But why were all
the shops shut so early in the evening?
"These Sicilians," said the waiter, an old Neapolitan acquaintance, in
reply to my enquiries, "are always playing some game. They are
pretending to be Englishmen at this moment; they have the Sunday-closing
obsession on the brain. Their attacks generally last a fortnight; it's
like the measles. Poor people."
Playing at being Englishmen!
They have invented a new game now, those that are left of them. They are
living in dolls' houses, and the fit is likely to last for some little
time.
An engineer remarked to me, not long ago, among the ruins:
"This baracca, this wooden shelter, has an interior surface area of
less than thirty square metres. Thirty-three persons - men, women, and
children - have been living and sleeping in it for the last five months."
"A little overcrowded?" I suggested.
"Yes. Some of them are beginning to talk of overcrowding. It was all
very well in the winter months, but when August comes. . . . Well, we
shall see."
No prophetic visions of the Messina of to-day, with its minute sheds
perched among a wilderness of ruins and haunted by scared shadows in
sable vestments of mourning, arose in my mind that evening as I sat at
the little marble table, sipping my coffee - overroasted, like all
Italian coffee, by exactly two minutes - and puffing contentedly at my
cigar, while the sober crowd floated hither and thither before my eyes.
Yes, everything was as it should be. And yet, what a chance!
What a chance for some God, in this age of unbelief, to establish his
rule over mankind on the firm foundations of faith! We are always
complaining, nowadays, of an abatement of religious feeling. How easy
for such a one to send down an Isaiah to foretell the hour of the coming
catastrophe, and thus save those of its victims who were disposed to
hearken to the warning voice; to reanimate the flagging zeal of
worshippers, to straighten doubts and segregate the sheep from the
goats! Truly, He moves in a mysterious way, for no divine message came;
the just were entombed with the unjust amid a considerable deal of
telegraphing and heart-breaking.
A few days after the disaster the Catholic papers explained matters by
saying that the people of Messina had not loved their Madonna
sufficiently well. But she loved them none the less, and sent the
earthquake as an admonishment. Rather a robust method of conciliating
their affection; not exactly the suaviter in modo. . . .
But if genuine prophets can only flourish among the malarious willow
swamps of old Babylon and such-like improbable spots, we might at least
have expected better things of our modern spiritualists. Why should
their apparitions content themselves with announcing the decease, at the
Antipodes, of profoundly uninteresting relatives? Alas! I begin to
perceive that spirits of the right kind, of the useful kind, have yet to
be discovered.
