Often glittering like a diamond, he is every
bit as dewless. His materialistic and supercilious outlook results, I
think, from contempt or nescience of nature; you will notice the trait
still more at Venice, whose inhabitants seldom forsake their congested
mud-flat. Depth of character and ideality and humour - such things
require a rustic landscape for their nurture. These citizens are arid,
for lack of dew; unquestionably more so than their English
representatives.
POSTSCRIPT. - The pavements of Florence, by the way, have an
objectionable quality. Their stone is too soft. They wear down rapidly
and an army of masons is employed in levelling them straight again all
the year round. And yet they sometimes use this very sandstone, instead
of marble, for mural inscriptions. How long are these expected to remain
legible? They employ the same material for their buildings, and I
observe that the older monuments last, on the whole, better than the new
ones, which flake away rapidly - exfoliate or crack, according to the
direction from which the grain of the rock has been attacked by the
chisel. It may well be that Florentines of past centuries left the hewn
blocks in their shady caverns for a certain length of time, as do the
Parisians of to-day, in order to allow for the slow discharge and
evaporation of liquid; whereas now the material, saturated with
moisture, is torn from its damp and cool quarries and set in the blazing
sunshine. At the Bourse, for instance, - quite a modern structure - the
columns already begin to show fissures. [7]
Amply content with Viareggio, because the Siren dwells so near, I stroll
forth. The town is awake. Hotels are open. Bathing is beginning. Summer
has dawned upon the land.
I am not in the city mood, three months in Florence having abated my
interest in humanity. Past a line of booths and pensions I wander in the
direction of that pinery which year by year is creeping further into the
waves, and driving the sea back from its old shore. There is peace in
this green domain; all is hushed, and yet pervaded by the mysterious
melody of things that stir in May-time. Here are no sombre patches, as
under oak or beech; only a tremulous interlacing of light and shade. A
peculiarly attractive bole not far from the sea, gleaming rosy in the
sunshine, tempts me to recline at its foot.
This insomnia, this fiend of the darkness - the only way to counteract
his mischief is by guile; by snatching a brief oblivion in the hours of
day, when the demon is far afield, tormenting pious Aethiopians at the
Antipodes. How well one rests at such moments of self-created night,
merged into the warm earth! The extreme quietude of my present room,
after Florentine street-noises, may have contributed to this
restlessness. Also, perhaps, the excitement of Corsanico. But chiefly,
the dream - that recurrent dream.
Everybody, I suppose, is subject to recurrent dreams of some kind. My
present one is of a painful or at least sad nature; it returns
approximately every three months and never varies by a hair's breadth. I
am in a distant town where I lived many years back, and where each stone
is familiar to me. I have come to look for a friend - one who, as a
matter of fact, died long ago. My sleeping self refuses to admit this
fact; once embarked on the dream-voyage, I hold him to be still alive.
Glad at the prospect of meeting my friend again, I traverse cheerfully
those well-known squares in the direction of his home.... Where is it,
that house; where has it gone? I cannot find it. Ages seem to pass while
I trample up and down, in ever-increasing harassment of mind, along
interminable rows of buildings and canals; that door, that
well-remembered door - vanished! All search is vain. I shall never meet
him: him whom I came so far to see. The dismal truth, once established,
fills me with an intensity of suffering such as only night-visions can
inspire. There is no reason for feeling so strongly; it is the way of
dreams! At this point I wake up, thoroughly exhausted, and say to
myself: "Why seek his house? Is he not dead?"
This stupid nightmare leaves me unrefreshed next morning, and often
bears in its rear a trail of wistfulness which may endure a week. Only
within the last few years has it dared to invade my slumbers. Before
that period there was a series of other recurrent dreams. What will the
next be? For I mean to oust this particular incubus. The monster annoys
me, and even our mulish dream-consciousness can be taught to acquiesce
in a fact, after a sufficient lapse of time.
There are dreams peculiar to every age of man. That celebrated one of
flying, for instance - it fades away with manhood. I once indulged in a
correspondence about it with a well-known psychologist, [8] and would
like to think, even now, that this dream is a reminiscence of leaping
habits in our tree-haunting days; a ghost of the dim past, therefore,
which revisits us at night when recent adjustments are cast aside and
man takes on the credulity and savagery of his remotest forefathers; a
ghost which comes in youth when these ancient etchings are easier to
decypher, being not yet overscored by fresh personal experiences. What
is human life but a never-ending palimpsest?
So I pondered, when my musings under that pine tree were interrupted by
the arrival on the scene of a young snake. I cannot say with any degree
of truthfulness which of us two was more surprised at the encounter. I
picked him up, as I always do when they give me a chance, and began to
make myself agreeable to him. He had those pretty juvenile markings
which disappear with maturity.
