It Was An Historical Title Familiar To Me;
And Forthwith A Train Of Memories, Slumbering In The Caverns Of My Mind,
Was Ignited.
Yes; there was no doubt about it:
The old "proprietor" and
his nephews, he of the municipal gardens. . . .
I wondered how they had met their fate, on the chill wintry morning. For
assuredly, in that restricted space, not a soul can have escaped alive;
the wreckage, hitherto undisturbed, still covered their remains.
And, remembering the old man and his humane converse that evening under
the trees, the true meaning of the catastrophe began to disentangle
itself from accidental and superficial aspects. For I confess that the
massacre of a myriad Chinamen leaves me cool and self-possessed; between
such creatures and ourselves there is hardly more than the frail bond of
a common descent from the ape; they are altogether too remote for our
narrow world-sympathies. I would as soon shed tears over the lost
Pleiad. But these others are our spiritual cousins; we have deep roots
in this warm soil of Italy, which brought forth a goodly tithe of what
is best in our own lives, in our arts and aspirations.
And I thought of the two nephews, their decent limbs all distorted and
mangled under a heap of foul rubbish, waiting for a brutal disinterment
and a nameless grave. This is no legitimate death, this murderous
violation of life. How inconceivably hateful is such a leave-taking, and
all that follows after! To picture a fair young body, that divine
instrument of joy, crushed into an unsightly heap; once loved, now
loathed of all men, and thrust at last, with abhorrence, into some
common festering pit of abominations. . . . The Northern type - a mighty
bond, again; a tie of blood, this time, between our race and those
rulers of the South, whose exploits in this land of orange and myrtle
surpassed the dreamings of romance.
Strange to reflect that, without the ephemeral friendship of that
evening, Messina of to-day might have represented to my mind a mere
spectacle, the hecatomb of its inhabitants extorting little more than a
conventional sigh. So it is. The human heart has been constructed on
somewhat ungenerous lines. Moralists, if any still exist on earth, may
generalize with eloquence from the masses, but our poets have long ago
succumbed to the pathos of single happenings; the very angels of Heaven,
they say, take more joy in one sinner that repenteth than in a hundred
righteous, which, duly apprehended, is only an application of the same
illiberal principle.
A rope of bed-sheets knotted together dangled from one of the upper
windows, its end swaying in mid-air at the height of the second floor.
Many of them do, at Messina: a desperate expedient of escape. Some pots
of geranium and cactus, sadly flowering, adorned the other windows,
whose glass panes were unbroken. But for the ominous sunlight pouring
through them from within, the building looked fairly intact on this
outer side. Its ponderous gateway, however, through which I had hoped to
enter, was choked up by internal debris, and I was obliged to climb,
with some little trouble, to the rear of the house.
If a titanic blade had sheared through the palazzo lengthwise, the
thing could not have been done more neatly. The whole interior had gone
down, save a portion of the rooms abutting on the street-front; these
were literally cut in half, so as to display an ideal section of
domestic architecture. The house with its inmates and all it contained
was lying among the high-piled wreckage within, under my feet; masonry
mostly - entire fragments of wall interspersed with crumbling mortar and
convulsed iron girders that writhed over the surface or plunged sullenly
into the depths; fetid rents and gullies in between, their flanks
affording glimpses of broken vases, candelabras, hats, bottles,
birdcages, writing-books, brass pipes, sofas, picture-frames,
tablecloths, and all the paltry paraphernalia of everyday life. No
attempt at stratification, horizontal, vertical, or inclined; it was as
if the objects had been thrown up by some playful volcano and allowed to
settle where they pleased. Two immense chiselled blocks of stone - one
lying prone at the bottom of a miniature ravine, the other proudly
erect, like a Druidical monument, in the upper regions - reminded me of
the existence of a staircase, a diabolical staircase.
Looking upwards, I endeavoured to reconstruct the habits of the inmates,
but found it impossible, the section that remained being too shallow.
Sky-blue seems to have been their favourite colour. The kitchen was
easily discernible, the hearth with its store of charcoal underneath,
copper vessels hanging in a neat row overhead, and an open cupboard full
of household goods; a neighbouring room (the communicating doors were
all gone), with lace window-curtains, a table, lamp, and book, and a
bedstead toppling over the abyss; another one, carpeted and hung with
pictures and a large faded mirror, below which ran a row of shelves that
groaned under a multitudinous collection of phials and bottles.
The old man's embrocations. . . .
XXX
THE SKIRTS OF MONTALTO
After such sights of suffering humanity - back to the fields and
mountains! Aspromonte, the wild region behind Reggio, was famous, not
long ago, for Garibaldi's battle. But the exploits of this warrior have
lately been eclipsed by those of the brigand Musolino, who infested the
country up to a few years ago, defying the soldiery and police of all
Italy. He would still be safe and unharmed had he remained in these
fastnesses. But he wandered away, wishful to leave Italy for good and
all, and was captured far from his home by some policemen who were
looking for another man, and who nearly fainted when he pronounced his
name. After a sensational trial, they sentenced him to thirty odd years'
imprisonment; he is now languishing in the fortress of Porto Longone on
Elba. Whoever has looked into this Spanish citadel will not envy him.
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