Sleep of the princely Albergo that dignifies Lucca.
The villages were silent, the moon soon left the sky, and the stars
could not show through the fog, which deepened in the hours after
midnight.
A map I had bought in Lucca made the difficulties of the first part of
the road (though there were many cross-ways) easy enough; and the
second part, in midnight and the early hours, was very plain sailing,
till - having crossed the main line and having, at last, very weary,
come up to the branch railway at a slant from the west and north, I
crossed that also under the full light - I stood fairly in the Elsa
valley and on the highroad which follows the railway straight to
Siena. That long march, I say, had been easy enough in the coolness
and in the dark; but I saw nothing; my interior thoughts alone would
have afforded matter for this part; but of these if you have not had
enough in near six hundred miles of travel, you are a stouter fellow
than I took you for.
Though it was midsummer, the light had come quickly. Long after
sunrise the mist dispersed, and the nature of the valley appeared.
It was in no way mountainous, but easy, pleasant, and comfortable,
bounded by low, rounded hills, having upon them here and there a row
of cypresses against the sky; and it was populous with pleasant farms.
Though the soil was baked and dry, as indeed it is everywhere in this
south, yet little regular streams (or canals) irrigated it and
nourished many trees - - but the deep grass of the north was wanting.
For an hour or more after sunrise I continued my way very briskly;
then what had been the warmth of the early sun turned into the violent
heat of day, and remembering Merlin where he says that those who will
walk by night must sleep by day, and having in my mind the severe
verses of James Bayle, sometime Fellow of St Anne's, that 'in Tuscan
summers as a general rule, the days are sultry but the nights are
cool' (he was no flamboyant poet; he loved the quiet diction of the
right wing of English poetry), and imagining an owlish habit of
sleeping by day could be acquired at once, I lay down under a tree of
a kind I had never seen; and lulled under the pleasant fancy that this
was a picture-tree drawn before the Renaissance, and that I was
reclining in some background landscape of the fifteenth century (for
the scene was of that kind), I fell asleep.
When I woke it was as though I had slept long; but I doubted the
feeling. The young sun still low in the sky, and the shadows not yet
shortened, puzzled me. I looked at my watch, but the dislocation of
habit which night marches produce had left it unwound. It marked a
quarter to three, which was absurd. I took the road somewhat stiffly
and wondering. I passed several small white cottages; there was no
clock in them, and their people were away. At last in a Trattoria, as
they served me with food, a woman told me it was just after seven; I
had slept but an hour.
Outside, the day was intense; already flies had begun to annoy the
darkened room within. Through the half-curtained door the road was
white in the sun, and the railway ran just beyond.
I paid my reckoning, and then, partly for an amusement, I ranged my
remaining pence upon the table, first in the shape of a Maltese cross,
then in a circle (interesting details!). The road lay white in the
sunlight outside, and the railway ran just beyond.
I counted the pence and the silver - there was three francs and a
little over; I remembered the imperial largesse at Lucca, the lordly
spending of great sums, where, now in the pocket of an obsequious man,
the pounds were taking care of themselves. I remembered how at Como I
had been compelled by poverty to enter the train for Milan. How little
was three francs for the remaining twenty-five miles to Siena! The
road lay white in the sunlight, and the railway ran just beyond.
I remembered the pleasing cheque in the post-office of Siena; the
banks of Siena, and the money changers at their counters changing
money at the rate of change.
'If one man,' thought I, 'may take five per cent discount on a sum of
money in the exchange, may not another man take discount off a walk of
over seven hundred miles? May he not cut off it, as his due,
twenty-five miserable little miles in the train?' Sleep coming over me
after my meal increased the temptation. Alas! how true is the great
phrase of Averroes (or it may be Boa-ed-din: anyhow, the Arabic
escapes me, but the meaning is plain enough), that when one has once
fallen, it is easy to fall again (saving always heavy falls from
cliffs and high towers, for after these there is no more falling)....
Examine the horse's knees before you buy him; take no ticket-of-leave
man into your house for charity; touch no prospectus that has
founders' shares, and do not play with firearms or knives and never go
near the water till you know how to swim. Oh! blessed wisdom of the
ages! sole patrimony of the poor! The road lay white in the sun, and
the railway ran just beyond.
If the people of Milo did well to put up a statue in gold to the man
that invented wheels, so should we also put one up in Portland stone
or plaster to the man that invented rails, whose property it is not
only to increase the speed and ease of travel, but also to bring on
slumber as can no drug:
