Alone

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Drive swiftly thence, if you are in the mood, as you should be, for
something at the other pole of feeling, to view that wonder, the
kneeling boy at the Museo delle Terme. Headless and armless though he
be, he displays as much vitality as the Peruvians; every inch of the
body is alive, and one may well marvel at the skill of the artist who,
during his interminable task of sculpture, held fast the model's
fleeting outline--so fleeting, at that particular age of life, that
every month, and every week, brings about new conditions of surface and
texture. A child of Niobe? Very likely. There is suffering also here, a
suffering different from theirs; struck by the Sun-God's arrow, he is in
the act of sinking to earth. Over this tension broods a divine calm.
Here is the antidote to mummified Incas.

Alatri

What brought me to Alatri?

Memories of a conversation, by Tiber banks, with Fausto, who was born
here and vaunted it to be the fairest city on earth. Rome was quite a
passable place, but as to Alatri----

"You never saw such walls in all your life. They are not walls. They are
precipices. And our water is colder than the Acqua Marcia."

"Walls and water say little to me. But if the town produces other
citizens like yourself----"

"It does indeed! I am the least of the sons of Alatri."

"Then it must be worthy of a visit...."

In the hottest hour of the afternoon they deposited me outside the city
gate at some new hotel--I forget its name--to which I promptly took an
unreasoning dislike. There was a fine view upon the mountains from the
window of the room assigned to me, but nothing could atone for that lack
of individuality which seemed to exhale from the establishment and its
proprietors. It looked as though I were to be a cypher here. Half an
hour was as much as I could endure. Issuing forth despite the heat, I
captured a young fellow and bade him carry my bags whithersoever he
pleased. He took me to the Albergo della----

The Albergo della----is a shy and retiring hostelry, invisible as such
to the naked eye, since it bears no sign of being a place of public
entertainment at all. Here was individuality, and to spare. Mine host is
an improvement even upon him of the Pergola at Valmontone; a man after
my own heart, with merry eyes, drooping white moustache and a lordly
nose--a nose of the right kind, a flame-tinted structure which must have
cost years of patient labour to bring to its present state of
blossoming. That nose! I felt as though I could dwell for ever beneath
its shadow. The fare, however, is not up to the standard of the
"Garibaldi" inn at Frosinone which I have just left.

Now Frosinone is no tourist resort. It is rather a dull little place; I
am never likely to go there again, and have therefore no reason for
keeping to myself its "Garibaldi" hotel which leaves little to be
desired, even under these distressful war-conditions. It set me
thinking--thinking that there are not many townlets of this size in
rural England which can boast of inns comparable to the "Garibaldi" in
point of cleanliness, polite attention, varied and good food, reasonable
prices. Not many; perhaps very few. One remembers a fair number of the
other kind, however; that kind where the fare is monotonous and badly
cooked, the attendance supercilious or inefficient, and where you have
to walk across a cold room at night--refinement of torture--in order to
turn out the electric light ere going to bed. That infamy is alone
enough to condemn these establishments, one and all.

Yes! And the beds; those frowsy, creaky, prehistoric wooden concerns,
always six or eight inches too short, whose mattresses have not been
turned round since they were made. What happens? You clamber into such a
receptacle and straightway roll downhill, down into its centre, into a
kind of river-bed where you remain fixed fast, while that monstrous
feather-abomination called a pillow, yielding to pressure, rises up on
either side of your head and engulfs eyes and nose and everything else
into its folds. No escape! You are strangled, smothered; you might as
well have gone to bed with an octopus. In this horrid contrivance you
lie for eight long hours, clapped down like a corpse in its coffin.
Every single bed in rural England ought to be burnt. Not one of them is
fit for a Christian to sleep in....

The days are growing hot.

A little tract of woodland surrounded by white walls and attached to the
convent on the neighbouring hill is a pleasant spot to while away the
afternoon hours. You can have it to yourself. I have all Alatri to
myself; a state of affairs which is not without its disadvantages, for,
being the only foreigner here, one is naturally watched and regarded
with suspicion. And it would be even worse in less civilised places,
where one could count for certain on trouble with some conscientious
official. So one remains on the beaten track, although my reputation
here as non-Austrian (nobody bothers about the Germans) is fairly well
established since that memorable debate, in the local cafe, with a
bootmaker who, having spent three years in America, testified publicly
that I spoke English almost as well as he did. The little newsboy of the
place, who is a universal favourite, seeing that his father, a
lithographer, is serving a stiff sentence for forgery--he brings me
every day with the morning's paper the latest gossip concerning myself.

"Mr. So-and-so still says you are a spy. It is sheer malice."

"I know. Did you tell him he might----?"

"I did. He was very angry. I also told him the remark you made about his
mother."

"Tell him again, to-morrow."

It seldom pays to be rude. It never pays to be only half rude.

In October--and we are now at midsummer--there occurred a little
adventure which shows the risks one may run at a time like this.

I was in Rome, walking homewards at about eleven at night along the
still crowded Corso and thinking, as I went along, of my impending
journey northwards for which the passport was already vised, when there
met me a florid individual accompanied by two military officers. We
stared at one another. His face was familiar to me, though I knew not
where I had seen it. Then he introduced himself. He was a director of
the Banca d'ltalia. And was I not the gentleman who had recently been to
Orvinio? I remembered.

"The last time I was there," I said, "was about a month ago. I fancy we
had some conversation in the motor up from Mandela."

"That is so. And now, however disagreeable it may be, I feel myself
obliged to perform a patriotic duty. This is war-time. I would ask you
to be so good as to accompany us to the nearest police-station."

"Which is not far off," I replied. "There is one up the next street on
our right."

We walked there, all four of us, without saying another word. "What have
I been doing?" I wondered. Then we climbed upstairs.

Here, at a well-lighted table in a rather stuffy room, sat a delegato or
commissario--I forget which--surrounded, despite the lateness of the
hour, by one or two subordinates. He was of middle age, and not
prepossessing. He looked as if he could make himself unpleasant, though
his face was not of that actively vicious--or actively stupid: the terms
are interconvertible--kind. While scanning his countenance, during those
few moments, sundry thoughts flitted through my mind.

These then, I said to myself--these are the functionaries, whether
executive or administrative, whether Italian or English or Chinese, whom
a man is supposed to respect. Who are they? God knows. Nine-tenths of
them are in a place where they have no business to be: so much is
certain. And what are they doing, these swarms of parasites? Justifying
their salaries by inventing fresh regulations and meddlesome bye-laws,
and making themselves objectionable all round. Distrust of authority
should be the first civic duty, even as the first military duty is said
to be the reverse of it. We catch ourselves talking of the "lesson of
history." Why not take that lesson to heart? Reverence of the mandarin
destroyed the fair life of old China, which was overturned by the
Tartars not because Chinamen were too weak or depraved, but because they
were the opposite: too moral, too law-abiding, too strong in their sense
of right. They paid for their virtue with the extinction of their
wonderful culture. They ought to have known better; they ought to have
rated morality at its true worth, since it was the profoundest Chinaman
himself who said that virtue is merely etiquette--or something to that
effect.

I found myself studying the delegato's physiognomy. What could one do
with such a composite face? It is a question which often confronts me
when I see such types. It confronted me then, in a flash. How make it
more presentable, more imposing? By what alterations? Shaving that
moustache? No; his countenance could not carry the loss; it would
forfeit what little air of dignity it possessed. A small pointed beard,
an eye-glass? Possibly. Another trimming of the hair might have improved
him, but, on the whole, it was a face difficult to manipulate, on
account of its inherent insipidity and self-contradictory features; one
of those faces which give so much trouble to the barbers and valets of
European royalties.

He took down the names and addresses of all four of us, and it was then
that I missed my chance. I ought to have spoken first instead of
allowing this luscious director to begin as follows:--

"The foreign gentleman here was at Orvinio about a month ago. He admits
it himself and I can corroborate the fact, as I was there at the same
time. Orvinio is a small country place in the corner of Umbria. There is
a mountain in the neighbourhood, remote and very high--altissima! It is
called Mount Muretta and occupies a commanding situation. For reasons
which I will leave you, Signer Commissario, to investigate, this
gentleman climbed up that mountain and was observed, on the very summit,
making calculations and taking measurements with instruments."

Now why did I climb up that wretched Muretta? For an all-sufficient
reason: it was a mountain. There is no eminence in the land, from Etna
and the Gran Sasso downwards, whose appeal I can resist. A bare
wall-like patch on the summit (whence presumably the name) visible from
below and promising a lively scramble up the rock, was an additional
inducement. Precipices are not so frequent at Orvinio that one can
afford to pass them by, although this one, as a matter of fact, proved
to be a mighty tame affair. There was yet another object to my trip. I
desired to verify a legend connected with this mountain, the tradition
of a vanished castle or hamlet in its upper regions to whose former
existence the name of a certain old family, still surviving at Orvinio,
bears witness. "We are not really from Orvinio," these people will tell
you. "We are from the lost castle of the Muretta." (There is not a
vestige of a castle left. But I found one brick in the jungle which
covers, on the further side of the summit, a vast rock-slide dating, I
should say, from early mediaeval days, under whose ruins the fastness
may lie buried.) Reasons enough for visiting Muretta.

As to taking measurements--well, a man is naturally accused of a good
many things in the course of half a century. Nobody has yet gone so far
as to call me a mathematician. These "calculations and instruments" were
a local mirage; as pretty an instance of the mythopoeic faculty as one
could hope to find in our degenerate days, when gods no longer walk the
earth. [27]

The official seemed to be impressed with the fact that my accuser was
director of a bank. He inquired what I had to say.

This was a puzzle. They had sprung the thing on me rather suddenly. One
likes to have notice of such questions. Tell the truth? I am often
tempted to do so; it saves so much trouble! But truth-telling is a
matter of longitude, and the further east one goes, the more one learns
to hold in check that unnatural propensity. (Mankind has a natural love
of the lie itself. Bacon.) Which means nothing more than that one will
do well to take account of national psychology. An English functionary,
athlete or mountaineer, might have glimpsed the state of affairs. But to
climb in war-time, without any object save that of exercising one's
limbs and verifying a questionable legend, a high and remote
mountain--Muretta happens to be neither the one nor the other--would
have seemed to an Italian an incredible proceeding. I thought it better
to assume the role of accuser in my turn: an Oriental trick.

"This director," I said, "calls himself a patriot. What has he told us?
That while at Orvinio he knew a foreigner who climbed a high mountain to
make calculations with instruments. What does this admirable citizen do
with regard to such a suspicious character? He does nothing. Is there
not a barrack-full of carbineers at the entrance of the place ready to
arrest such people? But our patriotic gentleman allows the spy to walk
away, to climb fifty other mountains and take five thousand other
measurements, all of which have by this time safely reached Berlin and
Vienna. That, Signor Commissario, is not our English notion of
patriotism. I shall certainly make it my business to write and
congratulate the Banca d'Italia on possessing such a good Italian as
director. I shall also suggest that his talents would be more worthily
employed at the Banca--"(naming a notoriously pro-German establishment).

A poor speech; but it gave me the satisfaction of seeing the fellow grow
purple with fury and so picturesquely indignant that he soon reached the
spluttering stage. In fact, there was nothing to be done with him. The
delegato suggested that inasmuch as he had said his say and deposited
his address, he was at liberty to depart, whenever so disposed.

They went--he and his friends.

The other was looking serious--as serious as such a face could be made
to look. He must not be allowed to think, I decided, for once an
official begins to think he is liable to grow conscientious and
then--why, any disaster might happen, the least of them being that I
should remain in custody pending investigations. In how many more
countries was I going to be arrested for one crime or another? This joke
had lost its novelty a good many years ago.

"A pernicious person," I began, "--you have but to look at him. And now
he has invited me here in order to make a patriotic impression on his
friends, those poor little devils in uniform (a safe remark, since no
love is lost hereabouts between police and military). Such silly talk
about measurements! It should be nipped in the bud. Here you have an
intelligent young subordinate, if I mistake not. Let him drive home with
me at my expense; we will go through all papers and search for
instruments and bring everything that savours of suspicion back to this
office, together with my passport which I never carry on my person.
This, meanwhile, is my carta di soggiorno."

The document was in order. Still he hesitated. I thought of those
miserable three days' grace which were all that the French consulate had
accorded me. If the man grew conscientious, I might remain stranded in
Rome, and all that passport trouble must begin again. And to tell him of
this dilemma would make him more distrustful than ever.

I went on hastily to admit that my request might not be regular, but how
natural! Were we not allies? Was it not my duty to clear myself of such
an imputation at the earliest moment and to spare no efforts to that
end? I felt sure he could sympathise with the state of my mind, etc.
etc.

Thus I spoke while perfect innocence, mother of invention, lent wings to
my words, and while thinking all the time: You little vermin, what are
you doing here, in that chair, when you should be delving the earth or
breaking stones, as befits your kind? I tried to picture myself climbing
up Muretta with a theodolite bulging out of my pocket. A flagon of port
would have been more in my line. Calculations! It is all I can do to
control my weekly washing bill, and even for that simple operation I
like to have a quiet half hour in a room by myself. Instruments! If this
young fellow, I thought, discovers so much as an astrolabe among my
belongings, let them hang me from the ramparts at daybreak! And the
delegato, listening, was finally moved by my rhetoric, as they often
are, if you can throw not only your whole soul, but a good part of your
body, into the performance. He found the idea sufficiently reasonable.
The subordinate, as might have been expected, had nothing whatever to
do; like all of his kind, he was only in that office to evade military
service.

We drove away and, on reaching our destination, I insisted, despite his
polite remonstrances, on turning everything upside down. We made hay of
the apartment, but discovered nothing more treasonable than some rather
dry biscuits and a bottle of indifferent Marsala.

"And now I must really be going," he said. "Half-past one! He will be
surprised at my long absence."

"I am coming with you. I promised him the passport."

"Don't dream of it. To-morrow, to-morrow. You will have no trouble with
him. You can bring the passport, but he will not look at it. Yes; ten
o'clock, or eleven, or midday."

So it happened. The passport was waived aside by the official, a little
detail which, I must say, struck me as more remarkable than anything
else. He did not even unfold it.

"E stato un' equivoco," was all he condescended to say, still without a
smile. There had been a misunderstanding.

The incident was closed.

Things might have gone differently in the country. I would either have
been marched to the capital under the escort of a regiment of
carbineers, or kept confined in some rural barracks for half a century
while the authorities were making the necessary researches into the
civil status of my grandmother's favourite poet--an inquiry without
which no Latin dossier is complete.

POSTSCRIPT.--Why are there so many carbineers at Orvinio? And how many
of these myriad public guardians scattered all over the country ever
come into contact with a criminal, or even have the luck to witness a
street accident? And would the taxpayer not profit by a reduction in
their numbers? And whether legal proceedings of every kind would not
tend to diminish?

There is a village of about three hundred inhabitants not far from Rome;
fifteen carbineers are quartered there. Before they came, those
inevitable little troubles were settled by the local mayor; things
remained in the family, so to speak. Now the place has been set by the
ears, and a tone of exacerbation prevails. The natives spend their days
in rushing to Rome and back on business connected with law-suits, not a
quarter of which would have arisen but for the existence of the
carbineers. Let me not be misunderstood. Individually, these men are
nowise at fault. They desire nothing better than to be left in peace.
Seldom do they meddle with local concerns--far from it! They live in
sacerdotal isolation, austerely aloof from the populace, like a colony
of monks. The institution is to blame. It is their duty, among other
things, to take down any charge which anybody may care to prefer against
his neighbour. That done, the machinery of the law is automatically set
in motion. Five minutes' talk among the village elders would have
settled many affairs which now degenerate into legal squabbles of twice
as many years; chronic family feuds are fostered; a man who, on
reflection, would find it more profitable to come to terms with his
opponent over a glass of wine, or even to square the old syndic with a
couple of hundred francs, sees himself obliged to try the same tactics
on a judge of the high court--which calls for a different technique.

Altogether, the country is flagrantly over-policed. [28] It gives one a
queer sense of public security to see, at Rome for instance, every third
man you meet--an official, of course, of some kind--with a revolver
strapped to his belt, as if we were still trembling on the verge of
savagery in some cowboy settlement out West. Greek towns of about ten
thousand inhabitants, like Argos or Megara, have about ten municipal
guardians each, and peace reigns within their walls. How can ten men
perform duties which, in Italy, would require ten times as many? Is it a
question of climate, or national character? A question, perhaps, of
common sense--of realising that local institutions often work with less
friction and less outlay than that system of governmental centralisation
of which the carbineers are an example.

Meanwhile we are still at Alatri which, I am glad to discover, possesses
five gateways--five or even more. It is something of a relief to be away
from that Roman tradition of four. Military reasons originally, fixing
themselves at last into a kind of sacred tradition.... So it is, with
unimaginative races. Their pious sentimentalism crystallises into
inanimate objects. The English dump down Gothic piles on India's coral
strand, and the chimes of Big Ben, floating above that crowd of
many-hued Orientals, give to the white man a sense of homeliness and
racial solidarity. The French, more fluid and sensitive to the
incongruous, have introduced local colour into some of their Colonial
buildings, not without success. As to this particular Roman tradition,
it pursues one with meaningless iteration from the burning sands of
Africa to Ultima Thule. Always those four gateways!

For a short after-breakfast ramble nothing is comparable to that green
space on the summit of the citadel. Hither I wend my way every morning,
to take my fill of the panorama and meditate upon the vanity of human
wishes. The less you have seen of localities like Tiryns the more you
will be amazed at this impressive and mysterious fastness. That portal,
those blocks--what Titans fitted them into their places? Well, we have
now learnt a little something about those Titans and their methods. From
this point you can see the old Roman road that led into Alatri; it
climbs up the hill in straightforward fashion, intersecting the broad
modern "Via Romana"--a goat-track, nowadays....

These Alatri remains are wonderful--more so than many of the sites which
old Ramage so diligently explored. Why did he fail to "satisfy his
curiosity" in regard to them? He utters not a word about Alatri. Yet he
stayed at the neighbouring Frosinone and makes some good observations
about the place; he stayed at the neighbouring Ferentino and does the
same. Was he more "pressed for time" than usual? We certainly find him
"hurrying down" past Anagni near-by, of whose imposing citadel he again
says nothing whatever....

I am now, at the end of several months, beginning to know Ramage fairly
well. I hope to know him still better ere we part company, if ever we
do. It takes time, this interpretation, this process of grafting one
mind upon another. For he does not supply mere information. A fig for
information. That would be easy to digest. He supplies character, which
is tougher fare. His book, unassuming as it is, comes up to my test of
what such literature should be. It reveals a personality. It contains a
philosophy of life.

And what is the dominating trait of this old Scotsman? The historical
sense. Ancient inscriptions interested him more than anything else. He
copied many of them during his trip; fifty, I should think; and it is no
small labour, as any one who has tried it can testify, to decipher these
half-obliterated records often placed in the most inconvenient
situations (he seems to have taken no squeezes). To have busied himself
thus was to his credit in an age whose chief concern, as regards
antiquity, consisted in plundering works of art for ornamental purposes.
Ramage did not collect bric-a-brac like other travellers; he collected
knowledge of humanity and its institutions, such knowledge as
inscriptions reveal. It is good to hear him discoursing upon these
documents in stone, these genealogies of the past, with a pleasingly
sentimental erudition. He likes them not in any dry-as-dust fashion, but
for the light they throw upon the living world of his day. Speaking of
one of them he says: "It is when we come across names connected with men
who have acted an illustrious part in the world's history, that the
fatigues of such a journey as I have undertaken are felt to be
completely repaid." That is the humanist's spirit.

His equipment in the interpretation of these stones and of all else he
picked up in the way of lore and legend was of the proper kind.
Boundless curiosity, first of all. And then, an adequate apparatus of
learning. He knew his classics--knew them so well that he could always
put his finger on those particular passages of theirs which bore upon a
point of interest. We may doubtless be able to supply some apt quotation
from Virgil or Martial. It is quite a different thing remembering, and
collating, references in. Aelian or Pliny or Aristotle or Ptolemy. And
wide awake, withal; not easily imposed upon. He is not of the kind to
swallow the tales of the then fashionable cicerone's. He has critical
dissertations on sites like Cannae and the Bandusian Fountain and
Caudine Forks; and when, at Nola, they opened in his presence a
sepulchre containing some of those painted Greek vases for which the
place is famous, he promptly suspects it to be a "sepulchre prepared for
strangers," and instead of buying the vases allows them to remain where
they are "for more simple or less suspicious travellers." On the way to
Cape Leuca he passes certain mounds whose origin he believes to be
artificial and the work of a prehistoric race. I fancy his conjecture
has proved correct. On page 258, speaking of an Oscan inscription, he
mentions Mommsen, which shows that he kept himself up to date in such
researches....

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