Alone By Norman Douglas













































































 -  From the fate
which nearly overtook me he might save himself by specialising; by
dividing the many local varieties into - Page 72
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From The Fate Which Nearly Overtook Me He Might Save Himself By Specialising; By Dividing The Many Local Varieties Into

Two main classes and devoting his whole attention to one or the other; to the kind such as I found

On Elba - small and round and fragrant, of ruddy hue, and palpitating with warm sunbeams; or to that other kind, those that grow in clearings of the Apennines where the boughs droop to earth with the weight of their portentous clusters - swarthy as night, huge in size, oval, and fraught with chilly mountain dews.

No true enthusiast, I feel sure, would ever be satisfied with such an unfair division of labour - so one-sided an arrangement. He would curse his folly for having specialised. While engaged upon one variety, he would always be hankering after that other kind and thinking how much better they were. What shall he do, then? Well, he might devote one year to one species, the next to another, and so on. Or else - seeing that every zone of altitude bears brambles at its season and that the interval between the maturing of the extreme varieties is at least four months - he might pilgrimage athwart the country in a vertical sense, devouring blackberries of different flavour as he went along; he might work his way upwards, boring a tunnel through the landscape as a beetle drills an oak, and leaving a track of devastation in his rear - browsing aloft from the sea-board, where brambles are black in June, through tangled macchia and vine-clad slopes into the cooler acclivities of rock and jungle - grazing ever upward to where, at close of September and in the shadow of some lonely peak on which the white mantle of winter has already fallen, he finds a few more berries struggling for warmth and sunshine, and then, still higher up, just a few more - the last, the very last, of their race - dwarfs of the mountains, earthward-creeping, and frozen pink ere yet they have had time to ripen. Here, crammed to the brim, he may retire to hibernate, curled up like a full-gorged bear and ready to roll downhill with the melting snows and arrive at the sea-coast in time to begin again. What a jolly life! How much better than being Postmaster-General or Inspector of Nuisances! But such enthusiasts are nowhere to be found. I wish they were; the world would be a merrier place....

Here is the ruined town of Ferento, all alone on the arid brow of the hill. Nothing human in sight. A charming spot it must have been in olden times, when the country was more timbered; now all is bare - brown earth, brown stones. Dutifully I inspect the ruins and, applying the method of Zadig or something of that kind, conclude that Ferento, this particular Ferento, was relatively unimportant and relatively modern, although so fine a site may well have commended itself from early days as a settlement. I pick up, namely, a piece of verde antico, a green marble which came into vogue at a later period than many other coloured ones. Ergo, Ferento was relatively modern as antiquities go; else this marble would not occur there. I seek for coloured ones and find not the smallest fragment; nothing but white. Ergo, the place was relatively insignificant; else the reds and yellows would also be discoverable. I observe incidentally - quite incidentally! - that the architecture corroborates my theory; so do the guide-books, no doubt, if there are any. Now I know, furthermore, the origin of that small slab of verde antico which had puzzled me, mixed up, as it was, among the mosaics of quite modern marbles in that church whither I had been conducted by a local antiquarian to admire a certain fresco recently laid bare, and some rather crude daubs by Romanelli.

Out again, into the path that overlooks the steep ravine. Here I find, resting in the shadow of the wall, an aged shepherd and his flock and a shaggy, murderous-looking dog of the Campagna breed that shows his teeth and growls incessantly, glaring at me as if I were a wolf. "Barone" is the brute's name. I had intended to clamber down and see whether the rock-surface bears any traces of human workmanship; the rock-surface, I now decide, may take care of itself. It has waited for me so long. It can wait a little longer.

"Does that beast of yours eat Christians?"

"He? He is a perfect capo di c - - . That is his trick, to prevent people from kicking him. They think he can bite."

I produce half a cigar which he crushes up into his black clay pipe.

"Yours is not a bad life."

"One lives. But I had better times in Zurich."

He had stayed there awhile, working in some factory. He praised its food, its beer, its conveniences.

Zurich: incongruous image! Straightway I was transported from this harmonious desolation of Ferento; I lost sight of yonder clump of withering thistles - thistles of recent growth; you could sit, you could stand, in their shade - and found myself glancing over a leaden lake and wandering about streets full of ill-dressed and ungracious folk; escaping thence further afield, into featureless hills encrusted with smug, tawdry villas and drinking-booths smothered under noisome horse-chestnuts and Virginia creepers. How came they to hit upon the ugliest tree, and the ugliest creeper, on earth? Infallible instinct! Zurich: who shall sum up thy merciless vulgarity?

So this old man had been there.

And I remembered an expression in a book recently written by a friend of mine who, oddly enough, had encountered some of these very Italians in Zurich. He talks of its "horrible dead ordinariness" - some such phrase. [33] It is apt. Zurich: fearsome town! Its ugliness is of the active kind; it grips you by the throat and sits on your chest like a nightmare.

I looked at the old fellow.

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