One evening I was tidying up Ronald’s room at Cambridge. We were both of us in residence now: I as an M.A., while he had just entered as an undergraduate. He was as studiously untidy as I was the reverse, and, but for me, his room, artistic as it was, would always have looked like a boudoir that had been used over-night for a tap-room. Pipes, tobacco, and matches met the eye everywhere, scattered among vases of flowers and ferns; no two sheets of the Times were together in one place; “Esmond” lay cheek by jowl with “Tom Jones” (the former, I was glad to see, the better worn), while there was more than a suspicion that his surplice was in use as a bed for a litter of kittens.
Ronald himself lay at his ease upon the sofa, watching—I cannot say with interest, but at any rate without prejudice—my improvements for the worse. But I roused him at last. In replacing a small box of Italian olive wood I knocked off the lid, and an aggregation of articles unimaginable were scattered on the floor.
“Hullo! stop that, old man,” he said. “You’ll be losing or breaking some of my most cherished possessions.”
“What on earth are they, Ronald? Here’s a small crucifix and a missal (you haven’t turned Roman Catholic, have you?) and any amount of rings—most of them brass—and, by Jove, a lock of hair! Is the last a love token? It looks uncommonly like the relic of another escapade. Did it belong to the girl who played the harmonium on the beach at Bayview? I didn’t know you’d got so far as that. Besides, her hair was light, if I remember. Out with it, old man, and clear your conscience by confession.”
“Have done with your jokes, Fred; you’re the last fellow to chaff like that if you knew the rights of it. And, if I must tell you, I must. But I didn’t want you to know of the matter; it looks too much like boasting. However, you find out everything I do; so I may as well tell you all about this, before you hunt it up for yourself in some underhand way, or make a tale out of it that isn’t the true one. You know Richards, Fred; the man my uncle made me travel with last autumn—to see the world, as he called it. I never liked the fellow, and always thought him a cad; but I didn’t know till then that he was a coward as well as a cad.”
“I always thought him both,” was my reply.
“Taormina in Sicily was one of the places we stopped at: the loveliest spot that you could dream of, if you dreamed your hardest. You’ve never been there, have you? Well: the town itself is a fair day’s walk up hill from the sea, and Mola’s another day’s walk above that; by which time you’ve nearly reached the clouds—only, as it happens, Sicily doesn’t boast of any. But you needn’t go higher than Taormina for the loveliest view on earth. They may talk of seeing Madrid, Seville, Naples, and a hundred other places, and then dying contented—why, there’s none of them that’s a patch on Taormina. Sit down in the proscenium of the old theatre, facing Etna, with the Straits of Messina and the foot of Italy laid out like a map on your left: and you can do without another view for the rest of your natural life. The only objection we found to it was that in September of last year it was most awfully hot, and Taormina is pestiferous enough to be a Turkish settlement. It is worse, I think, than the old town of Granada, which is perhaps the filthiest place that I know in Europe. The cholera, too, was about last year, especially in Italy; and, if it did cross the Straits, Taormina was ripe and handy for it.
“After we’d been there for a week or so it did come with a vengeance. First a suspicious case or two, then a case that was not suspicious at all, and then it fell like a thunderbolt on the town. Richards was off directly, and with him everyone in the place who could afford to go; so the poorer people, with their old priest, who stuck to his work like a man, had it all to themselves.
“Now it looks like boasting, but I didn’t like to run. Besides, I had come there for a fortnight, and I was fond of the place and the view and the old theatre—so why go? Anyhow I didn’t budge, and did what I could to help the old man in his difficulty—it was little enough. However, I had heaps of money, and they wanted that more than anything. And he taught me something about medicine—what little he knew of it; though, after all, nothing but stimulants at one stage and opium at another seemed to do them the slightest good.
“What a time it was! I pray that I may never stand face to face with cholera again. Overhead, a sky like brass, and, veiling the town, a dusky, steel-blue haze, almost as palpable as gauze: the distinctive colour (I’ve been told) of a cholera atmosphere. They died like flies, crowded in their close, evil-smelling dwellings, though we lighted fires in the streets to clear the air; an idea I borrowed, I believe, from ‘Old St. Paul’s.’