Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General

“Will my smoking annoy you, sir?” asked I, as I was ready to begin.

“No,” said he, without looking up. “I’d like to know where one could go to live nowadays if it did.”

“Very true,” said I; “the practice is almost universal”

“So is child-murder, so is profane swearing, so is wearing a beard, and poisoning by strychnine.”

I was somewhat struck by his enumeration of modern atrocities, and I said, in a tone intended to invite converse, “You are no admirer, then, of what some are fain to call progress?”

He started, and, turning a fierce sharp glance on me, said, “I’d rather you’d touch me with that hot poker there, sir, than hurl that hateful word at my ears. If there’s a thing I hate the most, it’s what cant – a vile modern slang – calls ‘Progress.’ You’re just in the spot at this moment to mark one of its high successes. Do you know Spezia?” “Not in the least; never was here before.” “Well, sir, I have known it, I’ll not stop to count how many years; but I knew it when that spot yonder, where you see that vile tall chimney, with its tail of murky smoke, was a beautiful little villa, all overgrown with fig and olive trees. Where you perceive that red glare – the flame of a smelting furnace – there was an orangery. I ought to know the spot well. There, where a summerhouse stood, on that rocky point, they have got a crane and a windlass. Now, turn to this other side. The road you saw to-day, crossed with four main lines, cut up, almost impassable between mud, rubbish, and fallen timber, with swampy excavations on one side and brick-fields on the other, led – ay, and not four years ago – along the margin of the sea, with a forest of chestnuts on the other side, two lines of acacias forming a shade along it, so that in the mid-day of an Italian July you might walk it in delicious shadow. In the Gulf itself the whole scene was mirrored, and not a headland, nor rock, nor cliff, that was not pictured below. It was, in a word, a little paradise; nor were the people all unworthy of their lovely birthplace. They were a quiet, civil, obliging, simple-minded set – if not inviting strangers to settle amongst them, never rude or repelling to them; equitable in dealings, and strange to all disturbance or outrage. What they are now is no more easy to say than what a rivulet is when a torrent has carried away its banks and swept its bed. Two thousand navvies, the outsweepings of jails and the galleys, have come down to the works; a horde of contractors, sub-contractors, with the several staffs of clerks, inspectors, and suchlike, have settled on the spot, ravaging its beauty, uprooting its repose, vulgarising its simple rusticity, and converting the very gem of the Mediterranean into a dreary swamp – a vast amphitheatre, where liberated felons, robbing contractors, foul miasma, centrifugal pumps, and tertian fevers, fight all day for the mastery. And for what? – for what? To fill the pockets of knavish ministers and thieving officials – to make an arsenal that will never be finished, for a fleet that will never be built.” My companion, it is needless to say, was no optimist; but the strange point was, that while he was unsparing of his censure on Cavour and the “Piedmontese party,” he was no apologist for the old state of things in Italy. So far from it, that he launched out freely in attack of Papal bigotry, superstition, and corruption, and freely corroborated our own Premier’s assertions, by calling the Pope’s the “worst government in Europe.” In fact, he showed very clearly that the smaller states of Italy were well or ill administered in the direct ratio that they admitted or rejected Papal interference, – Modena being the worst, and Tuscany the best of them.

Though he certainly knew his subject so far as details went – for he not merely knew Italy well in its several provinces, but he understood the characters and tempers of the leading Italians – yet, with all this, I could not help asking him, If he was not satisfied with the old Italy, and yet did not like the new, what he did wish for?

“I have my theory on that subject, sir,” said he; “nor am I the less enamoured of it that I never yet met the man I could induce to adopt it.”

“It is no worse than the fate of all discoverers, I suppose,” said I; “Columbus saw land two whole days before his followers.”

“Columbus was a humbug, sir, and no more discovered America than you did.”

I was so afraid of a digression here that I stammered out a partial concurrence, and asked for some account of his project for Italy.

“I’d unite her to Greece, sir. These people, with the exception of a small circle around Rome, are not Latins – they are Greeks. I’d bring them back to the parent stock, who are the only people in Europe with craft and subtlety to rule them. Take my word for it, sir, they’d not cheat the ‘Hellenes’ as they do the French and the English; and as the only true way to reform a nation is to make vice unprofitable, I’d unite them to a race that could outrogue and outwit them on every hand. What is it, I ask you, makes of the sluggish, indolent, careless Irishman, the prudent, hard-working, prosperous fellow you see him in the States? Simply the fact, that the craft by which he outwitted John Bull no longer serves him. The Yankee is too shrewd to be jockeyed by it, and Paddy must use his hands instead of his head. The same would happen with the Italian. Give him a Greek master, and you’ll see what he’ll become.”

“But the Greeks, after all,” said I, “do not present such a splendid example of order and prosperity. They are little better than brigands.”

“And don’t you see why?” broke he in. “Have you ever looked into a gambling-house when the company had no ‘pigeon,’ and were obliged to play against each other. They have lost all decency – all the semblance of good manners and decorum. Whatever little politeness they had put on to impose upon the outsider was gone, and there they were in all the naked atrocity of their bad natures. It is thus you see the Greeks. You have dropped in upon them unfairly; you have invaded a privacy they had hoped might be respected. Give them a nation to cheat, however; let the pigeon be introduced, and you’ll not see a better bred and a more courtly people in Europe.”

That they had great social qualities he proceeded to show from a number of examples. They were, in fact, in the world of long ago what the French are to our own day, and there was no reason to suppose that the race had lost its old characteristics. According to my companion’s theory, Force had only its brief interval of domination anywhere; the superior intelligence was sure to gain the upper hand at last; and we, in our opposition to this law, were supply retarding an inevitable tendency of nature – protracting the fulfilment of what we could not prevent.

I got him back from these speculations to speak of himself, and he told me some experiences which will, perhaps, account for the displeasure with which he regards the changed fortunes of Spezia. I shall give his narrative as nearly as I can in his own words, and in a chapter to itself.

THE STRANGE MAN’S SORROW

“When I first knew Spezia, it was a very charming spot to pass the summer in. The English had not found it out A bottle of Harvey sauce or a copy of ‘Galignani’ had never been seen here; and the morning meal, which now figures in my bill as ‘Dejeuner complet – two francs.’ was then called ‘Coffee,’ and priced twopence. I used to pass my day in a small sail-boat, and in my evenings I played halfpenny whist with the judge and the commander of the forces and a retired envoy, who, out of a polite attention to me as a stranger, agreed to play such high stakes during my sojourn at the Baths.

“They were excellent people, of unblemished character, and a politeness I have rarely seen equalled. Nobody could sneeze without the whole company rising to wish him a long and prosperous life, or a male heir to his name; and as for turning the trump card without a smile and a bow all round to the party, it was a thing unheard of.

“I thought if I could only secure a spot to live in in such an Arcadia, it would be charming, but this was a great difficulty. No one had any accommodation more than he wanted for himself. The very isolation that gave the place its charm excluded all speculation, and not a house was to be had. In my voyagings, however, around the Gulf, I landed one day at a little inlet, surrounded with high lands, and too small to be called a bay, and there, to my intense astonishment, I discovered a small villa. It looked exactly like the houses one sees in a toy-shop, and where you take off the roof to peep in and see how neatly the stairs are made and the rooms divided; but there was a large garden at one side and an orangery at the other, and it all looked the neatest and prettiest little thing one ever saw off the boards of a minor theatre. I drew my boat on shore and strolled into the garden, but saw no one, not even a dog. There was a deep well with a draw-bucket, and I filled my gourd with ice-cold water; and then plucking a ripe orange that had just given me a bob in the eye, I sat down to eat it. While I was engaged, I heard a wicket open and shut, and saw an old man, very shabbily dressed, and with a mushroom straw hat, coming towards me. Before I could make excuses for my intrusion, he had welcomed me to Pertusola – ‘The Nook,’ in English – and invited me to step in and have a glass of wine.

“I took him for the steward or fattore, and acceded, not sorry to ask some questions about the villa and its owner. He showed me over the house, explaining with much pride how a certain kitchen-range came from England, though nobody ever knew the use of it, but it was all very comfortable. The silk-worms and dried figs and salt-fish occupied more space, and contributed more odour, perhaps, than a correct taste would have approved of. Yet there were capabilities – great capabilities; and so, before I left, I took it from the old gentleman in the rusty costume, who turned out to be the proprietor, a marquis, the ‘commendatore’ of I don’t know what order, and various other dignities beside, all recited and set forth in the lease.

“I suppose I have something of Robinson Crusoe in my nature, for I loved the isolation of this spot immensely. It wasn’t an island, but it was all but an island. Towards the land, two jutting promontories of rock denied access to anything not a goat; the sea in front; an impenetrable pine wood to the rear: and there I lived so happily, so snugly, that even now, when I want a pleasant theme to doze over beside my wood-fire of an evening, I just call up Pertusola, and ramble once again through its olive groves, or watch the sunset tints as they glow over the Carara mountains.

“I smartened the place up wonderfully, within doors and without. I got flowers, roots, and annuals, and slips of geraniums, and made the little plateau under my drawing-room window a blaze of tulips and ranunculuses, so that the Queen – she was at Spezia for the bathing – came once to see my garden, as one of the show spots of the place. Her Majesty was as gracious as only royalty knows how to be, and so were all her suite in their several ways; but there was one short, fat, pale-faced man, with enormous spectacles, who, if less polite than the rest, was ten times as inquisitive. He asked about the soil, and the drainage, the water and its quality – was it a spring – did it ever fail – and when, and how? Then as to the bay itself, was it sheltered, and from what winds? What the anchorage was like – mud – and why mud? And when I said there was always a breeze even in summer, he eagerly pushed me to explain, why? and I did explain that there was a cleft or gully between the hills, which acted as a sort of conductor to the wind; and on this he went back to verify my statement, and spent some time poking about, examining everything, and stationing himself here and there on points of rock, to experience the currents of air. ‘You are right,’ said he, as he got into his boat, ‘quite right; there is a glorious draught here for a smelting-furnace.’

“I thought it odd praise at the time, but before six months I received notice to quit.

“Pertusola had been sold to a lead company, one of the directors having strongly recommended the site as an admirable harbour, with good water, and a perpetual draught of wind, equal to a blast-furnace.”

Looking at the dress-coat in which you once captivated dinner-parties, on a costeimonger – seeing the strong-boned hunter that has carried you over post and rail, in a cab, – are sore trials; but nothing, according to my companion’s description, to the desecration of your house and home by its conversion into a factory. Such an air of the “Inferno,” too, pervades the smelting-house, with its lurid glow, its roar, its flash, and its furious heat, that I could readily forgive him the passionate warmth with which he described it.

“They had begun that chimney, sir,” cried he, “before I got out of the house. I had to cross on a plank over a pit before my door, where they were riddling the ore. The morning I left, I covered my eyes, not to see the barbaric glee with which they destroyed all around, and I left the place for ever. I crossed over the Gulf, and I took that house you can see on the rocky point called Marola. It had no water; there was no depth to anchor in; and not a breath of air could come at it except in stillness. No more terrors of smelting-house here, thought I. Well, sir, I must be brief; the whole is too painful to dwell on. I hadn’t been eight months there when a little steamer ran in one morning, and four persons in plain clothes landed from her, and pottered about the shore – I thought looking for anemones. At last they strolled up to my house, and asked permission to have a look at the Gulf from my terrace. I acceded, and in they came. They were all strangers but one, and who do you think he was? The creature with the large spectacles! My blood ran cold when I saw him.

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