"Yes, sir. Offer them cigarettes and everything else you possess. The
dear fellows! They seldom have the heart to refuse."
"Seldom," echoes the judge.
That is our party; the judge, major, lieutenant and myself. We dine
together and afterwards sit in that side room while the fat little host
bustles about, doing nearly all the work of the war-diminished
establishment himself. Presently the first two rise and indulge in a
lively game of cards, amid vigorous thumpings of the table and cursings
at the ways of Providence which always contrives to ruin the best hands.
I order another litre of wine. The lieutenant, to keep me company,
engulfs half a dozen eggs. He tells me about Albanian women. I tell him
about Indian women. We thrash the matter out, pursuing this or that
aspect into its remotest ramifications, and finally come to the
conclusion that I, at the earliest opportunity, must emigrate to
Albania, and he to India.
As for the judge, he was born under the pale rays of Saturn. He has
attached himself to my heart. Never did I think to care so much about a
magistrate, and he a Genoese.
There are some men, a few men, very few, about whom one craves to be
precise. Viewed through the mist of months, I behold a corpulent and
almost grotesque figure of thirty-five or thereabouts; blue-eyed,
fair-haired but nearly bald, clean-shaven, bespectacled. So purblind has
he grown with poring over contracts and precedents that his movements
are pathologically awkward - embryonic, one might say; his unwieldy
gestures and contortions remind one of a seal on shore. The eyes being
of small use, he must touch with his hands. Those hands are the most
distinctive feature of his person; they are full of expression; tenderly
groping hands, that hesitate and fumble in wistful fashion like the
feelers of some sensitive creature of night. There is trouble, too, in
that obese and sluggish body; trouble to which the unhealthy complexion
testifies. He may drink only milk, because wine, which he dearly
loves - "and such good wine, here at Levanto" - it always deranges the
action of some vital organ inside.
The face is not unlike that of Thackeray.
A man of keen understanding who can argue the legs off a cow when duly
roused, he seems far too good for a small place like this, where, by the
way, he is a newcomer. Maybe his infinite myopia condemns him to
relative seclusion and obscurity. He has a European grip of things; of
politics and literature and finance. Needless to say, I have discovered
his cloven hoof; I make it my business to discover such things; one may
(or may not) respect people for their virtues, one loves them only for
their faults. It is a singular tinge of mysticism and credulity which
runs through his nature. Can it be the commercial Genoese, the gambling
instinct? For he is an authority on stocks and shares, and a passionate
card-player into the bargain. Gambling and religion go hand-in-hand
- they are but two forms of the same speculative spirit. Think of the
Poles, an entire nation of pious roulette-lovers! I have yet to meet a
full-blown agnostic who relished these hazards. The unbeliever is not
adventurous on such lines; he knows the odds against backing a winner in
heaven or earth.
Often, listening to this lawyer's acute talk and watching his uncouth
but sympathetic face, I ask myself a question, a very obvious question
hereabouts: How could you cause him to swerve from the path of duty? How
predispose him in your favour? Sacks of gold would be unavailing: that
is certain. He would wave them aside, not in righteous Anglo-Saxon
indignation, but with a smile of tolerance at human weakness. To
simulate clerical leanings? He is too sharp; he would probably be vexed,
not at your attempt to deceive, but at the implication that you took him
for a fool. A good tip on the stock exchange? It might go a little way,
if artfully tendered. Perhaps an apt and unexpected quotation from the
pages of some obsolete jurist - the intellectual method of approach; for
there is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of
intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook. In any case, it
would be a desperate venture to override the conscience of such a man.
May I never have to try!
His stern principles must often cause him suffering, needless suffering.
He is for ever at the mercy of some categorical imperative. This may be
the reason why I feel drawn to him. Such persons exercise a strange
attraction upon those who, convinced of the eternal fluidity of all
mundane affairs, and how that our most sacred institutions are merely
conventionalities of time and place, conform to only one rule of
life - to be guided by no principles whatever. They miss so much, those
others. They miss it so pathetically. One sees them staggering
gravewards under a load of self-imposed burdens. A lamentable spectacle,
when one thinks of it. Why bear a cross? Is it pleasant? Is it pretty?
He also has taken me for walks, but they are too slow and too short for
my taste. Every twenty yards or so he must stand still to "admire the
view" - that is, to puff and pant.
"What it is," he then exclaims, "to be an old man in youth, through no
fault of one's own. How many are healthy, and yet vicious to the core!"
I inquire:
"Are you suggesting that there may be a connection between sound health
and what society, in its latest fit of peevish self-maceration, is
pleased to call viciousness?"
"That is a captious question," he replies. "A man of my constitution,
unfit for pleasures of the body, is prone to judge severely. Let me try
to be fair.
