With hay, or maize, or wheat, or tomatoes, or
whatever the particular crop may be. You chat with the parents; the
youngsters run up to you, all gleeful with the change of scene and the
joy of travelling by railway. I know what they will look like, when they
return to their mountains later on....
And so, discoursing of this and that, one rambles oneself into a
book....
Into half a book; for here - at Alatri, and now - midsummer, I mean to
terminate these non-serious memories and leave unrecorded the no less
insignificant events which followed up to the mornings in October, those
mornings when jackdaws came cawing past my window from the thickly
couched mists of the Borghese Gardens, and the matutinal tub began to
feel more chilly than was altogether pleasant.
Half a book: I perceive it clearly. These pages might be rounded by
another hundred or two. The design is too large for one volume; it
reminds me of those tweed suits we used to buy long ago whose pattern
was so "loud" that it "took two men to show it off." Which proves how a
few months' self-beguilement by the wayside of a beaten track can become
the subject of disquisitions without end. Maybe the very aimlessness of
such loiterings conduces to a like method of narrative. Maybe the tone
of the time fosters a reminiscential and intimately personal mood, by
driving a man for refuge into the only place where peace can still be
found - into himself. What is the use of appealing in objective fashion
to the intelligence of a world gone crazy? Say your say. Go your way.
Let them rave! We shall all be pro-German again to-morrow. [32]
Half a book: it strikes me, on reflection, as curiously appropriate. To
produce something incomplete and imperfect, a torso of a kind - is it not
symbolical of the moment? Is not this an age of torso's? We are
manufacturing them every hour by the score. How many good fellows are
now crawling about mutilated, converted into torso's? There is room for
a book on the same lines....
I glance through what has been written and detect therein an occasional
note of exacerbation and disharmony which amuses me, knowing, as I do,
its transitory nature. Dirty work, touching dirt. One cannot read for
three consecutive years of nothing but poison-gas and blood and
explosives without engendering a corresponding mood - a mood which
expresses itself in every one according to whether he thinks
individually or nationally; whether he cultivates an impartial
conscience or surrenders to that of the crowd. For the man and his race
are everlastingly tugging in different directions, and unreasoning
subservience to race-ideals has clouded many a bright intellect. How
many things a race can do which its component members, taken separately,
would blush to imitate! Our masses are now fighting for commercial
supremacy. The ideal may well be creditable to a nation. It is hardly
good enough for a gentleman. He reacts; he meditates a Gospel of Revolt
against these vulgarities; he catches himself saying, as he reads the
morning paper full of national-flag fetishism and sanguinary nonsense:
"One Beethoven symphony is a greater victory than the greatest of these,
and reasonable folks may live under any rule save that of a wind-fed
herd."
It avails nothing. The day has dawned, the day of those who pull
downwards - stranglers of individualism. Can a man subscribe to the
aspirations of a mob and yet think well of himself? Can he be black and
white? He can be what he is, what most of us are: neutral tint. Look
around you: a haze of cant and catchwords. Such things are employed on
political platforms and by the Press as a kind of pepsine, to aid our
race-stomach in digesting certain heavy doses of irrationalism. The
individual stomach soon discovers their weakening effect....
Looking back upon these months of uneventful wanderings, I became aware
of a singular phenomenon. I find myself, for some obscure reason, always
returning to the same spot. I was nine times in Rome, twice in Florence
and Viareggio and Olevano and Anticoli and Alatri and Licenza and
Soriano, five times at Valmontone, thrice at Orvinio; and if I did not
go a second time to Scanno and other places, there may be a reason for
it. Why this perpetual revisiting? How many new and interesting sites
might have been explored during that period! Adventures and discoveries
might have fallen to my lot, and been duly noted down. As it is, nothing
happened, and nothing was noted down. I have only a diary of dates to go
upon, out of which, with the help of memory and imagination, have been
extracted these pages. For generally, delving down into memory, a man
can bring up at least one clear-cut fragment, something still fervid and
flashing, a remembered voice or glimpse of landscape which helps to
unveil the main features of a scenario already relegated to the
lumber-room. And this detail will unravel the next; the scattered
elements jostle each other into place, as in the final disentangling of
some complicated fugue.
Such things will do for a skeleton. Imagination will kindly provide
flesh and blood, life, movement. Imagination - why not? One suppresses
much; why not add a little? Truth blends well with untruth, and phantasy
has been so sternly banned of late from travellers' tales that I am
growing tender-hearted towards the poor old dame; quite chivalrous, in
fact - especially on those rather frequent occasions when I find myself
unable to dispense with her services.
Yes; truth blends well with untruth. It is one of the maladies of our
age, a sign of sheer nervousness, to profess a frenzied allegiance to
truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where
graver issues are at stake.
