CHAPTER XXIX
A FIRST GLIMPSE OF ITALY
MY days in Monte Carlo after this were only four, exactly. In spite of my solemn resolutions of the morning the spirit of this gem-like world got into my bones by three o’clock; and at four, when we were having tea at the Riviera Palace Hotel high above the Casino, I was satisfied that I should like to stay here for months. Barfleur, as usual, was full of plans for enjoyment; and he insisted that I had not half exhausted the charms of the place. We should go to some old monastery at Laghet where miracles of healing were performed, and to Cannes and Beaulieu in order to see the social life there.
A part of one of these days we spent viewing a performance in Mentone. Another day Barfleur and I went to Laghet and Nice, beginning with a luncheon at the Riviera Palace and winding up at the Hôtel des Fleurs. The last day we were in the Casino, gambling cheerfully for a little while, and then on the terrace viewing the pigeon shooting, which Barfleur persistently refused to contemplate. This (to me) brutal sport was evidently fascinating to many, for the popping of guns was constant. It is so curious how radically our views differ in this world as to what constitutes evil and good. To Scorp this was a legitimate sport. The birds were ultimately destined for pies anyhow; why not kill them here in this manner? To me the crippling of the perfect winged things was a crime. I would never be one to hold a gun in such a sport.
It was this last day in the Café de Paris that Barfleur and I encountered Marcelle and Mme. Y., our companions of that first dinner in Paris. Barfleur was leaving for London, Scorp was to stay on at Monte Carlo, and for the first time I faced the prospect of traveling alone. Acting on impulse I turned to Marcelle and said: “Come with me as far as Ventimiglia,” never thinking for a moment that she would. “Oui,” she replied, “oui, oui,” and seemed very cheerful over the prospect.
Marcelle arrived some fifteen minutes before my train was due, but she was not to speak to me until we were on the train. It took some manœuvering to avoid the suspicions of Scorp.
Barfleur left for the north at four-thirty, assuring me that we would meet in Paris in April and ride at Fontainebleau, and that we would take a walking tour in England. After he was gone, Scorp and I walked to and fro and then it was that Marcelle appeared. I had to smile as I walked with Scorp, thinking how wrathful he would have been if he had known that every so often we were passing Marcelle, who gazed demurely the other way. The platforms, as usual, were alive with passengers with huge piles of baggage. My train was a half hour late and it was getting dark. Some other train which was not bound for Rome entered, and Marcelle signaled to know whether she was to get into that. I shook my head and hunted up the Cook’s tourist agent, always to be found on these foreign platforms, and explained to him that he was to go to the young lady in the blue suit and white walking-shoes and tell her that the train was a half hour late and ask her if she cared to wait. With quite an American sang-froid he took in the situation at once, and wanted to know how far she was going. I told him Ventimiglia and he advised that she get off at Garaban in order to catch the first train back. He departed, and presently returned, cutting me out from the company of Sir Scorp by a very wise look of the eye, and informed me that the lady would wait and would go. I promptly gave him a franc for his trouble. My pocket was bulging with Italian silver lire and paper five- and ten-lire pieces which I had secured the day before. Finally my train rolled in and I took one last look at the sea in the fading light and entered. Sir Scorp gave me parting instructions as to simple restaurants that I would find at different places in Italy—not the showy and expensive cafés, beloved of Barfleur. He wanted me to save money on food and have my portrait painted by Mancini, which I could have done, he assured me, with a letter from him. He looked wisely around the platform to see that there was no suspicious lady anywhere in the foreground and said he suspected one might be going with me.
“Oh, Scorp,” I said, “how could you? Besides, I am very poor now.”
“The ruling passion—strong in poverty,” he commented, and waved me a farewell.
I walked forward through the train looking for my belongings and encountered Marcelle. She was eager to explain by signs that the Cook’s man had told her to get off at Garaban.
“M’sieur Thomas Cook, il m’a dit—il faut que je descends à Garaban—pas Ventimiglia—Garaban.” She understood well enough that if she wanted to get back to Monte Carlo early in the evening she would have to make this train, as the next was not before ten o’clock.
I led the way to a table in the dining-car still vacant, and we talked as only people can talk who have no common language. By the most astonishing efforts Marcelle made it known that she would not stay at Monte Carlo very long now, and that if I wanted her to come to Florence when I got there she would. Also she kept talking about Fontainebleau and horseback riding in April. She imitated a smart rider holding the reins with one hand and clucking to the horse with her lips. She folded her hands expressively to show how heavenly it would be. Then she put her right hand over her eyes and waved her left hand to indicate that there were lovely vistas which we could contemplate. Finally she extracted all her bills from the Hôtel de Paris—and they were astonishing—to show me how expensive her life was at Monte Carlo; but I refused to be impressed. It did not make the least difference, however, in her attitude or her mood. She was just as cheerful as ever, and repeated “Avril—Fontainebleau,” as the train stopped and she stepped off. She reached up and gave me an affectionate farewell kiss. The last I saw of her she was standing, her arms akimbo, her head thrown smartly back, looking after the train.
* * * * *
It was due to a railroad wreck about twenty miles beyond Ventimiglia that I owe my acquaintance with one of the most interesting men I have met in years, a man who was very charming to me afterwards in Rome, but before that I should like to relate how I first really entered Italy. One afternoon, several days before, Barfleur and I paid a flying visit to Ventimiglia, some twenty miles over the border, a hill city and the agreed customs entry city between France and Italy. No train leaving France in this region, so I learned, stopped before it reached Ventimiglia, and none leaving Ventimiglia stopped before it entered France, and once there customs inspectors seized upon one and examined one’s baggage. If you have no baggage you are almost an object of suspicion in Italy.
On the first visit we came to scale the walls of this old city which was much like Eze and commanded the sea from a great eminence. But after Eze it was not Ventimiglia that interested me so much as the fact that Italy was so different from France. In landing at Fishguard I had felt the astonishing difference between England and the United States. In landing at Calais the atmosphere of England had fallen from me like a cloak and France—its high color and enthusiasm—had succeeded to it. Here this day, stepping off the train at Ventimiglia only a few miles from Monte Carlo, I was once more astonished at the sharp change that had come over the spirit of man. Here were Italians, not French, dark, vivid, interesting little men who, it seemed to me, were so much more inclined to strut and stare than the French that they appeared to be vain. They were keen, temperamental, avid, like the French but strange to say not so gay, so light-hearted, so devil-may-care.
Italy, it seemed to me at once, was much poorer than France and Barfleur was very quick to point it out. “A different people,” he commented, “not like the French, much darker and more mysterious. See the cars—how poor they are. You will note that everywhere. And the buildings, the trains—the rolling stock is not so good. Look at the houses. The life here is more poverty-stricken. Italy is poor—very. I like it and I don’t. Some things are splendid. My mother adores Rome. I crave the French temperament. It is so much more light-hearted.” So he rambled on.
It was all true—accurate and keenly observed. I could not feel that I was anywhere save in a land that was seeking to rehabilitate itself but that had a long way to go. The men—the officials and soldiery of whom there were a legion clad in remarkable and even astonishing uniforms, appealed to my eye, but the souls of them to begin with, did not take my fancy. I felt them to be suspicious and greedy. Here for the first time I saw the uniform of the Italian bersaglieri: smart-looking in long capes, round hats of shiny leather with glossy green rooster feathers, and carrying short swords.
This night as I crossed the border after leaving Garaban I thought of all I had seen the day I came with Barfleur. When we reached Ventimiglia it was pitch dark and being alone and speaking no Italian whatsoever, I was confused by the thought of approaching difficulties.
Presently a customs inspector descended on me—a large, bearded individual who by signs made me understand that I had to go to the baggage car and open my trunk. I went. Torches supplied the only light: I felt as though I were in a bandit’s cave. Yet I came through well enough. Nothing contraband was found. I went back and sat down, plunging into a Baedeker for Italian wisdom and wishing gloomily that I had read more history than I had.
Somewhere beyond Ventimiglia the train came to a dead stop in the dark, and the next morning we were still stalled in the same place. I had risen early, under the impression that I was to get out quickly, but was waved back by the porter who repeated over and over, “Beaucoup de retard!” I understood that much but I did not understand what caused it, or that I would not arrive in Pisa until two in the afternoon. I went into the dining-car and there encountered one of the most obstreperous English women that I have ever met. She was obviously of the highly intellectual class, but so haughty in her manner and so loud-spoken in her opinions that she was really offensive. She was having her morning fruit and rolls and some chops and was explaining to a lady, who was with her, much of the character of Italy as she knew it. She was of the type that never accepts an opinion from any one, but invariably gives her own or corrects any that may be volunteered. At one time I think she must have been attractive, for she was moderately tall and graceful, but her face had become waxy and sallow, and a little thin—I will not say hard, although it was anything but ingratiating. My one wish was that she would stop talking and leave the dining-car, she talked so loud; but she stayed on until her friend and her husband arrived. I took him to be her husband by the way she contradicted him.
He was a very pleasing, intellectual person—the type of man, I thought, who would complacently endure such a woman. He was certainly not above the medium in height, quite well filled out, and decidedly phlegmatic. I should have said from my first glance that he never took any exercise of any kind; and his face had that interesting pallor which comes from much brooding over the midnight oil. He had large, soft, lustrous gray eyes and a mop of gray hair which hung low over a very high white forehead. I must repeat here that I am the poorest judge of people whom I am going to like of any human being. Now and then I take to a person instantly, and my feeling endures for years. On the other hand I have taken the most groundless oppositions based on nothing at all to people of whom subsequently I have become very fond. Perhaps my groundless opposition in this case was due to the fact that the gentleman was plainly submissive and overborne by his loud-talking wife. Anyhow I gave him a single glance and dismissed him from my thoughts. I was far more interested in a stern, official-looking Englishman with white hair who ordered his bottle of Perrier in a low, rusty voice and cut his orange up into small bits with a knife.
Presently I heard a German explaining to his wife about a wreck ahead. We were just starting now, perhaps twenty-five or thirty miles from Ventimiglia, and were dashing in and out of rocky tunnels and momentarily bursting into wonderful views of walled caves and sunlit sweeps of sea. The hill-town, the striped basilica with its square, many-arched campanile was coming into view. I was delighted to see open plains bordered in the distance by snow-capped mountains, and dotted sparsely with little huts of stone and brick—how old, Heaven only knows. “Here once the Tuscan shepherds strayed.” As Barfleur said, Italy was much poorer than France. The cars and stations seemed shabbier, the dress of the inhabitants much poorer. I saw natives, staring idly at the cars as we flashed past, or taking freight away from the platforms in rude carts drawn by oxen. Many of the vehicles appeared to be rattle-trap, dusty, unpainted; and some miles this side of Genoa—our first stop—we ran into a region where it had been snowing and the ground was covered with a wet slushy snowfall. After Monte Carlo, with its lemon and orange trees and its lovely palms, this was a sad comedown; and I could scarcely realize that we were not so much as a hundred miles away and going southward toward Rome at that. I often saw, however, distant hills crowned with a stronghold or a campanile in high browns and yellows, which made up for the otherwise poor foreground. Often we dashed through a cave, protected by high surrounding walls of rock, where the palm came into view again and where one could see how plainly these high walls of stone made for a tropic atmosphere. I heard the loud-voiced English woman saying, “It is such a delight to see the high colors again. England is so dreary. I never feel it so much as when we come down through here.”
We were passing through a small Italian town, rich in whites, pinks, browns and blues, a world of clothes-lines showing between rows of buildings, and the crowds, pure Italian in type, plodding to and fro along the streets. It was nice to see windows open here and the sunshine pouring down and making dark shadows. I saw one Italian woman, in a pink-dotted dress partly covered by a bright yellow apron, looking out of a window; and then it was that I first got the tang of Italy—the thing that I felt afterwards in Rome and Florence and Assisi and Perugia—that wonderful love of color that is not rampant but just deliciously selective, giving the eye something to feed on when it least expects it. That is Italy!
When nearly all the diners had left the car the English lady left also and her husband remained to smoke. He was not so very far removed from me, but he came a little nearer, and said: “The Italians must have their striped churches and their wash lines or they wouldn’t be happy.”
It was some time before he volunteered another suggestion, which was that the Italians along this part of the coast had a poor region to farm. I got up and left presently because I did not want to have anything to do with his wife. I was afraid that I might have to talk to her, which seemed to me a ghastly prospect.
I sat in my berth and read the history of art as it related to Florence, Genoa, and Pisa, interrupting my paragraphs with glances at every interesting scene. The value of the prospect changed first from one side of the train to the other, and I went out into the corridor to open a window and look out. We passed through a valley where it looked as though grapes were flourishing splendidly, and my Englishman came out and told me the name of the place, saying that it was good wine that was made there. He was determined to talk to me whether I would or no, and so I decided to make the best of it. It just occurred to me that he might be the least bit lonely, and, seeing that I was very curious about the country through which we were passing, that he might know something about Italy. The moment it dawned upon me that he might be helpful to me in this respect I began to ask him questions, and I found his knowledge to be delightfully wide. He knew Italy thoroughly. As we proceeded he described how the country was divided into virtually three valleys, separated by two mountain ranges, and what the lines of its early, almost prehistoric, development, had been. He knew where it was that Shelley had come to spend his summers, and spots that had been preferred by Browning and other famous Englishmen. He talked of the cities that lie in a row down the center of Italy—Perugia, Florence, Bologna, Modena, Piacenza and Milan—of the fact that Italy had no educational system whatsoever and that the priests were bitterly opposed to it. He was sorry that I was not going to stop at Spezia, because at Spezia the climate was very mild and the gulf very beautiful. He was delighted to think that I was going to stop at Pisa and see the cathedral and the Baptistery. He commented on the charms of Genoa—commercialized as it had been these later years—saying that there was a very beautiful Campo Santo and that some of the palaces of the quarreling Guelphs and Ghibellines still remaining were well worth seeing. When we passed the quarries of Carrara he told me of their age and of how endless the quantity of marble still was. He was going to Rome with his wife and he wanted to know if I would not look him up, giving me the name of a hotel where he lived by the season. I caught a note of remarkable erudition; for we fell to discussing religion and priestcraft and the significance of government generally, and he astonished me by the breadth of his knowledge. We passed to the subject of metaphysics from which all religions spring; and then I saw how truly philosophic and esoteric he was. His mind knew no country, his knowledge no school. He led off by easy stages into vague speculations as to the transcendental character of race impulses; and I knew I had chanced upon a profound scholar as well as a very genial person. I was very sorry now that I had been so rude to him. By the time we reached Pisa we were fast friends, and he told me that he had a distinguished friend, now a resident of Assisi, and that he would give me a letter to him which would bring me charming intellectual companionship for a day or two. I promised to seek him out at his hotel; and as we passed the Leaning Tower and the Baptistery, not so very distant from the railroad track as we entered Pisa, he gave me his card. I recognized the name as connected with some intellectual labors of a most distinguished character and I said so. He accepted the recognition gracefully and asked me to be sure and come. He would show me around Rome.
I gathered my bags and stepped out upon the platform at Pisa, eager to see what I could in the few hours that I wished to remain.