Earthwork out of Tuscany | Page 6

the huntsmen are up in America, as your good kinsman
has it, and I would never have you act your own Antipodes. Addio.

I
EYE OF ITALY
[Footnote: My thanks are due to the Editor of Black and White for
permission to reprint the substance of this essay.]
I have been here a few days only--perhaps a week: if it's impressionism
you're after, the time is now or a year hence. For, in these things of
three stages, two may be tolerable, the first clouding of the water with
the wine's red fire, or the final resolution of the two into one humane
consistence: the intermediate course is, like all times of process,
brumous and hesitant. After a dinner in the white piazza, shrinking
slowly to blue under the keen young moon's eye, watched over
jealously by the frowning bulk of Brunelleschi's globe--after a dinner of
pasta con brodo, veal cutlets, olives, and a bottle of right _Barbèra_, let
me give you a pastel (this is the medium for such evanescences) of
Florence herself. At present I only feel. No one should think--few
people can--after dinner. Be patient therefore; suffer me thus far.
I would spare you, if I might, the horrors of my night-long journey
from Milan. There is little romance in a railway: the novelists have
worked it dry. That is, however, a part of my sum of perceptions which
began, you may put it, at the dawn which saw Florence and me face to
face. So I must in no wise omit it.

I find, then, that Italian railway-carriages are constructed for the
convenience of luggage, and that passengers are an afterthought, as
dogs or grooms are with us, to be suffered only if there be room and on
condition they look after the luggage. In my case we had our full
complement of the staple; nevertheless every passenger assumed the
god, keeping watch on his traps, and thinking to shake the spheres at
every fresh arrival. Thoughtless behaviour! for there were thus twelve
people packed into a rocky landscape of cardboard portmanteaus and
umbrella- peaks; twenty-four legs, and urgent need of stretching-room
as the night wore on. There was jostling, there was asperity from those
who could sleep and from those who would; there was more when two
shock-head drovers--like First and Second Murderers in a
tragedy--insisted on taking off their boots. It was not that there was
little room for boots; indeed I think they nursed them on their thin
knees. It was at any rate too much even for an Italian passenger;
for--well, well! their way had been a hot and a dusty one, poor fellows.
So the guard was summoned, and came with all the implicit powers of
an uniform and, I believe, a sword. The boots were strained on
sufficiently to preserve the amenities of the way: they could not, of
course, be what they had been; the carriage was by this a forcing- house.
And through the long night we ached away an intolerable span of time
with, for under-current, for sinister accompaniment to the pitiful strain,
the muffled interminable plodding of the engine, and the rack of the
wheels pulsing through space to the rhythm of some music-hall jingle
heard in snatches at home. At intervals came shocks of contrast when
we were brought suddenly face to face with a gaunt and bleached world.
Then we stirred from our stupor, and sat looking at each other's stale
faces. We had shrieked and clanked our way into some great naked
station, shivering raw and cold under the electric lights, streaked with
black shadows on its whitewash and patched with coarse
advertisements. The porters' voices echoed in the void, shouting
_"Piacensa," "Parma," "Reggio," "Modena," "Bologna,"_ with infinite
relish for the varied hues of a final a. One or two cowed travellers
slippered up responsive to the call, and we, the veterans who endured,
set our teeth, shuddered, and smoked feverish cigarettes on the platform
among the carriage-wheels and points; or, if we were new hands,
watched awfully the advent of another sleeping train, as dingy as our

own--yet a hero of romance! For it bore the hieratic and tremendous
words "_Roma, Firenze, Milano_" It was privileged then; it ministered
in the sanctuary. We glowed in our sordid skins, and could have kissed
the foot-boards that bore the dust of Rome. I will swear I shall never
see those three words printed on a carriage without a thrill, _Roma,
Firenze, Milano_,-- Lord! what a traverse.
Or we held long purposeless rests at small wayside places where no
station could be known, and the shrouded land stretched away on either
side, not to be seen, but rather felt, in the cool airs that blew in, and the
rustling of secret trees near by. No further