My Pilgrimage Is To Rome, My Business Is With Lonely Places, Hills,
And The Recollection Of The Spirit.
It would be waste to describe at
length this mighty capital.
The mists and the woods, the snows and the
interminable way, had left me ill-suited for the place, and I was
ashamed. I sat outside a cafe, opposite the cathedral, watching its
pinnacles of light; but I was ashamed. Perhaps I did the master a hurt
by sitting there in his fine great cafe, unkempt, in such clothes,
like a tramp; but he was courteous in spite of his riches, and I
ordered a very expensive drink for him also, in order to make amends.
I showed him my sketches, and told him of my adventures in French, and
he was kind enough to sit opposite me, and to take that drink with me.
He talked French quite easily, as it seems do all such men in the
principal towns of north Italy. Still, the broad day shamed me, and
only when darkness came did I feel at ease.
I wandered in the streets till I saw a small eating shop, and there I
took a good meal. But when one is living the life of the poor, one
sees how hard are the great cities. Everything was dearer, and worse,
than in the simple countrysides. The innkeeper and his wife were
kindly, but their eyes showed that they had often to suspect men. They
gave me a bed, but it was a franc and more, and I had to pay before
going upstairs to it. The walls were mildewed, the place ramshackle
and evil, the rickety bed not clean, the door broken and warped, and
that night I was oppressed with the vision of poverty. Dirt and
clamour and inhuman conditions surrounded me. Yet the people meant
well.
With the first light I got up quietly, glad to find the street again
and the air. I stood in the crypt of the cathedral to hear the
Ambrosian Mass, and it was (as I had expected) like any other, save
for a kind of second _lavabo_ before the Elevation. To read the
distorted stupidity of the north one might have imagined that in the
Ambrosian ritual the priest put a _non_ before the _credo,_ and
_nec's_ at each clause of it, and renounced his baptismal vows at the
_kyrie;_ but the Milanese are Catholics like any others, and the
northern historians are either liars or ignorant men. And I know three
that are both together.
Then I set out down the long street that leads south out of Milan, and
was soon in the dull and sordid suburb of the Piacenzan way. The sky
was grey, the air chilly, and in a little while - alas! - it rained.
Lombardy is an alluvial plain.
That is the pretty way of putting it. The truth is more vivid if you
say that Lombardy is as flat as a marsh, and that it is made up of
mud.
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