An imposing personality is a useless possession unless there are others willing to be imposed upon, and it is thiswillingness to be dominated quite as much as the love of dominating that makes the mafia possible. If I may “quote from memory”:
Surely the pleasure is as greatOf being beaten as to beat.
Surely the pleasure is as greatOf being beaten as to beat.
Possibly the Sicilian charm contains among its many ingredients a trace of this love of being dominated which, in England, we associate more particularly with women, spaniels and walnut trees; and if it were not so, history might contain less about the misgovernment of the island by foreigners.
The mafia is not like the Neapolitan Camorra, it is not an organised society such as one reads about in books for boys, nor is it a recognised trade union with a president, secretary, officers and so on. It is rather an esprit de corps, and no more a secret society than omertà is a secret society; nevertheless, they speak of the mafia as being more highly organised in some districts than in others, and there are secret societies whose members are mafiosi, so that for a foreigner to speak of the mafia as a secret society would appear to be an excusable error.
Among every collection of men, and even in a herd of bullocks, one is always the acknowledged leader, and in a sulphur-mine it naturally happens that one man has a more dominating personality, more prepotenza, than any of the others; this capo-mafioso takes the lead and is king. When, as often happens, he is a man with a respect for law and order, willing to be useful to the managers, the mafia can and does supplement in an amateur fashion the deficiencies of professional justice. If Giovanni Grasso were really a worker in a sulphur-mine, as he sometimes appears to be on the stage, he would certainly take the lead, and no one who knows him will believe that he could ever be capable of a bad action. But few men can safely be trusted with absolute power. Sometimes this capo-mafioso is a villain who glories in a record of crime, a brow-beating bully who willstick at nothing. Here is a situation for a melodrama—the Wicked Despot. He does as he chooses with those around him, who fear lest he should treat them as Don Totò treated Don Andrea before the opening ofOmertà, and as he treats Saru in the course of the play; and they not only fear, they also admire an unscrupulousness of which they feel themselves to be incapable. They refer their disputes to him and execute his orders. They do not pay him money for adjudicating between them, it is enough for him to have the satisfaction of being asked to arbitrate and, by giving his decision and seeing that it is carried out, he consolidates his power. But he exacts from them a percentage of their winnings at cards as tribute, and they pay it willingly so as to keep on good terms with him. Of course, under the throne of any of these tyrants, among those who have sufficient daring, conspiracies are continually surging and, sooner or later, whether he is a good or a bad man, he has to give way to a stronger—perhaps a fresh arrival, who takes the public fancy. Sometimes there are two with apparently an equal power of dominating; they agree not to quarrel openly, but, between themselves, each is on the look-out for an opportunity to annihilate the other’s influence.
One Saturday, in the street at Caltanissetta, Beppe showed me marks of bullets on the wall. He said that only a week before there had been a row among a score of men with revolvers about some question of precedence among the mafiosi in a neighbouring mine arising out of the terms proposed for ending a strike. One of the men was killed and several were wounded, but the question of precedence could not be settled that day because the survivors were all put into prison.
According to the plays, the prisons are to the mafiosi what the ganglia are to the nerves, and give the prisoners an opportunity for talking matters over, thus providing an effective means of continuing the plot of the drama. And though the criminals feel secure in the knowledge thatomertà will prevent their confederates from giving information, yet the police, of course, know who is who all the time, just as the police in London know who are the criminals; the law, however, is jealous of the rights of the people and does not move on suspicion. And too much of the modern police methods would not combine well with the requirements of melodrama.
Beppe assured me that in his mine the mafiosi are mostly good fellows and do not do any harm, except among themselves when they quarrel, get drunk and murder one another. He admits that the making use of them in the management of the men is like playing with fire, but he agrees with all who have gone into the matter that a stranger falling among them, wherever he might meet them, would be treated with the most extreme respect and courtesy. This is not because they are afraid of giving themselves away, distrusting the stranger’s omertà, it is because they have a real self-respect and wish to pass in the eyes of the world for men of good position. The presence of a stranger among them is a challenge to their chivalry and to their oriental sense of hospitality.
Anyone wishing to study the mafia from books might begin withLa Mafia e I Mafiosi, by Antonio Cutrera, Delegato di Pubblica Sicurezza (Palermo. Alberto Reber, 1900), and continue withLa Mala Vita di Palermo(I Ricottari), by the same author. If he will also read all the numerous books by other authors cited in the notes to these two works he ought to gain a fair knowledge of the subject.
Sicilians sometimes claim that much of what has been stated in the foregoing chapter is now out of date, and that, with the advance of civilisation, the power of the mafiaand the respect for omertà are giving way to confidence in the police. And they go on to regret that Giovanni Grasso should have so much success with his plays in foreign countries, because they contain a great deal of mafia and mala vita which he presents with so much realism that foreigners are encouraged in the idea that all Sicilians are for ever sleeplessly going about with knives in their belts seeking to execute vendettas. But most theatre-goers know by this time that melodramas are not made up of the events of ordinary life. A man does not discover every day that he has been deceived by his wife or that his sister has been betrayed by his compare; when he does make such a discovery he may be pardoned if he loses his self-control. Anyhow, the sleepless vendetta notion is so ludicrously contrary to the fact that Sicily can afford to take the risk. One might as well treat seriously the complaint against the marionettes, that the swaggering talk of Orlando and Rinaldo encourages the boys to behave in real life as though every fancied insult must be wiped out with blood. The boys certainly do fight—they can be seen fighting in the fish-market, one armed with a basket for his shield and another with a stick for his sword, his Durlindana. But boys fight, even in England, with no marionettes to inflame their imaginations, and sometimes they cut one another; still, no one would take too seriously the exclamation of that schoolmaster who, on being called to deal with some such incident, hurried from his study muttering:
“Knives, knives—dangerous weapons; would to heaven they had never been invented!”
What was he going to do at dinner-time? And if the marionettes are to be abolished, what is the Sicilian boy to do when it is time for him to sit down to his evening meal of romance? It is even possible that if he were starved of his marionettes he would more frequently substitute the dangerous weapon for the stick.
We see Sicilian life only in bits at a time and any bit we see may turn out on investigation to be only a bit ofacting; and, whether real life or acting, we see it through the veil of romance which is held in front of it by their language and by their gestures, which cause their acting to appear more real—that is, which help it to be more deceptive. By their language I do not mean merely their words and their grammar—we also have a grammar, and our dictionary contains words as many and as expressive as theirs—the romance is rather in their attitude of mind and the consequent use they make of their words. I have read with disgust in an English newspaper an account of a squalid Pentonville murder which, as described in a contemporary Italian journal, appeared worthy to be set to music by Puccini. We are like the audience in Giovanni’s theatre—dominated by the imposing romance of the language, and we prefer to be so dominated. Or we are like the audience in the teatrino at Palermo, when the buffo performs a miracle; as soon as we get behind “la mala vita” and see it as “the life of the criminal classes” we have caught a glimpse of how the illusion is worked.
By their gestures I mean something about which in England, in France and even in Northern Italy, nothing is known. It is true that we Northerners can and do communicate with one another in gesture, but in England we mostly omit gesture and use speech, while in France and Northern Italy the gesture is only slight. A Sicilian sometimes omits words, but if he omits gestures it is only by exercising great self-control. When he is talking naturally, every muscle of his body is at work helping him to express his meaning. It is as though he had not yet learnt to trust speech, everything must be acted too, as half-educated people have not yet learnt to trust the written word and if they read must read aloud. At a cinematograph show, when a letter or telegram or the title of the piece is shown on the screen, a murmur goes round the hall; it is the people reading the writing out loud to assure themselves of its meaning. So the talking Sicilian is telling everything twice, once with his voice and once with his gestures andthere is so much oil in his backbone that there is nothing creaky, awkward or grudging in his movements; the gestures are made with an exuberance, an intensity and a natural unconscious beauty which seem to lift the matter above the plane of ordinary life. So habitual is this gesticulation that it is often useless. I have been behind the scenes in a marionette theatre, watching the man declaiming for the figures. His energy was tremendous, no wonder he drank out of a black bottle from time to time. I knew he was hidden from the audience and thought he might be suggesting movements for the marionettes to the man who was manipulating them, but that man could not see him either and was improvising the movements of the figures unaided.
The gesticulating Sicilian, however, is not more deeply moved by what he is describing than the phlegmatic Englishman is when he is quietly telling something. I have sometimes ventured to laugh at the Sicilian for his unnecessary vehemence, and he has stopped in the middle of it all and joined in the laughter. It would be extremely interesting to see Giovanni Grasso in the part of an English gentleman, a Wyndham or a Hawtrey part. I believe he would succeed because I believe he would succeed in anything he set his mind to do, but for him to reproduce an Englishman’s tranquillity would be as much of an effort as it would be for an English actor to reproduce a Sicilian’s mobility.
Their power of acting is not confined to those who are actors by profession; the love of improvising little scenes in daily life may be said to be characteristic of them. To suppose that they do this from a love of lying would be to simplify unduly; they have the artist’s power of seeing a thing in two senses at once, and they assume that they will not be misunderstood, at all events, they are not going to give it all away by explaining, and if the stranger is taken in—well, as a rule, it does not very much signify. Just as omertà makes things difficult for the Sicilian police, so thislove of acting makes things difficult for the foreign traveller. There is a story in the form of a dialogue between a foreigner in Palermo inquiring of a native about a tree that was clipped into a fantastic shape. It can hardly be given in English because it turns on the double meaning of “naturale,” which means sometimes “natural” and sometimes “naturally,” but if it be added that “scusi” = “excuse me”; “quest’ albero” = “this tree”; “è” = “is”; “o” = “or,” any reader will be able to understand it:
Foreigner: Scusi, Signore; quest’ albero è artificiale o naturale?
Palermitan: Artificiale.
For: Oh, artificiale?
Pal: Naturale.
For: È naturale?
Pal: Artificiale.
For: (getting irritated): Scusi, Signore; quest’ albero è artificiale o naturale?
Pal: Artificiale, naturale.
And then the foreigner goes home and writes a book about his travels, saying that the natives are so stupid they do not even know whether their trees are clipped into odd shapes by nature or art. But the apparently grave and courteous Palermitan knew what he was doing all the time and was enjoying it as a child enjoys committing a harmless piece of mischief.
If one were to pierce through it and understand them as they may be supposed to understand themselves, one would not necessarily be in a position to give an opinion about the mafia, for, besides those who speak of the growing confidence in the police, there are others who assert that the improvement, if any, is slight and only on the surface, and that the spirit of the mafia is not confined to the mala vita, but extends to the upper classes and influences even the administration of justice and the elections. When the natives differ on such a point, a mere foreigner can hardlydecide; but I have more frequently heard the opinion expressed in favour of improvement. Certainly, in the Teatro Machiavelli, when murderers are taken by the police it is often done now with the approval of the audience, which they tell me would not have been the case some years back.
Before writing about the mala vita one ought at least to have seen a man murdered in the street. I have never seen this, nor have I ever even seen the body of a murdered man lying in the street. All that I know about the mala vita in Sicily has been gathered from conversation, books and plays. Lest it should be thought that in thus disclaiming practical knowledge of the subject I am inspired by omertà—as a traveller may shut his eyes to unpleasant incidents out of regard for his hosts—I will here collect together all the occasions when I have thought myself to be in the immediate neighbourhood of the mala vita.
At Castellinaria the barber who keeps the shop opposite the Albergo della Madonna—the shop in which Alfio Mascalucia was assistant—always seemed to me to be a man one would readily trust with all one’s possessions. He must be now over forty, married and with a family. Peppino told me the other day that in his youth, meaning between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, this barber had been a notorious ricottaro and had often been in prison for crimes of various kinds. When I heard this, his extremely courteous manner reminded me of the Robin Hood side of the Cristiani, and of the oriental hospitality of the mafiosi towards strangers. I asked Peppino whether I ought to discontinue my custom. He said not unless I was dissatisfied with him as a barber. Then I realised that I must have forgotten where I was for the moment.
Carmelo and his brother Rosario at Castellinaria have both been in prison for attempting to murder, but they can neither of them be said ever to have belonged to the class of habitual criminals.
In the Teatro Machiavelli Peppino Fazio gave me as aricordo one of the knives used by the mafiosi. The blade doubles on the handle, so that when open it is about twice as long as when shut; some are as long as twenty-four inches when open, mine is only eighteen. Being intended for the theatre, it has never been sharpened or pointed but, except for this it is a real mala vita knife. They told me there would be nothing to fear so long as I continued the life of blameless respectability which had no doubt become habitual to me—or some nonsense of that kind—but that if I should happen to be caught by the police in doubtful surroundings and searched, even this knife, in spite of its arrested adolescence, might get me into trouble.
“So you had better be careful,” said one of them; “but if you do get put into prison, let us know and you shall be treated as well as any ricottaro. I will bring you a good dinner every day.”
“Yes,” said another, “and I will bring you cigarettes.”
“And I,” said a third, “will fetch your linen and bring it back to you nicely washed and ironed.”
Whenever I show my knife to any of my English friends, for I am happy to say I got it safely home, they always exclaim that it is an entirely prosaic object. And so it is. It is as unromantic as an escape of gas.
Several times I have been in a theatre when the performance has been interrupted by a disturbance among the audience, but I have never seen it develop into a serious row.
Once in Palermo my bedroom looked over a small piazza, and one night I heard talking and looked out. I saw a crowd and distinguished a man disputing from below with another man on a balcony about fifteen feet from mine, and there was a woman in the room behind him. The dispute was all in dialect, but evidently they were very angry. Presently the man on the balcony drew a revolver, it shone in the doubtful light, and he threatened the man below; but nothing further happened and presently the crowd dispersed, the man on the balcony retired and allwas quiet. Perhaps this was the prelude to a murder, and I may have read about it afterwards in the newspaper without knowing how near I had been to the crime.
There was one other occasion when I thought I was going to see something of the mala vita. On the cliff at Castellinaria are some remains of polygonal buildings which have been made a national monument. The custode’s cabin is just below, in a sheltered place where Peppino and I sometimes go and sit after supper. One moonlight evening, it was rather late, but the lamp was still shining in the cabin and the custode was still hanging about, I heard someone approaching and, looking up, saw, against the sky, a sinewy, slight woman in a long black dress with a black shawl over her head. She was coming rapidly along the edge of the cliff with a shuffling, swaying motion, and as she came she was continually rearranging the shawl over her head and chattering volubly to herself in a hoarse, coarse, raucous voice. The custode glanced at her as she drew near and I thought he flinched. I do not know how I knew it, but I was sure she was his wife. She was beside herself with passion. She must have found out something—something about some other woman. I felt as I have felt at an Ibsen play—as though I were looking through the keyhole into a room where dirty linen was about to be washed. She shook and trembled all over like an express train approaching a country station. Reason told me that Peppino and I were safe, we were on the platform; nevertheless accidents do happen and there was the poor custode on the line. She drew up in front of us, and her draperies swirled round her with the suddenness of her stopping. She became silent and still, while she looked at me as though fixing my appearance on her brain for this life and the next; she looked at Peppino in the same way and at the custode. Then the chattering began again and the restless rearranging of her shawl over her head. Suddenly she turned, poured herself into the cabin and exploded. It was not as with an earthquake, for the wallswere left standing and the roof and foundations were unshaken, and an earthquake, they say, seems to last for an eternity, whereas this woman seemed to take but a moment to complete her work of desolation. She pounced upon something among the debris and laughed hysterically as she hid it in her bosom.
The storm was over. She was transformed into a rather beautiful and extremely graceful woman of about thirty. She exchanged a few words of friendly chaff with her husband, smiled at Peppino and bowed to me as she passed out, went up the path against the moonlit sky and faded into the night.
All this was about a pack of cards. She had promised to lend the cards to a neighbour that evening; her husband was to have brought them home early in the day; he had forgotten to do so and she had come to fetch them. So there was no murder and no dirty linen, but the cabin had to be tidied.
What would this woman do had she the motive and the cue for passion that I had supposed for her? If her husband ever does entertain another lady in his cabin and his wife hears of it, I hope I may not be in the neighbourhood. But if I were to be there and to witness the crime, omertà would forbid me, as a good Sicilian, to say anything about it. I should have to forget the claims of justice and go to prison, if necessary, rather than give such information as might lead to the conviction of the person or persons guilty.
Lastly, there was the lady in the restaurant-car—but perhaps she ought not to be included in the list. Let her have the benefit of the doubt and a chapter to herself.
One day, as I was travelling through the island by rail, I lunched in the restaurant-car and divided my attention between the colazione, the view and the other lunchers.
At the table in front of me sat three gentlemen; beyond them, at a separate table, sat a distinguished-looking lady, quietly but well dressed in foamy white musliny stuff, with a good deal of lace and a few touches of pale green. She had a lovely hat and a veil, which she wore in such a way that I thought how well she would look in a motor-car. She did not appear to be much over thirty, and she was alone except that she had a little dog, whom she fed from her plate and who was evidently very fond of her. She was not strictly beautiful, her face depended for its charm more on its expression than on the regularity of its features, but there was about her a certain indescribable combination of dignity and vivacity that was curiously attractive, and that soon attracted the three gentlemen, who, I presently became aware, had entered into conversation with her. Possibly they had asked the waiter to introduce them while I was looking out of the window. Certainly they cannot have met her before, because I heard them ask her her nationality, and she told them that her father was an Italian, a native of Rome, and that her mother was French. And where was she going? To some place whose name I did not catch. Then she must change at the junction. Yes, but there would be no difficulty because she was accustomed to travelling, she had travelled in China, India, Egypt and America. No doubt she was gifted by nature with that happy temperament whichenables its possessor to make friends easily, and her extensive travels had provided opportunities for its cultivation. I supposed the three gentlemen to be accountants or advocates or perhaps engineers; but I thought from her manner that she would have been just as much at her ease if they had been carabinieri. I heard her tell them she was twenty-two; she must have been very young when she began her travels.
While the waiter was making out our bills, one of the gentlemen begged her to grant him a favour. She smiled in her frank open way as an encouragement to him to name it, and he declared that he should consider it an honour if she would permit him to pay for her luncheon. The lady accepted his generosity, and granted his request with a smile of such queenly condescension that I had a vision of great Elizabeth stepping upon Raleigh’s cloak.
Presently this gentleman went and sat by himself at a table for two and the lady joined him. This appeared to me a little odd; he might just as well have sat at her table, or have invited her to sit at his with the other two gentlemen, there was room and it would have been less marked. But they seemed to prefer to start a little colony of their own, as it were, on neutral ground. The gentleman made another proposal: A glass of wine? With pleasure. So the waiter brought it, and then the lady accepted a cigarette.
At the junction the lady and the gentleman both got out, and I saw him help her into her train, which started first for the place whose name I had not caught. Then he got into his train, which was labelled “Castellinaria,” and I went on without changing. A few days later, however, I returned to the junction, changed there and followed the accountant to Castellinaria, where I was going to see my friend Antonio, who happened to be engaged there on an engineering job. In the evening I told him about the lady in the restaurant-car. He laughed and said:
“But this lady is a particular friend of mine. She isoften here, she returned two days ago and told me all this herself, only last night. If you would like to make her acquaintance I will take you to see her.”
So we went to her hotel, which was not the Albergo della Madonna. She received us in her bedroom, for which she apologised charmingly—so charmingly as to make it appear the most natural thing in the world to be received by her in her bedroom. She remembered seeing me in the train, and begged me to sit down. She had a visitor—a gentleman. It was the gentleman who had paid for her luncheon in the restaurant-car. I was introduced, and he was, as I had supposed, an accountant. The lady was less elaborately clad than on the occasion of our previous meeting. Just as her other costume was precisely what it should have been for a restaurant-car, so this was precisely adapted to her present surroundings. She evidently understood dress. And very pretty it was to see her busying herself about the room, entertaining her guests and playing with her little dog. He was not the only little dog she had ever had. Her previous companion, who had been given her by a Neapolitan gentleman, died, and she wept for six weeks and was inconsolable until another friend gave her this one. She thought first of calling him Vesuvio, which was the name of his predecessor, but could not bring herself to do so. Then she had the inspiration to call him Etna, which suited him better, because he was a trifle bigger; it was also a kind of complimentary reference to her first love. While she told us this she was making coffee with a spirit lamp on the chest of drawers. She had a speciality for making coffee, and really it was quite drinkable.
She gave us the story of her life. She was the niece of a cardinal, in whose person were accumulated all the apostolic virtues, and her mother was a French lady of noble birth and almost incredible beauty, who, when Mary, or Mery as she prefers to write it, was about two months old, married the cardinal’s coachman and had eleven morechildren. When one draws a conclusion from insufficient data, it is always satisfactory to discover, as one too seldom does, that one was right. I had been right about the gentleman being an accountant, and here I was right again in my surmise that the lady was exceptionally highly connected, so highly that one could overlook her mother’s mésalliance with the coachman. Her uncle was only a bishop at the time of her birth, he became a cardinal soon after Mery’s mother married the coachman, and then he forced the coachman to legitimise Mery, and in this way the coachman became Mery’s legal father; and all this was part of a scheme to accelerate the ecclesiastical preferment of her uncle. Ah! but he was an ambitious man and aspired to the throne of S. Peter. His scheme failed, however, owing to the wicked intrigues of the Jesuits.
Parts of this might have borne, I do not say amplification, for it was quite long enough, but a word or two of elucidation. I have no doubt Mery would have been quite ready to explain everything, for she had nothing to conceal and the subject would have done as well as any other to display her feminine charm, but I did not interrupt, because I have observed that when a thorough woman of business undertakes to elucidate a point of law, she does it so much in the manner of Mrs. Nickleby that she not infrequently leaves it more obscure than she finds it. Mery did not expressly say she was a woman of business, she, in fact, disclaimed any such pretension, but she did it with a delightful mock modesty that forbade us to take her words literally.
No expense was spared over Mery’s education. She was sent to a convent at Marseilles and the nuns were very kind to her, not because of her ecclesiastical connection, but because they were holy women with large and noble hearts. Before her education was completed, however, she was sent for to return home, and oh, what a home it was! Her mother’s health had broken down because the cardinal beat her, her legal father drank instead of protecting his wife, the younger children were uncared-for and the elderchildren, though they were growing up, had not Mery’s business capacity and powers of management. She put her shoulder to the wheel, did the marketing, the cooking and the cleaning; she washed and mended the children’s clothes and saw to everything. She hated the life, but woman was born to suffer and she did her duty.
In time her next sister married a music-hall singer—I should say a dramatic artist. Mery, who was now entering upon the heyday of her youth and beauty, was naturally introduced to the friends of her sister’s husband. Every man in the company fell in love with her; all the bachelors proposed, and without her natural firmness, reinforced by the teaching of the holy nuns, she could scarcely have escaped matrimony. There was another thing that helped to save her—she was waiting for her anima gemella. I may here say that her anima gemella has not yet crossed her path and that her real age is twenty-seven. She told us this in confidence and it is not to go any further. For people in restaurant-cars she is any age she thinks proper at the moment, they do not matter, but she will never deceive her friends.
Her sister’s husband was a man of real insight; he divined that Mery was a heaven-inspired dancer, and devoted himself to the development of her genius. She did not say he had taught her to dance; she said he encouraged and developed her natural genius for dancing. She made her debut with a success which the newspapers declared to be even more “phenomenal” than that which attends the debut of every artist. Engagements followed, and soon she was dancing practically all over the globe, creating a furore wherever she went and leaving the younger children’s socks to wash and darn themselves. Her mother was too ill and her legal father too drunk to know what she was doing or where she was doing it, but His Eminence heard and was so much scandalised that when she danced into the Eternal City the doors of the Vatican were closed to her. Cardinals are delightful men,most of them—and Mery knows because she is on terms of intimacy with every member of the College—but too frequently they have a fault; they do not understand the artistic temperament. Nevertheless, if her uncle could have heard the cheers that greeted her in Shanghai and New York, and the encores that called her back in Cairo and Calcutta, if he could have seen the flowers that choked the wheels of her carriage in St. Petersburg and the diamonds that were showered upon her in Brazil, even his commonplace heart must have been moved.
She did not dance for us because, it seems, they do not dance when they are resting, which was perhaps the psychological reason, but there was also a geographical reason in the want of space, for the room was small and contained, besides Mery and Etna in one arm-chair, another arm-chair and two ordinary chairs occupied by her visitors; also there was the chest of drawers on which she had made the coffee and all such other articles of furniture as one usually sees in a hotel bedroom, including two beds. The extra bed was there because Mery was, she confessed it, of luxurious habits and in the hot weather liked to be able to change and finish the night in a cool bed.
Here there came a pause, not that she was exhausted, but something had happened about the little dog, who required attention. When Etna’s business had been settled I thought it might be tactful if I suspended the inconvenience, as they say, so I asked Antonio whether we ought not to go and we begged leave to retire. She wished us good night in her frank, open way, thanked me for my visit, inquired how long I was staying in the town and concluded with the hope that I would call again, she never went out, so I should be sure to find her at any time. It should not be Addio, it should be Arrivederci.
There are few places where I am more at home than I am in Castellinaria, but as I had come there this time expressly to see Antonio he considered it his duty to look after me; he was engaged next day, however, so he deputedtwo of his friends to amuse me, and they invited me to come for a drive to the lighthouse. On the way, one of them said:
“And so Antonio took you yesterday to pass an intellectual evening with the cardinalessa.”
“Yes,” I replied. “What a charming woman and what a strange life!”
They agreed, somewhat coldly as it seemed to me, and they rather markedly refrained from developing the subject I had offered them; but they proposed a counter subject. In a few days it would be Mery’s onomastico and they were going to send flowers. I should be in Palermo, would not I send her a message on a picture post-card? Of course I would. So between us we composed it:—
Auguri per l’ onomastico. Ringraziamenti per la serata intellettuale e per il caffè. Saluti—non più, per timore di ingelosire nostro amico Antonio.Devotissimo suo Enrico.[183]
Auguri per l’ onomastico. Ringraziamenti per la serata intellettuale e per il caffè. Saluti—non più, per timore di ingelosire nostro amico Antonio.
Devotissimo suo Enrico.[183]
This was the address:—
All’ Eminentissima Cardinalessa,Mery So-and-So,Albergo dell’ Allegria,Castellinaria.
All’ Eminentissima Cardinalessa,Mery So-and-So,Albergo dell’ Allegria,Castellinaria.
I chose a card with a picture of St. Peter’s; this seemed more appropriate than una ballerina qualunque, which I might have had for the same money, because her onomastico was the 8th September, the birthday of the Madonna, and it was her uncle who had given her the name of Mery and had himself baptised her.
I left Castellinaria next day with the card in my pocket ready to be posted on the 7th September, and went to Palermo, where I know a young doctor. I told him allabout it and showed him the post-card. When he saw Mery’s real name he burst out laughing.
“Oh! that woman! Why, I know her quite well. She was here with a friend of mine, who asked me to attend her professionally—I mean in my professional capacity. Oh! nothing serious, but we had to communicate with her people and I know all about her. She is not a normal woman. Of course, that rigmarole about the cardinal is all nonsense. She is the daughter of a fisherman of Siracusa. She did dance here once for a few nights, but only at the Biondo, and no one noticed her, she was in one of the back rows of the ballet. Did they tell you why she returned to Castellinaria?”
They had said nothing about it, and my doctor, not being a friend of Antonio and therefore not bound by any ties of omertà, gave me an account of it.
It happened a few months previously: Mery was living in Palermo in a hotel, and her room had a balcony; the next balcony belonged to a room occupied by a young lady and her family, and the young lady was engaged to an officer. One day Etna strayed on to the neighbouring balcony and behaved in a manner that displeased the young lady whose betrothed complained to the proprietor and Mery was requested to leave. She, of course, saw that all this about her dog was merely a casus belli concealing a conspiracy to insult her, and indignantly refused to go. Next day, while the officer was sitting with his friends outside his usual caffè, Mery happened to pass on her way to buy a stamp and post a letter. She spoke to the officer, saying:
“You think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”
The officer requested her not to address him, whereupon, taking the law into her own hands, she went up to him and made a hole in her manners by scratching his face. A crowd began to collect. Mery permitted herself the use of an expression. It was a Sicilian word, my doctor told me what it was and also its meaning; it appeared to merather silly than offensive, but he assured me that it is never used except by people of the very lowest class. Mery then made more holes in her manners, reducing them to the condition of one of her father’s fishing-nets, and was attempting to do the same with the officer’s face when the crowd interfered; Mery was hissed and handed over to the police, who prepared her papers, took her to the railway station and turned her out of the town.
Incidents such as this, by showing Mery that Sicily is no longer being misgoverned by foreigners, may in time, perhaps, teach her not to distrust professional justice. They also may in time, perhaps, teach travellers not to trust to conclusions based upon insufficient data about distinguished-looking ladies in restaurant-cars.
But I sent her the post-card all the same.
One makes friends rapidly in Sicily. I made friends for life with all the coast-guards during three or four hours which I spent with them in their caserma. The corporal was the most demonstrative, and after I returned to England we exchanged post-cards for some months. Then he suddenly left off writing, and I drew the conclusion that it is as easy to unmake friends as to make them. But I was wrong. After four and a half years of undeserved neglect I received another post-card:
Since the death of one of my sisters and the occurrence of several other family troubles I have not been able before this day to write and assure you of the great affection which I continue to nourish towards you. For this I beg your pardon and your indulgence. I should have much pleasure in writing you a long letter and in telling you many things. Do you permit me to do so?
Since the death of one of my sisters and the occurrence of several other family troubles I have not been able before this day to write and assure you of the great affection which I continue to nourish towards you. For this I beg your pardon and your indulgence. I should have much pleasure in writing you a long letter and in telling you many things. Do you permit me to do so?
I gave the required permission, and presently received the long letter—much too long to be reproduced, but amounting to this:
That he was sorry to hear I had had a cold, and wished he could have had it instead; we could only hope that heaven would give me good health for a hundred years; that he was now writing the long letter about which there had been delay in consequence of his having been away at home on leave when the necessary permission reached him; that he had no words in which to express his joy at hearing that I was soon coming to Sicily, as it was now sixty-three months since he had been in my presence. “Year after year and I have not seen you, spring after spring and I have not seen you, autumn after autumn and I have not seen you, and I have always looked for your coming and have not seen you.”
He went on to say that the young lady to whom he was engaged was a beautiful and honest girl, well educated and of a superior but unfortunately poor family. He was longing for the day when he might introduce her to me, for he had now been engaged over four years, and his misery was that he did not know when they could be married. He was thirty-five, and had been in service fifteen years and a half; on attaining forty he would be able to retire from the service and marry, but in the meantime he was losing all his youth under military discipline; he had applied for a permanent government post which might be given him at any moment, and then he could retire from the coast-guard service and return to his business; he was a carpenter by trade, and there would then be no obstacle to his marrying. And sometimes he was in despair because he could marry at once if only he could deposit 8000 francs—a sum that was beyond his means. He saw no way out of his trouble. He had been very unfortunate ever since he was born, and supposed he should continue to be so until he died; but he had always been economical, and had saved about half thesum required; if only he could get the remaining 4000 francs it would be a great good fortune, and in a few days he hoped to send me his photograph together with that of his young lady.
I replied congratulating him on his engagement and regretting that it was not in my power to help him to hasten his marriage. Even if there had been any reason why I should help him I should not have contemplated mixing myself up with the regulations regarding the marriage of coast-guards made by a friendly nation. If one were to begin, it would take a great deal of money to go round Italy endowing all the coastguards who want to marry; not that he had asked me to do this, he had not even asked me to help him, but it is as well to be prepared for what seems likely to happen next, and I was using a sanctified form of refusal.
In his reply he did not mention the subject; he said he had been transferred to Castellinaria and had been promoted. He was now Caporale Maggiore. I did not know before that coastguard corporals, like musical scales and Hebrew prophets, could be either major or minor.
I again congratulated him, and hoped his promotion might help to hasten his marriage. Next time I was at Castellinaria I asked Peppino where I should find the caserma of the Guardia di Finanza.
“It is in the church,” said Peppino.
“What church? Not the duomo?”
“No; this other church where is no longer the praying and they shall enchant no more the Glory of the Mass with music and the bells are not ringing and there is the cortile near the sea. It is not very long far.”
Then I knew he meant the disused church of S. Maria dell’ Aiuto which I had often admired. I called there the following day about three in the afternoon and inquired for the corporal. His comrade who let me in took me along two sides of a beautiful cloister, with sculptured marble columns, and upstairs into the barber’s shop, where wefound the corporal with a towel round his neck being shaved. He was so surprised to see me that I was afraid there would be an accident, but the barber was clever and nothing serious happened. After the shaving he took me into the dormitory, which extends all along one side of the cloister on the first floor with windows looking on the grass and flowers of the cortile on one side and over the sea on the other—very fresh and healthy. Some of his comrades, who had been on duty all night, were sleeping in their beds, other beds were empty, and their owners were blacking their boots and polishing their buttons. He told them to entertain me, which they did while he finished his dressing. He then returned and proposed taking me out.
As we went along he asked whether he might take me to see his young lady. I was surprised to hear she was in the town, knowing it was not her native place, and asked whether the remaining 4000 francs had dropped from heaven. He replied that he was still waiting. He was to have a month’s leave soon, and intended to take the girl to his home and introduce her to his family; in the meantime he had hired a room, and it was very expensive—twenty francs a month, in the house of most respectable people. I foresaw complications when they should arrive at home, at least I thought the journey might provoke remark among the friends of the family, but I said nothing, and we went to the house of the respectable people. Here I was introduced to the fidanzata, whose name was Filomena, and who appeared to be, as he had said, rather above him in station and of refined and lady-like manners. She was embroidering the top part of a sheet—the part that is turned down and lies over the pillow when the bed is made—no doubt for her trousseau. The design had been traced and traced again from the tracing so often that it was difficult to say what it represented. There was a balustrade of columns like those that were taken from old Kew Bridge and sold to support sun-dials; there were cauliflowery arabesques, and among the spiky foliage there weremeaningless ponds of open-work made by gathering the threads of the linen together into wonderful patterns. In the middle of all this stood one who after a few more tracings will have quite lost the semblance of a woman; the five fingers of her hands and the five toes of her feet had already become so conventionalised that all one could be sure of was that there were still five of each. The corporal said that this monster was Helen gazing out to sea from the topless towers of Ilium. She was really looking the other way, exhibiting to the spectator all that remained of the face that launched the thousand ships of which half a dozen were shown riding at anchor behind her back. I did not venture to criticise, because the corporal knew all about it, having seen theStory of Hectordone by the marionettes. Filomena was embroidering this most beautifully; I should say that the needle-working of it was as much above all praise as the design of it was beneath all blame.
Most of the room was taken up by a bed large enough to hold three or four Filomenas without crowding, and upon it lay a mandoline and a guitar. The corporal called for music; Filomena cheerfully complied, left her broidery-frame, and took up the mandoline, whose only title to be considered a musical instrument is that Mozart uses it for the pizzicato accompaniment which Don Giovanni plays while he sings “Deh Vieni.” Filomena, knowing nothing about Mozart, used her mandoline for the delivery of a melody which she performed with great skill, though it was but a silly tune and sounded sillier than it was because of the irritating tremolo. It was like her embroidery—very well done but not worth doing. She had been taught the mandoline by the nuns, who had also taught her needlework. I expected the corporal to accompany her on the guitar; he admitted that he was passionately devoted to music, but excused himself from performing on the ground that he had not studied it. This is not usually put forward as an objection; the rule isfor them to play and tell one, unnecessarily but with some pride, that they are doing it all by ear. And in their accompaniment they show themselves to be artists of the school that preaches “Simplify, simplify, simplify” in that they exclude all harmonies except those of the tonic, dominant and sub-dominant. But they make the mistake of not being careful always to play each in its right place; they carry their simplifying process to the length of using their chosen harmonies in regular order, one after the other, two bars each—it may come right and it may not, and when it does not the resulting complexities ruin the simplicity. This sort of thing might become unbearable, but I know how to escape from people of the corporal’s class without being rude. I do not tell them I have another engagement—that is not accepted because, as there is no time in Sicily, punctuality is not recognised. If they have a proverb about it, it ought to be, “Never put off till to-morrow what can be done the day after.” Nor do I say I have letters to write—that only provokes discussion:
“We thought you had come all this way to see us, and now you want to write to England! You can talk to your English friends when you are at home.”
The course is to say one wants to sleep; one need not sleep, but no objection is made, and one is usually allowed to depart at once. I have not ventured to try this among my aristocratic friends, I doubt whether it would work with them—besides, they disarm me by handing round tea—but with corporals I employ it freely, and the knowledge that I can always get away in a moment, even if I choose to remain, imparts to their company a sense of freedom which I regret to say I have sometimes looked for in vain in the educated drawing-rooms of the upper classes.
Before Filomena could begin her third piece I put my method in practice, and for once it did not work quite smoothly, but the result was not unsatisfactory.
Certainly I might sleep, said the corporal; but why go away? He hoped I should dine with them. I might namemy own hour and, as for sleeping, there was the bed. Besides, his brother was coming to dinner:
“I want you to know my brother,” said the corporal; “he is not like me.”
“But, my dear Corporal, that is no recommendation,” I replied. “Is he also a coast-guard?”
“No. He is a dentist and very clever. He is an artificial dentist and he had to work to learn his profession.”
“Well, I suppose every dentist must learn his profession before he is qualified. Dentists have to be made, they are not like poets. No one is a natural born dentist.”
“He had to work very hard. For a whole year he went to the hospital every day four times a week.”
“A clever dentist is a useful ally. I should like to know him. I might want his help while I am here. What is his name?”
“Ah yes! That will interest you, he has an English name.” Then he said something that sounded like “He ran away” with the “r” and the “w” both misty. As I did not recognise it, he wrote it down for me—“Ivanhoe.”
“If you send him your teeth,” continued the corporal, “he will repair them and return them to you as good as new.”
“Some of them are getting loose,” I admitted, “but they wouldn’t come out so easily as you think, and how should I ever get them in again?—Oh, I see what you mean, he is a dentist in artificial teeth.”
“Of course. When I say he is not like me, I mean that he is a man of great learning, really well educated. He is very clever. You will see him at dinner. I must not keep you talking, you wish to sleep. There is the bed; why not lie down? If only we were in my own house at home—” and so on.
There was the bed, certainly, if I could conquer my bashfulness and make use of it. Filomena treated the proposal as quite natural, and put the guitar and the mandoline on the chest of drawers, though there would have been plentyof room for them on the bed with me; she and the corporal prepared to leave the room, and I accepted their hospitality with excuses which I fancy I made with some realism because Peppino had kept me up talking half the night. They went away, I took off my boots, lay down on Filomena’s bed, and was asleep in a moment.
At about six o’clock the noise of the corporal opening the door woke me. He hoped he had not disturbed me, he had been in several times to fetch things and had tried to make no noise. I had known nothing about it. Ivanhoe had come and was very hungry. Then he showed me the cupboard containing the basin and water for me to wash, and told his fidanzata we were ready for the dinner which she had been cooking while I slept. He seemed to consider the room as his instead of hers—but then it was he who was paying the twenty francs a month. Still I had a sense as though there was something wrong.
I was introduced to Ivanhoe, and we sat down to Filomena’s dinner, which was like her embroidery and like her music—it was very well cooked, but the materials on which her skill had been expended were not worth cooking, they ought not to have been bought. The young lady was one of those artists who think more of treatment than of subject. The corporal, on the other hand, in the management of his matrimonial affairs, had chosen a good subject but was treating it in a way which my English prejudices made me think too free.
“I have not asked after your cold,” said the corporal to his brother. “I hope it is better.”
“It is quite well, thank you,” replied Ivanhoe. “I have cured it with a remedy that never fails.”
“I wish you could tell me what it is,” I said.
“Willingly,” said Ivanhoe. “You take a pail of water and a piece of iron; you make the iron red-hot and plunge it into the water; at first the water fizzles, but when the iron is cold the water is still; you put the water intobottles and drink one every day with your dinner. It always cures a cold.”
“I must try it,” I said. But I don’t think I shall.
“Surely you know how to cure colds in England, where you all live in a perpetual fog and everyone is so rich that they can afford to make experiments?”
“We have poor people also in England.”
But Ivanhoe knew better. “No,” he said, smiling indulgently, “that is your English modesty; there are no poor people in your country.”
“I assure you I have seen plenty. And as for modesty, I don’t care very much about modesty—not for myself; I don’t mind it in others.”
“Ah! but you English are so practical.”
“You have great men in England,” said the corporal. “Chamberlain, Lincoln, you call him il presidente, and Darwin and—”
“Yes,” interrupted Ivanhoe, “and great poets, Byron and Milton—il Paradiso Perduto—and that other one who wrote the drama named—what is his name? Gladstone.”
“Some of our poets have written drama,” I said. “What particular drama do you mean?”
“The one—it is from the History of Rome,” replied Ivanhoe. “A man kills his wife, but I do not remember his name.”
“Was it Romeo?” suggested the corporal.
“No; not Romeo. This was a black man. I read that Giovanni Grasso acted it in London.”
“It was Amleto,” said the corporal.
“No, it was not,” replied Ivanhoe. “And now I remember he was not black; he lived in Holland.”
“Where is Holland?” inquired the corporal.
“Holland is in the north. The people who live there are called Aragonesi.”
While Filomena prepared the coffee, I asked the corporal whether she allowed smoking in her bedroom. She did, so I gave him a cigarette and he admired my case saying it wassympathetic. I also gave Ivanhoe a cigarette, but Filomena did not smoke. There is a prejudice against ladies smoking in Sicily unless they wish to be considered as belonging either to the very highest or to the very lowest class, and Filomena is content to belong to her own class. So she looked on while we smoked and drank our coffee.
I said: “When we were speaking of English poets just now, you mentioned a name which we are more accustomed to associate with politics, the name of Gladstone.”
“Ah! politics!” said Ivanhoe. “You have now in England a struggle between your House of Lords and your House of Commons, is it not so?”
I replied that I had heard something about it.
“It is civil war,” said Ivanhoe, “that is, it would have been civil war some years ago, but people are now beginning to see that it is intolerable that everyone should not be allowed to have his own way.”
“I am afraid I do not quite follow you,” I said.
“Well,” he explained, “it is not difficult. Your House of Commons is composed entirely of poor men, so poor that they cannot afford to pay for legislation. Your House of Lords is rich, and rich people are egoists and will not pay; so the House of Commons is angry.”
I did not ask where all the poor Members of the House of Commons were found in a country that had no poor people; Ivanhoe was too full of his subject to give me an opportunity.
“If the House of Lords still continues refusing to pay for legislation there will be no war, but the House of Lords will be abolished—annihilated.”
“My dear Ivanhoe,” I exclaimed, “what a head you have for politics!”
“Politics are quite simple if one studies the newspapers. I know all the politics of Italy, of France, Germany, England, Argentina, Russia. Don’t you read the papers?”
“Yes, I read the papers, but I do not find our English papers—”
“Perhaps they are not so well edited as ours?”
“That may be the explanation,” I agreed. “They certainly do not state things so clearly and simply as you do.”
“Surely,” he continued, “you do not approve of war?”
I replied that war was a “terrible scourge.”
“It is worse,” said Ivanhoe. “It is a survival of barbarism that men should make a living out of killing each other. War must be abolished.”
“Will not that be rather difficult?” I objected.
“Not at all,” he replied. “Soldiers are the instruments of war. If there were no soldiers there would be no war; just as if there were no mandolines there would be no music. And the money we now pay to the soldiers could then be distributed among the poor—an act pleasing to God and the saints.”
But this did not suit the corporal who, being a coastguard, had no sympathy with cutting down the pay of the army.
“It is better as it is,” said the corporal. “It is better to pay the money to soldiers, who are earning an honest living, than to pay it to poor people and encourage them in their idleness.”
“But soldiers are receiving money for making war possible and that is not earning an honest living. There must be no more war. Soldiers must be abolished—obliterated.”
“Obliterated” woke the corporal up thoroughly. It was all very well to talk about annihilating the House of Lords, which he had understood to mean demolishing some palace, but the army was a body of men, and if we were to begin obliterating them—why, he had friends in the army and it would never do, because—and so on, with interruptions by Ivanhoe, until Filomena began to grow restless about washing up and I began to take my leave. I thanked her for her charming hospitality and the corporal and Ivanhoe accompanied me back to the Albergo della Madonna. On the way I said:
“Please tell me, Corporal, you say that Filomena is your fidanzata, but it seems to me you are as good as—”
“We are not married,” he interrupted, “but she has consented to become the mother of my children.”
“Do I understand that you have already taken steps to ensure the attainment of that happy result?”
He said he had, and that she was coming home with him in order that the baby might be born there. His people, who understood the sincerity of his nature and the purity of his motives—
“Ah yes, indeed,” interrupted Ivanhoe, “my brother has a heart of gold and we are all satisfied with his conduct.”
“But Filomena’s family,” continued the corporal, “are suspicious and unfriendly and dissatisfied. Her adorata mamma and all her aunts and female cousins wept when she left home, and they are still weeping. But what else could we do? She was getting ill after waiting so long and could not—”
“Yes,” interrupted Ivanhoe, “she was becoming like Ettorina, and my poor brother also was unhappy.”
They admitted that the situation, though the best possible, was not ideal. The corporal has to sleep at the caserma and pretend to the authorities that he is a free bachelor, he can only visit the mother of his future children in his spare time. And this regrettable state of things had arisen in consequence, or partly in consequence, of my respect for law and order. I did not put it like that to him. I pointed out that if I had sent the 4000 francs I should have been obliged to deny myself the pleasure of coming to see him in Sicily. He concurred and thanked me for my consideration. His experience of life had already taught him that the same money cannot be spent on two different objects, and he was grateful to me for choosing the one which gave him the pleasure of making me acquainted with his fidanzata. The 4000 francs from some other source or the government appointment might drop into hislap at any moment, and at the latest, he could regularise his position in five years, when he should be forty, by leaving the service, returning to the carpentry, marrying and legitimising any children that might have been born.
So I said good-bye to the brothers, wished the corporal every happiness and gave him my sympathetic cigarette-case as a non-wedding present, or rather as something that by an enharmonic change should become transformed into a wedding present on the solemnisation of his marriage, and he swore to keep it till death as a ricordo of our friendship.
* * * * *
Next morning Ivanhoe called upon me and said:
“My dear Signor Enrico, I am in want. Would it be possible for you to lend me five francs till next week?”
I replied, “My dear Ivanhoe, it distresses me to hear you are in want and it lacerates my heart that you should have made a request which I am compelled to decline.”
“I do not ask for myself. It is for my children.”
“Would you mind telling me, merely as a matter of idle curiosity and without prejudice to the question of the five francs, whether the mother of your children is your wife or your fidanzata?”
“She is my wife. We have been married thirteen months.”
“And how many children have you?”
“I have two.”
“Only two!”
“I am expecting another in a few weeks.”
“Bravo. Of course that alters the situation. Now suppose we settle it this way: Let us pretend that you ask me to lend you three francs, one for each child; I refuse, but propose, instead, to give you one franc on the faith of the new baby.”
“Do you mean you abandon all hope of ever seeing the one franc again?”
“I do.”
“Make it two francs and I agree.”
“No, Ivanhoe. One franc is quite enough for an unborn baby.”
“If you think so.”
So I gave him one franc.
“I am very much obliged to you,” he said, “and now there is one more favour I wish to ask of you. Will you hold the new baby at the baptismal font and thus do me the honour of becoming my compare?”
This did not suit me at all. I replied: “My dear Ivanhoe, let us forget all we have said since you told me you were expecting another baby, let us return to your original request and here—take four more francs. It will be better for me in the end than if I become your compare.”
“If you think so,” said Ivanhoe.
I had no doubt about it, so I gave him four more francs and abandoned all hope of ever seeing them again; but I got my money’s worth, or part of it, in the shape of a registered letter soon after my return to London; in English the letter runs thus, and I was brutal enough to leave it unanswered:
Castellinaria.My most esteemed friend, Signor Enrico!First of all I must inform you that my health is excellent and I hope that yours also is good. I wish you all the happiness that it is possible for anyone to have in this world and I would that I could transport my presence into London so that I might be with you for a few days and thus augment your domestic joy. But there is one thing wanting—I allude to money. So many misfortunes have happened to me in this sad year that I have not the means to undertake a long journey. I should be much obliged to you if you would kindly forward me 300 francs, of which I am in urgent need as I have to pay a debt. This money I will repay you immediately the next time I have the pleasure of seeing you in Castellinaria or, if you prefer it, I will promise to pay you in seven months from this date by sending the money through the post; it is for you to choose which course would suit youbest. You will find in me an honest man. You will be doing me a favour for which I shall be grateful all the rest of my life, for you will be extricating me from a position of extreme discomfort. The Padre Eterno will bless your philanthropic and humane action and I shall have a memory sculptured on my heart as long as I live.I will ever pray for your health and for that of all your family. The favour I am now asking I should like you to grant during the week after you receive this letter. I will not write more except to say that, relying on the goodness of your heart, I thank you cordially and await your favourable reply.With infinite salutations,I subscribe myself yours for life,Ivanhoe.
Castellinaria.
My most esteemed friend, Signor Enrico!
First of all I must inform you that my health is excellent and I hope that yours also is good. I wish you all the happiness that it is possible for anyone to have in this world and I would that I could transport my presence into London so that I might be with you for a few days and thus augment your domestic joy. But there is one thing wanting—I allude to money. So many misfortunes have happened to me in this sad year that I have not the means to undertake a long journey. I should be much obliged to you if you would kindly forward me 300 francs, of which I am in urgent need as I have to pay a debt. This money I will repay you immediately the next time I have the pleasure of seeing you in Castellinaria or, if you prefer it, I will promise to pay you in seven months from this date by sending the money through the post; it is for you to choose which course would suit youbest. You will find in me an honest man. You will be doing me a favour for which I shall be grateful all the rest of my life, for you will be extricating me from a position of extreme discomfort. The Padre Eterno will bless your philanthropic and humane action and I shall have a memory sculptured on my heart as long as I live.
I will ever pray for your health and for that of all your family. The favour I am now asking I should like you to grant during the week after you receive this letter. I will not write more except to say that, relying on the goodness of your heart, I thank you cordially and await your favourable reply.
With infinite salutations,I subscribe myself yours for life,Ivanhoe.