Alone

N >> Norman Douglas >> Alone

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These little local studies are not without charm. Somebody, one day, may
be induced to tell us about the fauna of Trafalgar Square. He should
begin with a description of the horse standing on three legs and gazing
inanely out of those human eyes after the fashion of its classic
prototype; then pass on to the lions beloved of our good Richard
Jefferies which look like puppy-dogs modelled in cotton-wool (why did
the sculptor not take a few lessons in lions from the sand-artist on
Yarmouth beach?), and conclude by dwelling as charitably as possible on
the human fauna--that droll little man, barely discernible, perched on
the summit of his lead pencil....

There was a slight earthquake at sunrise. I felt nothing....

And, appropriately enough, I encountered this afternoon M. M., that most
charming of persons, who, like Shelley and others, has discovered Italy
to be a "paradise of exiles." His friends may guess whom I mean when I
say that M. M. is connoisseur of earthquakes social and financial; his
existence has been punctuated by them to such an extent that he no
longer counts events from dates in the ordinary calendar, from birthdays
or Christmas or Easter, but from such and such a disaster affecting
himself. Each has left him seemingly more mellow than the last. Just
then, however, he was in pensive mood, his face all puckered into
wrinkles as he glanced upon the tawny flood rolling beneath that old
bridge. There he stood, leaning over the parapet, all by himself. He
turned his countenance aside on seeing me, to escape detection, but I
drew nigh none the less.

"Go away," he said. "Don't disturb me just now. I am watching the little
fishes. Life is so complicated! Let us pray. I have begun a new novel
and a new love-affair."

"God prosper both!" I replied, and began to move off.

"Thanks. But supposing the publisher always objects to your choicest
paragraphs?"

"I am not altogether surprised, if they are anything like what you once
read to me out of your unexpurgated 'House of the Seven Harlots.' Why
not try another firm? They might be more accommodating. Try mine."

He shook his head dubiously.

"They are all alike. It is with publishers as with wives: one always
wants somebody else's. And when you have them, where's the difference?
Ah, let us pray. These little fishes have none of our troubles."

I inquired about the new romance. At first he refused to disclose
anything. Then he told me it was to be entitled "With Christ at
Harvard," and that it promised some rather novel situations. I shall
look forward to its appearance.

What good things one could relate of M. M., but for the risk of
incurring his wrath! It is a thousand pities, I often tell him, that he
is still alive; I am yearning to write his biography, and cannot afford
to wait for his dissolution.

"When I am dead," he always says.

"By that time, my dear M., I shall be in the same fix myself."

"Try to survive. You may find it worth your while, when you come to look
into my papers. You don't know half. And I may be taking that little
sleeping-draught of mine any one of these days...." [12]

Mused long that night, and not without a certain envy, on the lot of M.
M. and other earthquake-connoisseurs--or rather on the lot of that true
philosopher, if he exists, who, far from being damaged by such
convulsions, distils therefrom subtle matter of mirth, I have only known
one single man--it happened to be a woman, an Austrian--who approached
this ideal of splendid isolation. She lived her own life, serenely
happy, refusing to acquiesce in the delusions and conventionalities of
the crowd; she had ceased to trouble herself about neighbours, save as a
source of quiet amusement; a state of affairs which had been brought
about by a succession of benevolent earthquakes that refined and
clarified her outlook.

Such disasters, obviously, have their uses. They knock down obsolete
rubbish and enable a man to start building anew. The most sensitive
recluse cannot help being a member of society. As such, he unavoidably
gathers about him a host of mere acquaintances, good folks who waste his
time dulling the edge of his wit and infecting him with their orthodoxy.
Then comes the cataclysm. He loses, let us say, all his money, or makes
a third appearance in the divorce courts. He can then at last (so one of
them expressed it to me) "revise his visiting-list," an operation which
more than counterbalances any damage from earthquakes. For these same
good folks are vanished, the scandal having scattered them to the winds.
He begins to breathe again, and employ his hours to better purpose. If
he loses both money and reputation he must feel, I should think, as
though treading on air. The last fools gone! And no sage lacks friends.

Consider well your neighbour, what an imbecile he is. Then ask yourself
whether it be worth while paying any attention to what he thinks of you.
Life is too short, and death the end of all things. Life must be lived,
not endured. Were the day twice as long as it is, a man might find it
diverting to probe down into that unsatisfactory fellow-creature and try
to reach some common root of feeling other than those physiological
needs which we share with every beast of earth. Diverting; hardly
profitable. It would be like looking for a flea in a haystack, or a joke
in the Bible. They can perhaps be found; at the expense of how much
trouble!

Therefore the sage will go his way, prepared to find himself growing
ever more out of sympathy with vulgar trends of opinion, for such is the
inevitable development of thoughtful and self-respecting minds. He
scorns to make proselytes among his fellows: they are not worth it. He
has better things to do. While others nurse their griefs, he nurses his
joy. He endeavours to find himself at no matter what cost, and to be
true to that self when found--a worthy and ample occupation for a
life-time. The happiness-of-the-greatest-number, of those who pasture on
delusions: what dreamer is responsible for this eunuchry? Mill, was it?
Bentham, more likely. As if the greatest number were not necessarily the
least-intelligent! As if their happiness were not necessarily
incompatible with that of the sage! Why foster it? He is a poor
philosopher, who cuts his own throat. Away with their ghosts;
de-spiritualize yourself; what you cannot find on earth is not worth
seeking.

That charming M. M., I fear, will never compass this clarity of vision,
this perfect de-spiritualization and contempt of illusions. He will
never remain curious, to his dying day, in things terrestrial and in
nothing else. From a Jewish-American father he has inherited that all
too common taint of psychasthenia (miscalled neurasthenia); he
confesses, moreover,--like other men of strong carnal proclivities--to
certain immaterial needs and aspirations after "the beyond." Not one of
these earthquake-specialists, in fact, but has his Achilles heel: a
mental crotchet or physical imperfection to mar the worldly perspective.
Not one of them, at close of life, will sit beside some open window in
view of a fair landscape and call up memories of certain moments which
no cataclysms have taken from him; not one will lay them in the balance
and note how they outweigh, in their tiny grains of gold, the dross of
an age of other men's lives. Not one of them! They will be preoccupied,
for the most part, with unseasonable little concerns. Pleasant folk,
none the less. And sufficiently abundant in Italy. Altogether, the
Englishman here is as often an intenser being than the home product.
Alien surroundings awaken fresh and unexpected notes in his nature. His
fibres seem to lie more exposed; you have glimpses into the man's
anatomy. There is something hostile in this sunlight to the hazy or
spongy quality which saturates the domestic Anglo-Saxon, blurring the
sharpness of his moral outline. No doubt you will also meet with dull
persons; Rome is full of them, but, the type being easier to detect
among a foreign environment, there is still less difficulty in evading
them....

Thus I should have had no compunction, some nights ago, in making myself
highly objectionable to Mr. P. G. who has turned up here on some mission
connected with the war--so he says, and it may well be true; no
compunction whatever, had that gentleman been in his ordinary social
state. Mr. P. G., the acme of British propriety, inhabiting a house, a
mansion, on the breezy heights of north London, was on that occasion
decidedly drunk. "Indulging in a jag," he would probably have called it.
He tottered into a place where I happened to be sitting, having lost his
friends, he declared; and soon began pouring into my ear, after the
confidential manner of a drunkard, a flood of low talk, which if I
attempted to set it down here, would only result in my being treated to
the same humiliating process as the excellent M. M. with his "choicest
paragraphs." It was highly instructive--the contrast between that
impeccable personality which he displays at home and his present state.
I wish his wife and two little girls could have caught a few shreds of
what he said--just a few shreds; they would have seen a new light on
dear daddy.

In vino veritas. Ever avid of experimentum in some corpore vili and
determined to reach the bed-rock of his gross mentality, I plied him
vigorously with drink, and was rewarded. It was rich sport, unmasking
this Philistine and thanking God, meanwhile, that I was not like unto
him. We are all lost sheep; and none the worse for that. Yet whoso is
liable, however drunk, to make an exhibition of himself after the
peculiar fashion of Mr. P. G., should realize that there is something
fundamentally wrong with his character and take drastic measures of
reform--measures which would include, among others, a total abstention
from alcohol. Old Aristotle, long ago, laboured to define wherein
consisted the trait known as gentlemanliness; others will have puzzled
since his day, for we have bedaubed ourselves with so thick a coating of
manner and phrase that many a cad will pass for something better. Well,
here is the test. Unvarnish your man; make him drink, and listen. That
was my procedure with P. G. Esquire. I listened to his outpouring of
inanity and obscenity and, listening sympathetically, like some
compassionate family doctor, could not help asking myself: Is such a man
to be respected, even when sober? Be that as it may, he gave me to
understand why some folk are rightly afraid of exposing, under the
influence of drink, the bete humaine which lurks below their skin of
decency. His language would have terrified many people. Me it rejoiced.
I would not have missed that entertainment for worlds. He finally wanted
to have a fight, because I refused to accompany him to a certain place
of delights, the address of which--I might have given him a far better
one--had been scrawled on the back of a crumpled envelope by some
cabman. Unable to stand on his legs, what could he hope to do there?

Olevano

I have loafed into Olevano.

A thousand feet below my window, and far away, lies the gap between the
Alban and Volscian hills; veiled in mists, the Pontine marches extend
beyond, and further still--discernible only to the eye of faith--the
Tyrrhenian.

The profile of these Alban craters is of inimitable grace. It recalls
Etna, as viewed from Taormina. How the mountain cleaves to earth, how
reluctantly it quits the plain before swerving aloft in that noble line!
Velletri's ramparts, twenty miles distant, are firmly planted on its
lower slope. Standing out against the sky, they can be seen at all hours
of the day, whereas the dusky palace of Valmontone, midmost on the green
plain and rock-like in its proportions, fades out of sight after midday.

Hard by, on your right, are the craggy heights of Capranica. Tradition
has it that Michael Angelo was in exile up there, after doing something
rather risky. What had he done? He crucified his model, desirous, like a
true artist, to observe and reproduce faithfully in marble the muscular
contractions and facial agony of such a sufferer. To crucify a man: this
was going almost too far, even for the Pope of that period, who seems to
have been an unusually sensitive pontiff--or perhaps the victim was a
particular friend of his. However that may be, he waxed wroth and
banished the conscientious sculptor in disgrace to this lonely mountain
village, there to expiate his sins, for a day or two....

One sleeps badly here. Those nightingales--they are worse than the
tram-cars in town. They begin earlier. They make more noise. Surely
there is a time for everything? Will certain birds never learn to sing
at reasonable hours?

A word as to these nightingales. One of them elects to warble, in
deplorably full-throated ease, immediately below my bedroom window. When
this particular fowl sets up its din at about 3.45 a.m. it is a
veritable explosion; an ear-rending, nerve-shattering explosion of
noise. I use that word "noise" deliberately. For it is not music--not
until your ears are grown accustomed to it.

I know a little something about music, having studied the art with
considerable diligence for a number of years. Impossible to enumerate
all the composers and executants on various instruments, the conductors
and opera-singers and ballet-girls with whom I was on terms of
familiarity during that incarnation. Perhaps I am the only person now
alive who has shaken hands with a man (Lachner) who shook hands with
Beethoven and heard his voice; all of which may appear when I come to
indite my musical memoirs. I have written a sonata in four movements,
opus 643, hitherto unpublished, and played the organ during divine
service to a crowded congregation. Furthermore I performed, not at my
own suggestion, his insipid Valse Caprice to the great Antoine
Rubinstein, who was kind enough to observe: "Yes, yes. Quite good. But I
rather doubt whether you could yet risk playing that in a concert." And
in the matter of sheer noise I am also something of an expert, having
once, as an infant prodigy, broken five notes in a single masterly
rendering of Liszt's polonaise in E Major--I think it is E
Major--whereupon my teacher, himself a pupil of Liszt, genially
remarked: "Now don't cry, and don't apologize. A polonaise like yours is
worth a piano." I set these things down with modest diffidence, solely
in order to establish my locus standi as a person who might be expected
to know the difference between sound and noise. As such, I have no
hesitation in saying that the first three bars of that nightingale
performance are, to sleeping ears, not music. They break upon the
stillness with the crash of Judgment Day.

And every night the same scare. It causes me to start up, bathed in
sudden perspiration, out of my first, and best, and often only sleep,
with the familiar feeling that something awful is happening. Windows
seem to rattle, plaster drops from the ceiling--an earthquake? Lord, no.
Nothing so trivial. Nothing so brief. It is that blasted bird clearing
its throat for a five hours' entertainment. Let it not be supposed that
the song of these southerners bears any resemblance to that of an
English nightingale. I could stand a hatful of English nightingales in
my bedroom; they would lull me to sleep with their anaemic whispers. You
might as well compare the voice of an Italian costermonger, the crowing
of a cock, the braying of a local donkey, with their representatives in
the north--those thin trickles of sound, shadowy as the squeakings of
ghosts. Something will have to be done about those nightingales unless I
am to find my way into a sanatorium. For hardly is this bird started on
its work before five or six others begin to shout in emulation--a little
further off, I am glad to say, but still near enough to be inconvenient;
still near enough to be reached by a brick from this window----A brick.
Methinks I begin to see daylight....

Meanwhile one can snatch a little rest out of doors, in the afternoon. A
delectable path, for example, runs up behind the cemetery, bordered by
butterfly orchids and lithospermum and aristolochia and other plants
worthy of better names; it winds aloft, under shady chestnuts, with
views on either side. Here one can sit and smoke and converse with some
rare countryman passing by; here one can dream, forgetful of
nightingales--soothed, rather, by the mellifluous note of the oriole
among the green branches overhead and the piping, agreeably remote, of
some wryneck in the olives down yonder. The birds are having a quiet
time, for the first time in their lives; sportsmen are all at the front.
I kicked up a partridge along this track two days ago.

Those wrynecks, by the way, are abundant but hard to see. They sit
close, relying on their protective colour. And it is the same with the
tree-creepers. I have heard Englishmen say there are no tree-creepers in
Italy. The olive groves are well stocked with them (there are numbers
even in the Borghese Gardens in Rome), but you must remain immovable as
a rock in order to see them; for they are yet shyer, more silent, more
fond of interposing the tree-trunk between yourself and them, than those
at home. Mouse-like in hue, in movement and voice--a strange case of
analogous variation....

As to this Scalambra, this mountain whose bleak grey summit overtops
everything near Olevano, I could soon bear the sight of it no longer. It
seemed to shut out the world; one must up and glance over the edge, to
see what is happening on the other side. I looked for a guide and
porter, for somebody more solid than Giulio, who is almost an infant;
none could be found. Men are growing scarce as the Dodo hereabouts, on
account of the war. So Giulio came, though he had never made the ascent.

Now common sense, to say nothing of a glance at the map, would suggest
the proper method of approach: by the village of Serrano, the Saint
Michael hermitage, and so up. Scouting this plan, I attacked the
mountain about half-way between that village and Rojate. I cannot
recommend my route. It was wearisome to the last degree and absolutely
shadeless save for a small piece of jungle clothing a gulley, hung with
myriads of caterpillars and not worth mentioning as an incident in that
long walk. No excitement--not the faintest chance, so far as I could
see, of breaking one's neck, and uphill all the time over limestone. One
never seems to get any nearer. This Scalambra, I soon discovered, is one
of those artful mountains which defend their summits by thrusting out
escarpments with valleys in between; you are kept at arm's length, as it
were, by this arrangement of the rock, which is invisible at a distance.
And when at last you set foot on the real ridge and climb laboriously to
what seems to be the top--lo! there is another peak a little further
off, obviously a few feet higher. Up you go, only to discover a third,
perhaps a few inches higher still. Alpine climbers know these tricks.

We reached the goal none the less and there lay, panting and gasping;
while an eagle, a solitary eagle with tattered wings, floated overhead
in the cloudless sky.

The descent to Rojate under that blazing sun was bad enough. My flask
had been drained to the dregs long ago, and the Scalambra, true to its
limestone tradition, had not supplied even a drop of water. Arriving at
the village at about two in the afternoon, we found it deserted;
everybody enjoying their Sunday nap. Rojate is a dirty hole. The water
was plainly not to be trusted; it might contain typhoid germs, and I was
responsible for Giulio's health; wine would be safer, we agreed. There,
in a little shop near the church--a dark and cool place, the first shade
we had entered for many hours--we drank without ever growing less
thirsty. We felt like cinders, so hot, so porous, that the liquid seemed
not only to find its way into the legitimate receptacle but to be
obliged to percolate, by some occult process of capillarity, the
remotest regions of the body. As time went on, the inhabitants dropped
in after their slumbers and kept us company. We told our adventures,
drank to the health of the Allies one by one and several times over; and
it was not until we had risen to our feet and passed once more into the
sunshine of the square that we suddenly felt different from what we
thought we felt.

The first indication was conveyed by Giulio, who called upon the
populace of Rojate, there assembled, to bear solemn witness to the fact
that I was his one and only friend, and that he would nevermore abandon
me--a sentiment in which I stoutly concurred. (A fellow-feeling makes us
wondrous blind.) Other symptoms followed. His hat, for example, which
had hitherto behaved in exemplary fashion, now refused to remain
steadily balanced on his head; it took some first-class gymnastics to
prevent it from falling to the ground. In fact, while I confined myself
to the minor part of Silenus--my native role--this youngster gave a
noteworthy representation of the Drunken Faun....

Now I see no harm in appreciating wine up to a certain point, and am
consoled to observe that Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D., was of the same
way of thinking. He says so himself, and there is no reason for doubting
his word. He frankly admits, for instance, that he enjoys the stuff
called moscato "with great zest." He samples the Falernian vintage and
pronounces it to be "particularly good, and not degenerated." Arrived at
Cutro, he is not averse to reviving his spirits with "a pretty fair
modicum of wine." He also lets slip--significant detail--the fact that
Dr. Henderson was one of his friends, and that he travelled about with
him. You may judge a man by the company he keeps. Who was this Dr.
Henderson? He was the author of "The History of Ancient Wines." Old
Henderson, I should say, could be trusted to know something of local
vintages.

And so far good.

At Licenza, however, Ramage tells us that he "got glorious on the wine
of Horace's Sabine farm." I do not know what he means by this
expression, which seems to be purposely ambiguous; in any case, it does
not sound very nice. At another place, again, he and his entertainer
consumed some excellent liquor "in considerable quantity"--so he avows;
adding that "it was long past midnight ere we closed our bacchanalian
orgies, and he (the host) ended by stating that he was happy to have
made my acquaintance." Note the lame and colourless close of that
sentence: he ended by stating. One always ends that way after
bacchanalian orgies, though one does not always gloss over the escapade
with such disingenuous language.

We can guess what really took place. It was something like what happened
at Rojate. Did not the curly-haired Giulio end by "stating" something to
the same effect?

I cannot make up my mind whether to be pleased with this particular
trait in friend Ramage's character. For let it never be forgotten that
our traveller was a young man at the time. He says so himself, and there
is no reason for doubting his word. Was he acting as beseemed his years?

I am not more straight-laced than many people, yet I confess it always
gives me a kind of twinge to see a young man yielding to intemperance of
any kind. There is something incongruous in the spectacle, if not
actually repellent. Rightly or wrongly, one is apt to associate that
time of life with stern resolve. A young man, it appears to me, should
hold himself well in hand. Youth has so much to spare! Youth can afford
to be virtuous. With such stores of joy looming ahead, it should be a
period of ideals, of self-restraint and self-discipline, of earnestness
of purpose. How well the Greek Anthology praises "Temperance, the nurse
of Youth!" The divine Plato lays it down that youngsters should not
touch wine at all, since it is not right to heap fire on fire. He adds
that older men like ourselves may indulge therein as an ally against the
austerity of their years--agreeing, therefore, with Theophrastus who
likewise recommends it for the "natural moroseness" of age.

Observe in this connection what happened to Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D.,
at Trebisacce. Here was a poor old coastguard who had been taken
prisoner by the Corsairs thirty years earlier, carried to Algiers, and
afterwards ransomed. Having "nothing better to do" (says our author) "I
confess I furnished him with somewhat more wine than was exactly
consistent with propriety"; with so liberal a quantity, indeed, that the
coastguard became quite "obstreperous in his mirth"; whereupon Ramage
hops on his mule and leaves him to his fate. Here, then, we have a young
fellow deliberately leading an old man astray. And why? Because he has
"nothing better to do." [13] It is not remarkably edifying. True, he
afterwards makes a kind of apology for "causing my brother to sin by
over-indulgence...."

But if we close our eyes to the fact that Ramage, when he gave way to
these excesses, was a young man and ought to have known better, what an
agreeable companion we find him!

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