On the afternoon of Friday the 13th of August the Patriarch
Monsignor Ballerini was to arrive by the three o'clock boat, and
there was a crowd to welcome him.
The music of Locarno was on the
quay playing a selection, not from "Madame Angot" itself, but from
something very like it - light, gay, sparkling opera bouffe - to
welcome him. I felt as I had done when I found the matchbox in the
sanctuary bedroom at Graglia: not that I minded it myself, but as
being a little unhappy lest the Bishop might not quite like it.
I do not see how we could welcome a bishop - we will say to a
confirmation - with a band of music at all. Fancy a brass band of
some twenty or thirty ranged round the landing stage at Gravesend
to welcome the Bishop of London, and fancy their playing we will
say "The two Obadiahs," or that horrid song about the swing going a
little bit higher! The Bishop would be very much offended. He
would not go a musical inch beyond the march in "Le Prophete," nor,
willingly, beyond the march in "Athalie." Monsignor Ballerini,
however, never turned a hair; he bowed repeatedly to all round him,
and drove off in a carriage and pair, apparently much pleased with
his reception. We Protestants do not understand, nor take any very
great pains to understand, the Church of Rome. If we did, we
should find it to be in many respects as much in advance of us as
it is behind us in others.
One thing made an impression upon me which haunted me all the time.
On every important space there were advertisements of the
programme, the substance of which I have already given. But
hardly, if at all less noticeable, were two others which rose up
irrepressible upon every prominent space, searching all places with
a subtle penetrative power against which precautions were
powerless. These advertisements were not in Italian but in
English, nevertheless they were neither of them English - but both,
I believe, American. The one was that of the Richmond Gem
cigarette, with the large illustration representing a man in a hat
smoking, so familiar to us here in London. The other was that of
Wheeler & Wilson's sewing machines.
As the Patriarch drove off in the carriage the man in the hat
smoking the Richmond Gem cigarette leered at him, and the woman
working Wheeler & Wilson's sewing machine sewed at him. During the
illuminations the unwonted light threw its glare upon the effigies
of saints and angels, but it illumined also the man in the black
felt hat and the woman with the sewing machine; even during the
artificial apparition of the Virgin Mary herself upon the hill
behind the town, the more they let off fireworks the more clearly
the man in the hat came out upon the walls round the market-place,
and the bland imperturbable woman working at her sewing machine.
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