved its name; but nowadays there is
nothing pleasant about the monotonous barren hills, of no use to any one
but the goats, and the distant woods, too scanty to lend any tint of
green to the dry and desert landscape. The company’s employés were
scarcely to be blamed for not liking the place; everything was scarce,
even pretty faces—at least such as had had the benefit of soap and
water. But the pay was good, and more than one among them had hopes of
becoming a shareholder, or at least cashier; and so things went on
somehow or other. Two hundred navvies pushed the work rapidly forward,
and enormous trucks full of the grey metal blocked the postal road day
and night.
But all that glitters is not gold; and one day the report spread that
the flourishing company had failed, as though prosperity had undermined
its foundations like stagnant water. It made a great talk in the
neighbourhood, and every one concluded his or her comments by long
exclamations of astonishment.
“_Mah!_” ejaculated the old, dried-up chaplain of the
_Misericordia_,[18] with his hands in the pockets of the threadbare
shooting-coat which he always wore except when he put on his surplice to
go and fetch the dead. “In my opinion it was just like when a set of
people leave the gaming-table, where low cards have been dealt; but they
do not all leave with the same advantages.”
“There is no getting at the exact truth,” remarked the landlord of the
village inn, who did not repent nearly so much of his sins as he did of
having given credit; “but in this business I too believe that the rogues
have done the honest men who trust their neighbours, and never suspect
any cheating.”
“What nonsense!” exclaimed Signor Vincenzino; and perhaps he would have
said more, only that, being syndic, and very rich, he thought it
possible he might be risking the chance of a decoration. He rose from
his seat in the Caffé del Giappone. “In any case,” he continued, keeping
his back turned to the host, “there is the law.”
“I’d like to see it!” replied mine host. “But it’s very seldom that
rogues who have grown rich do not find some one to help them, in one way
or another, in keeping what they have stolen.”
“Precisely!” retorted the chaplain, holding up his finger like Dante
under the Uffizi. “There are certain experts and certain lawyers who
show a most extraordinary ability in this respect, and acquire enormous
credit, so that sometimes the Government is even forced to raise them to
the rank of _Commendatore_. You alone, poor Phœbus...”
And so on, and so on.... It would be tedious to repeat all the
conversation that took place at the Caffé del Giappone. As to Phœbus,
however, I should not be altogether disposed to agree with the chaplain.
If Phœbus found no one to make the best of the arguments on his side
when—having been blinded by the effects of an explosion at the works—he
asked for a miserable little pension, which the Company refused, saying
that his misfortune was due to his own carelessness, and not to the
necessities of his work,—if, I say, he had no one to plead his cause,
this must be regarded merely as an accident, which happened to him, as
it may happen to hundreds of others in a like condition. Then came the
crash; and if a company were going to give every man what he wants, what
motive could it have for declaring itself insolvent. In this case, to
recommend the fulfilment of any humane duties is like running after a
mist-wreath, or asking a routed army, in full retreat, to think of the
dead and wounded they are leaving behind.