Chapter 16

Different are these mummies from those of the tenaciously unimaginative and routine-bound Egyptians. Theirs are dead as a door-nail; torpid lumps, undistinguishable one from the other. Here we have a rare phenomenon--life, and individuality, after death. They are more noteworthy than the cowled and desiccated monks of Italy or Sicily, or at least differently so; undraped, for the most part, though some of them may be seen, mere skin-covered heads, peering with dismal coyness out of a brown sack. And the jabbering teeth.... We dream as children of night-terrors, of goblins and phantoms that start out of the gloom and flit about with hideous grimaces. They are gone, while yet we shudder at that momentary flash of grizzliness; intangibilities, whose image is not easily detained. To see spectral visions embodied, and ghosts made flesh, one should come here. Had the excruciating operation of embalming been performed upon live men and women, their poses could hardly have been more multifariously agonised; and an aesthete may speculate as to how far such objects offend, in expression of blank misery and horror, against the canons of what is held to be artistically desirable. The nearest approach to them in human craftsmanship, and as regards Auffassung, are perhaps some little Japanese wood-carvings whose creators, labouring consciously, likewise overstepped the boundaries of the grotesque and indulged in nightmarish effects of line similar to those which the old Peruvians, all unconsciously, have achieved upon the bodies of their dear friends and relatives....

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 viséd, 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....