A Rough Shaking

“If I have,” he answered, “it has been by permitting them to be themselves.”

“You mean it is the nature of birds to be friendly with man?”

“I do. Through long ages men have been their enemies, and so have alienated them—they too not being themselves.”

“You mean that unfriendliness is not natural to men?”

“It cannot be human to be cruel!”

“How is it, then, that so many boys are careless what suffering they inflict?”

“Because they have in them the blood of men who loved cruelty, and never repented of it.”

“But how do you account for those men loving cruelty—for their being what you say is contrary to their nature?”

“Ah, if I could account for that, I should be at the secret of most things! All I meant to half-explain was, how it came that so many who have no wish to inflict suffering, yet are careless of inflicting it.”

I saw that we must know each other better before he would quite open his mind to me. I saw that though, hospitable of heart, he threw his best rooms open to all, there were others in his house into which he did not invite every acquaintance.

The avenue led to a wide gravelled space before a plain, low, long building in whitish stone, with pillared portico. In the middle of the space was a fountain, and close to it a few chairs. Mr. Skymer begged me to be seated. Memnon walked up to the fountain, and lay down, that I might get off his back as easily as I had got on it. Once down, he turned on his side, and lay still.

“The air is so mild,” said my host, “I fancy you will prefer this to the house.”

“Mild!” I rejoined; “I should call it hot!”

“I have been so much in real heat!” he returned. “Notwithstanding my love of turf, I keep this much in gravel for the sake of the desert.”

I took the seat he offered me, wondering whether Memnon was comfortable where he lay; and, absorbed in the horse, did not see my host go to the other side of the basin. Suddenly we were “clothed upon” with a house which, though it came indeed from the earth, might well have come direct from heaven: a great uprush of water spread above us a tent-like dome, through which the sun came with a cool, broken, almost frosty glitter. We seemed in the heart of a huge soap-bubble. I exclaimed with delight.

“I thought you would enjoy my sun-shade!” said Mr. Skymer. “Memnon and I often come here of a hot morning, when nobody wants us. Don’t we, Memnon?”

The horse lifted his nose a little, and made a low soft noise, a chord of mingled obedience and delight—a moan of pleasure mixed with a half-born whinny.

We had not been seated many moments, and had scarcely pushed off the shore of silence into a new sea of talk, when we were interrupted by the invasion of half a dozen dogs. They were of all sorts down to no sort. Mr. Skymer called one of them Tadpole—I suppose because he had the hugest tail, while his legs were not visible without being looked for.

“That animal,” said his master, “—he looks like a dog, but who would be positive what he was!—is the cleverest in the pack. He seems to me a rare individuality. His ancestors must have been of all sorts, and he has gathered from them every good quality possessed by each. Think what a man might be—made up that way!”

“Why is there no such man?” I said.

“There may be some such men. There must be many one day,” he answered, “—but not for a while yet. Men must first be made willing to be noble.”

“And you don’t think men willing to be made noble?”

“Oh yes! willing enough, some of them, to be made noble!”

“I do not understand. I thought you said they were not!”

“They are willing enough to be made noble; but that is very different from being willing to be noble: that takes trouble. How can any one become noble who desires it so little as not to fight for it!”

The man drew me more and more. He had a way of talking about things seldom mentioned except in dull fashion in the pulpit, as if he cared about them. He spoke as of familiar things, but made you feel he was looking out of a high window. There are many who never speak of real things except in a false tone; this man spoke of such without an atom of assumed solemnity—in his ordinary voice: they came into his mind as to their home—not as dreams of the night, but as facts of the day.

I sat for a while, gazing up through the thin veil of water at the blue sky so far beyond. I thought how like that veil was to our little life here, overdomed by that boundless foreshortening of space. The lines in Shelley’s Adonais came to me:

  “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,   Stains the white radiance of Eternity,   Until Death tramples it to fragments.”

Then I thought of what my host had said concerning the too short lives of horses, and wondered what he would say about those of dogs.

“Dogs are more intelligent than horses,” I said: “why do they live a yet shorter time?”

“I doubt if you would say so in an Arab’s tent,” he returned. “If you had said, ‘still more affectionate,’ I should have known better how to answer you.”

“Then I do say so,” I replied.

“And I return, that is just why they live no longer. They do not find the world good enough for them, die, and leave it.”

“They have a much happier life than horses!”

“Many dogs than some horses, I grant.”

That instant arose what I fancied must be an unusual sound in the place: two of the dogs were fighting. The master got up. I thought with myself, “Now we shall see his notions of discipline!” nor had I long to wait. In his hand was a small riding-whip, which I afterward found he always carried in avoidance of having to inflict a heavier punishment from inability to inflict a lighter; for he held that in all wrong-doing man can deal with, the kindest thing is not only to punish, but, with animals especially, to punish at once. He ran to the conflicting parties. They separated the moment they heard the sound of his coming. One came cringing and crawling to his feet; the other—it was the nondescript Tadpole—stood a little way off, wagging his tail, and cocking his head up in his master’s face. He gave the one at his feet several pretty severe cuts with the whip, and sent him off. The other drew nearer. His master turned away and took no notice of him.

“May I ask,” I said, when he returned to his seat, “why you did not punish both the animals for their breach of the peace?”

“They did not both deserve it.”

“How could you tell that? You were not looking when the quarrel began!”

“Ah, but you see I know the dogs! One of them—I saw at a glance how it was—had found a bone, and dog-rule about finding is, that what you find is yours. The other, notwithstanding, wanted a share. It was Tadpole who found the bone, and he—partly from his sense of justice—cannot endure to have his claims infringed upon. Every dog of them knows that Tadpole must be in the right.”

“He looked as if he expected you to approve of his conduct!”

“Yes, that is the worst of Tadpole! he is so self-righteous as to imagine he deserves praise for standing on his rights! He is but a dog, you see, and knows no better!”

“I noticed you disregarded his appeal.”

“I was not going to praise him for nothing!”

“You expect them to understand your treatment?”

“No one can tell how infinitesimally small the beginnings of understanding, as of life, may be. The only way to make animals reasonable—more reasonable, I mean—is to treat them as reasonable. Until you can go down into the abysses of creation, you cannot know when a nature begins to see a difference in quality of action.”

“I confess,” I said, “Mr. Tadpole did seem a little ashamed as he went away.”

“And you see Blanco White at my feet, taking care not to touch them. He is giving time, he thinks, for my anger to pass.”

He laughed the merriest laugh. The dog looked up eagerly, but dropped his head again.

If I go on like this, however, I shall have to take another book to tell the story for which I began the present! In short, I was drawn to the man as never to another since the friend of my youth went where I shall go to seek and find him one day—or, more likely, one solemn night. I was greatly his inferior, but love is a quick divider of shares: he that gathers much has nothing over, and he that gathers little has no lack. I soon ceased to think of him as my new friend, for I seemed to have known him before I was born.

I am going to tell the early part of his history. If only I could tell it as it deserves to be told! The most interesting story may be so narrated as that only the eyes of a Shakspere could spy the shine underneath its dull surface.

He never told me any great portion of the tale of his life continuously. One thing would suggest another—generally with no connection in time. I have pieced the parts together myself. He did indeed set out more than once or twice to give me his history, but always we got discussing something, and so it was interrupted.

I will not write what I have set in order as if he were himself narrating: the most modest man in the world would that way be put at a disadvantage. The constant recurrence of the capital I, is apt to rouse in the mind of the reader, especially if he be himself egotistic, more or less of irritation at the egotism of the narrator—while in reality the freedom of a man’s personal utterance may be owing to his lack of the egotistic. Partly for my friend’s sake, therefore, I shall tell the story as—what indeed it is—a narrative of my own concerning him.

Chapter II. With his parents

The lingering, long-drawn-out table d’hôte dinner was just over in one of the inns on the cornice road. The gentlemen had gone into the garden, and some of the ladies to the salotto, where open windows admitted the odours of many a flower and blossoming tree, for it was toward the end of spring in that region. One had sat down to a tinkling piano, and was striking a few chords, more to her own pleasure than that of the company. Two or three were looking out into the garden, where the diaphanous veil of twilight had so speedily thickened to the crape of night, its darkness filled with thousands of small isolated splendours—fire-flies, those “golden boats” never seen “on a sunny sea,” but haunting the eves of the young summer, pulsing, pulsing through the dusky air with seeming aimlessness, like sweet thoughts that have no faith to bind them in one. A tall, graceful woman stood in one of the windows alone. She had never been in Italy before, had never before seen fire-flies, and was absorbed in the beauty of their motion as much as in that of their golden flashes. Each roving star had a tide in its light that rose and ebbed as it moved, so that it seemed to push itself on by its own radiance, ever waxing and waning. In wide, complicated dance, they wove a huge, warpless tapestry with the weft of an ever vanishing aureate shine. The lady, an Englishwoman evidently, gave a little sigh and looked round, regretting, apparently, that her husband was not by her side to look on the loveliness that woke a faint-hued fairy-tale in her heart. The same moment he entered the room and came to her. He was a man above the middle height, and from the slenderness of his figure, looked taller than he was. He had a vivacity of motion, a readiness to turn on his heel, a free swing of the shoulders, and an erect carriage of the head, which all marked him a man of action: one that speculated on his calling would immediately have had his sense of fitness satisfied when he heard that he was the commander of an English gun-boat, which he was now on his way to Genoa to join. He was young—within the twenties, though looking two or three and thirty, his face was so browned by sun and wind. His features were regular and attractive, his eyes so dark that the liveliness of their movement seemed hardly in accord with the weight of their colour. His wife was very fair, with large eyes of the deepest blue of eyes. She looked delicate, and was very lovely. They had been married about five years. A friend had brought them in his yacht as far as Nice, and they were now going on by land. From Genoa the lady must find her way home without her husband.

The lights in the room having been extinguished that the few present might better see the fire-flies, he put his arm round her waist.

“I’m so glad you’re come, Henry!” she said, favoured by the piano. “I was uncomfortable at having the lovely sight all to myself!”

“It is lovely, darling!” he rejoined; then, after a moment’s pause, added, “I hope you will be able to sleep without the sea to rock you!”

“No fear of that!” she answered. “The stillness will be delightful. I was thoroughly reconciled to the motion of the yacht,” she went on, “but there is a satisfaction in feeling the solid earth under you, and knowing it will keep steady all night.”

“I am glad you like the change. I never sleep the first night on shore.—I cannot tell what it is, but somehow I keep wishing Fyvie could have taken us all the way.”

“Never mind, love. I will keep awake with you.”

“It’s not that! How could I mind lying awake with you beside me! Oh Grace, you don’t know, you cannot know, what you are to me! I don’t feel in the least that you’re my other half, as people say. You’re not like a part of myself at all; to think so would be sacrilege! You are quite another, else how could you be mine! You make me forget myself altogether. When I look at you, I stand before an enchanted mirror that cannot show what is in front of it.”

“No, Harry; I’m a true mirror, for I hold that inside me which remains outside me.”

“I fear you’ve got beyond me!” said her husband, laughing. “You always do!”

“Yes, at nonsense, Harry.”

“Then your speech was nonsense, was it?”

“No; it was full of sense. But think of something you would like me to say; I must fetch the boy to see the fire-flies; when I come back I will say it.”

She left the room. Her husband stood where he was, gazing out, with a tender look in his face that deepened to sadness—whether from the haunting thought of his wife’s delicate health and his having to leave her, or from some strange foreboding, I cannot tell. When presently she returned with their one child in her arms, he made haste to take him from her.

“My darling,” he said, “he is much too heavy for you! How stupid of me not to think of it! If you don’t promise me never to do that at home, I will take him to sea with me!”

The child, a fair, bright boy, the sleep in whose eyes had turned to wonder, for they seemed to see everything, and be quite satisfied with nothing, went readily to his father, but looked back at his mother. The only sign he gave that he was delighted with the fire-flies was, that he looked now to the one, now to the other of his parents, speechless, with shining eyes. He knew they were feeling just like himself. Silent communion was enough.

The father turned to carry him back to bed. The mother turned to look after them. As she did so, her eyes fell upon two or three delicate, small-leaved plants—I do not know what they were—that stood in pots on the balcony in front of the open window: they were shivering. The night was perfectly still, but their leaves trembled as with an ague-fit.

“Look, Harry! What is that?” she cried, pointing to them.

He turned and looked, said it must be some loaded wagon passing, and went off with the child.

“I hope to-morrow will be just like to-day!” said his wife when he returned. “What shall we do with it?—our one real holiday, you know!”

“I have a notion in my head,” he answered. “That little town Georgina spoke of, is not far from here—among the hills: shall we go and see it?”

Chapter III. Without his parents

The sun in England seems to shine because he cannot help it; the sun in Italy seems to shine because he means it, and wants to mean it. Thus he shone the next morning, including in his attentions a curious little couple, husband and wife, who, attended by a guide, and borne by animals which might be mules and might be donkeys, and were not lovely to look on except through sympathy with their ugliness, were slowly ascending a steep terraced and zigzagged road, with olive trees above and below them. They were on the south side of the hill, and the olives gave them none of the little shadow they have in their power, for the trees next the sun were always below the road. The man often wiped his red, innocent face, and looked not a little distressed; but the lady, although as stout as he, did not seem to suffer, perhaps because she was sheltered by a very large bonnet After a silence of a good many minutes, she was the first to speak.

“I can’t say but I’m disappointed in the olives, Thomas,” she remarked. “They ain’t much to keep the sun off you!”

“They wouldn’t look bad along a brookside in Essex!” returned her husband. “Here they do seem a bit out of place!”

“Well, but, poor things! how are they to help it—with only a trayful of earth under their feet! If you planted a priest on a terrace he would soon be as thin as they!”

They had just passed a very stout priest, in a low broad hat, and cassock, and she laughed merrily at her small joke. They were an English country parson and his wife, abroad for the first time in their now middle-aged lives, and happy as children just out of school. Incapable of disliking anybody, there was no unkindness in Mrs. Porson’s laughter.

“I don’t see,” she resumed, “how they ever can have a picnic in such a country!”

“Why not?”

“There’s no place to sit down!”

“Here’s a whole hill-side!”

“But so hard!” she answered. “There’s not an inch of turf or grass in any direction!”

The pair—equally plump, and equally good-natured—laughed together.

I need not give more of their talk. It was better than most talk, yet not worth recording. Their guide, perceiving that they knew no more of Italian than he did of English, had withdrawn to the rear, and stumped along behind them all the way, holding much converse with his donkeys however, admonishing now this one, now that one, and seeming not a little hurt with their behaviour, to judge from the expostulations that accompanied his occasionally more potent arguments. Assuredly the speed they made was small; but it was a festa, and hot.

They were on the way to a small town some distance from the shore, on the crest of the hill they were now ascending. It would, from the number of its inhabitants, have been in England a village, but there are no villages in the Riviera. However insignificant a place may be, it is none the less a town, possibly a walled town. Somebody had told Mr. and Mrs. Person they ought to visit Graffiacane, and to Graffiacane they were therefore bound: why they ought to visit it, and what was to be seen there, they took the readiest way to know.

The place was indeed a curious one, high among the hills, and on the top of its own hill, with approaches to it like the trenches of a siege. All the old towns in that region seem to have climbed up to look over the heads of other things. Graffiacane saw over hills and valleys and many another town—each with its church standing highest, the guardian of the flock of houses beneath it; saw over many a water-course, mostly dry, with lovely oleanders growing in the middle of it; saw over multitudinous oliveyards and vineyards; saw over mills with great wheels, and little ribbons of water to drive them—running sometimes along the tops of walls to get at their work; saw over rugged pines, and ugly, verdureless, raw hillsides—away to the sea, lying in the heat like a heavenly vat in which all the tails of all the peacocks God was making, lay steeped in their proper dye. Numerous were the sharp turns the donkeys made in their ascent; and at this corner and that, the sweetest life-giving wind would leap out upon the travellers, as if it had been lying there in wait to surprise them with the heavenliest the old earth, young for all her years, could give them. But they were getting too tired to enjoy anything, and were both indeed not far from asleep on the backs of their humble beasts, when a sudden, more determined yet more cheerful assault of their guide upon his donkeys, roused both them and their riders; and looking sleepily up, with his loud heeoop ringing in their ears, and a sense of the insidious approach of two headaches, they saw before them the little town, its houses gathered close for protection, like a brood of chickens, and the white steeple of the church rising above them, like the neck of the love-valiant hen.

Passing through the narrow arch of the low-browed gateway, hot as was the hour, a sudden cold struck to their bones. For not a ray of light shone into the narrow street. The houses were lofty as those of a city, and parted so little by the width of the street that friends on opposite sides might almost from their windows have shaken hands. Narrow, rough, steep old stone-stairs ran up between and inside the houses, all the doors of which were open to the air—here, however, none of the sweetest. Everywhere was shadow; everywhere one or another evil odour; everywhere a look of abject and dirty poverty—to an English eye, that is. Everywhere were pretty children, young, slatternly mothers, withered-up grandmothers, the gleam of glowing reds and yellows, and the coolness of subdued greens and fine blues. Such at least was the composite first impression made on Mr. and Mrs. Porson. As it was a festa, more men than usual were looking out of cavern-like doorways or over hand-wrought iron balconies, were leaning their backs against door-posts, and smoking as if too lazy to stop. Many of the women were at prayers in the church. All was orderly, and quieter than usual for a festa. None could have told the reason; the townsfolk were hardly aware that an undefinable oppression was upon them—an oppression that lay also upon their visitors, and the donkeys that had toiled with them up the hills and slow-climbing valleys.

It added to the gloom and consequent humidity of the town that the sides of the streets were connected, at the height of two or perhaps three stories, by thin arches—mere jets of stone from the one house to the other, with but in rare instance the smallest superstructure to keep down the key of the arch. Whatever the intention of them, they might seem to serve it, for the time they had straddled there undisturbed had sufficed for moss and even grass to grow upon those which Mr. Porson now regarded with curious speculation. A bit of an architect, and foiled, he summoned at last what Italian he could, supplemented it with Latin and a terminational o or a tacked to any French or English word that offered help, and succeeded, as he believed, in gathering from a by-stander, that the arches were there because of the earthquakes.

He had not language enough of any sort to pursue the matter, else he would have asked his informant how the arch they were looking at could be of any service, seeing it had no weight on the top, and but a slight endlong pressure must burst it up. Turning away to tell his wife what he had learned, he was checked by a low rumbling, like distant thunder, which he took for the firing of festa guns, having discovered that Italians were fond of all kinds of noises. The next instant they felt the ground under their feet move up and down and from side to side with confused motion. A sudden great cry arose. One moment and down every stair, out of every door, like animals from their holes, came men, women, and children, with a rush. The earthquake was upon them.

But in such narrow streets, the danger could hardly be less than inside the houses, some of which, the older especially, were ill constructed—mostly with boulder-stones that had neither angles nor edges, hence little grasp on each other beyond what the friction of their weight, and the adhesion of their poor old friable cement, gave them; for the Italians, with a genius for building, are careless of certain constructive essentials. After about twenty seconds of shaking, the lonely pair began to hear, through the noise of the cries of the people, some such houses as these rumbling to the earth.

They were far more bewildered than frightened. They were both of good nerve, and did not know the degree of danger they were in, while the strangeness of the thing contributed to an excitement that helped their courage. I cannot say how they might have behaved in an hotel full of their countrymen and countrywomen, running and shrieking, and altogether comporting themselves as if they knew there was no God. The fear on all sides might there have infected them; but the terror of the inhabitants who knew better than they what the thing meant, did not much shake them. For one moment many of the people stood in the street motionless, pale, and staring; the next they all began to run, some for the gateway, but the greater part up the street, staggering as they ran. The movement of the ground was indeed small—not more, perhaps, than half an inch in any direction—but fear and imagination weakened all their limbs. They had not run far, however, before the terrible unrest ceased as suddenly as it had begun.