In the midst of the excitement in the West has come a prodigious happening from Russia. For several days there had been rumours of riots and risings in Petrograd, but no authentic news came through till one morning we woke to find that a revolution had taken place, that the Tzar had abdicated for himself and the Tzarevitch, and that already a National Government had been established, which was speedily recognized by the Ambassadors of the various Powers. At one blow all the pro-German party in Russia, which had for its centre the ministers and intriguers surrounding the Imperial Family, had been turned out by the revolutionists, and the work that began with the murder of Rasputin at the end of December had been carried to completion. The Army and the Navy had declared for the new National Government, and the work of the National Government after the extirpation of German influence was to be the united effort of the Russian people to bring the war to a victorious close. The thing was done before we in the West knew any more than muttered rumours told us; it came to birth full-grown, as Athene was born from the head of Zeus. There are a thousand difficulties and dangers ahead, for the entire government of a huge people, involving the downfall of autocracy, cannot be changed as you change a suit of clothes, but the great thing has been accomplished, and at the head of affairs in Russia to-day are not the Imperial marionettes bobbing and gesticulating on their German wires, but those who represent the people. A thousand obscure issues are involved in the movement: we do not know for certain yet whether the Grand Duke Michael is Tzar of all the Russias, or the Grand Duke Nicholas the head of the Russian armies, or whether the whole family of Romanoffs have peeled off and thrown aside like an apple-paring; what is certain is that some form of national government has taken the place of a Germanized autocracy. How stable that will prove itself, and whether it will be able to set the derelict steam-roller at work again and start it on its way remains to be seen. For myself, I shout with the optimists, but certainly, if the crisis is over and there actually is now in power a firm and national Government, capable of directing the destinies of the country, it will have been the most wonderful revolution that ever happened.
And then, even earlier than I had dared to hope, for I had not expected to get away before the last week in March, came that blessed moment, when one night at Waterloo Station the guard's whistle sounded, and we slid off down the steel ribands to Southampton. In itself, to any who has the least touch of the travelling or gipsy mind, to start on a long journey, to cross the sea, to go out of one country and into another where men think different thoughts and speak a different language, is one of the most real and essential refreshments of life, even when he leaves behind him peace and entertainment and content. For two years and a half, if you except those little niggardly journeys that are scarce worth while getting into the train for, I had lived without once properly moving, and, oh, the rapture of knowing that when I got out of this train, it was to get on to a boat, and when I got out of the boat (barring the exit entailed by a mine or a submarine), it would be to get into another train, and yet another train, and at the Italian frontier another train yet, all moving southwards. Then once more there would be a boat, and after that the garden at Alatri, and the stone-pine and Francis. Even had I been credibly informed by the angel Gabriel or some such unimpeachable authority that the chances were two to one that the Southampton boat would be torpedoed, I really believe I should have gone, and taken the other chance in the hope of getting safely across and, for the present, leaving England (which I love) and all the friends whom I love also, firmly and irrevocably behind. I wanted (as the doctors say) a change, not of climate only, but of everything else that makes up life, people and things and moral atmosphere and occupations. I was aware that there were some thousands of people then in London who wanted the same thing and could not get it, and I am afraid that that added a certain edge to ecstasy. To get away from the people I knew and from the nation to which I belonged was the very pith of this remission. A few hours ago, too, I had been hunting the columns of newspapers and watching the ticking tape to get the very last possible pieces of information about all the events of which I have just given the summary, and now part and parcel of my delight was to think that for many hours to come I should not see a tape or a newspaper. The war had been levelled at me, at point-blank range; for two years and a half I had never been certain that the very next moment some new report would not be fired at me (and, indeed, I intentionally drew such fire upon myself); but now I had got out of that London newspaper office, and was flying through the dark night southwards. Here in England everything was soaked in the associations of war (though the most we had seen of it was two or three futile Zeppelins), but in Alatri, which I had never known except in conditions of peace and serenity, its detonation and the smoke of its burning would surely be but a drowsy peal of thunder, a mist on the horizon, instead of that all-encompassing fog out of which leaped the flash of explosions. I wanted desperately, selfishly, unpatriotically, to get out of it all for a bit, and Alatri, in intervals of Rome, beckoned like the promised land. I am aware that a Latin poet tells us that a change of climate obtained by a sea-voyage does not alter a man's mind, but I felt convinced he was mistaken.
Throughout that delightful journey my expectations mounted. First came the windy quay at Southampton, the stealing out into the night with shuttered portholes, and in the early morning the arrival at Havre. Then for a moment I almost thought that some ghastly practical joke had been played on us passengers, and that we had put back again into a British port, so Anglicized and khakied did the town appear. But no such unseemly jest had been played, and that night I slept in Paris, and woke to find a chilly fog over that lucent city, which again sent qualms of apprehension through me, for fear that by some cantrip trick this might be London again, and my fancied journey but a dream. But the dream every hour proved itself real, for again I was in the train that started from the Gare de Lyon, and not from my bedroom or the top of the Eiffel Tower, as would have been the wont of dreams, and in due time there was Aix-les-Bains with its white poplars and silvery lake, and the long pull upwards to Modane, and the great hill-side through which the tunnel went, with wreaths of snow still large on its northern slopes, and when we came out of the darkness again, we had passed into the "land of lands." The mountain valleys were still grey with winter, but it was Italy; and presently, as we sped clanking downwards, the chestnut trees were in leaf, and the petroleum tins stood on the rails of wooden balconies with carnations already in bud, and on the train was a risotto for lunch and a dry and abominable piece of veal, which, insignificant in themselves, were like some signal that indicated Italy. The dry veal and the risotto and the budding chestnut trees and the unwearied beneficence of the sun were all signals of the Beloved: tokens of the presence that, after so long, I was beginning to realize again. And then the great hopeless station of Turin happened, where nobody can ever find the place he wants, and trains steal out from the platform where he has left them, and hide themselves again, guarded by imperious officials in cocked hats at subtly-concealed side tracks, escaping the notice, like prudent burglars, of intending travellers. There were shrill altercations and immediate reconcilements, and polite salutings, and finally the knowledge that all was well, and I found my hat and my coat precisely where I had left them, as in some conjuring trick, in the identical compartment (though it and the train had moved elsewhere), and again we slid southwards. There were olive-trees now, green in a calm air, and grey when the wind struck them, and little ruined castles stuck on the tops of inaccessible hills, and houses painted pink, and stone-walled vineyards, and dust that came in through the windows, but it was the beloved Italian dust. Then came the sea again on the right-hand side of the train (only here was the magic of the Mediterranean), and the stifle of innumerable tunnels, punctuated with glimpses of Portofino, swimming in its hump-backed way out into the tideless sea, and the huddle of roofs at Rapallo, and the bridge at Zoagli, and the empty sands at Sestri, and the blue-jackets crowding the platform at Spezzia. All this was real; a dream, though the reality was as ecstatic as a dream, could not have produced those memories in their exact order and their accurate sequence, and when, next morning, I awoke somewhere near Rome, I thought that the years of war-time were the nightmare, and this golden morning which shone on fragments of ancient aqueducts and knuckled fig-trees was but the resumption of what had been before the unquiet night possessed and held me. Here again, as three years ago, was the serene wash of sun and southern air, untroubled and real and permanent. I could open my mouth and draw in my breath. Dimly I remembered the fogs of the north, and almost as dimly the fact that Italy was at war too, striving to put her foot on that damnable centipede that had emerged from Central Europe to bite and to sting and to claw all that resented its wrigglings and prevented its poisoning of the world.
I found that after four days in Rome I was free (except for a wallet of papers which required attention), to go wherever I pleased for the inside of a week, and you may judge where next the train took me. That morning I had sent to Francis news of my escape from Rome (how desirous "an escape from Rome" would have sounded a month ago), and the same evening, across the flames of the sunset, I saw the peaks and capes of the island, shaped like a harp lying on its back, grow from dimmest outline of dream-shape into distinctness again. There on the left was the lower horn of it, plunged into the sea; then came the inward curve, sloping downwards to the grey cluster of the town, where the fingers of the player would be, and it swelled upwards again into the larger horn which formed the top of it. Never for more than a moment, I think, did my eyes leave some part of that exquisite shape. How often in the lower horn of it had Francis and I sat perched on that little platform by the gilded statue of Our Lady, looking landwards across the blue plain of sea towards the streamer of smoke from the truncated volcano, or to the coastland northwards, where the port was whitely strung like a line of pearls along the shore of the bay. Just below the other horn is the divinest bathing-place that the world holds; on a rock a hundred yards from the shore there is a little cave, curtained by seaweed, and in it is a tin box where shall be found two cigarettes and matches to match. Those were to have been lit and smoked within two months of their concealment there, and that date has now long been buried beneath the three years' landslide of war. The matches will certainly be a mildewed fricassée of wood pulp and phosphorus, the cigarettes an almost more ignoble glue of paper and tobacco; but to-morrow morning I swear that Francis and I will swim there, and unearth the remains of the serene days before the war, and recapture the feel that there was in the world before the Prussian centipede went forth on his doomed errand. Francis, I know, will hate swimming so early in the year as this, for he is a midsummer bather; but surely one who has been through the horrors of Gallipoli and earned the V.C. in France will not absolutely refuse to go through this ordeal by water for the sake of the recovery of the peace-cache. If it is possible to feel certain of anything, it is that to-morrow morning, whatever the weather, two futile Englishmen, as happy as they are silly, will swim out to the rock below the higher horn of the harp, and verify the existence of a tin box.
The shores grew clearer, and at last through a thin low-lying haze of sunset we passed into the clear shadow of the island, and the houses and pier of the Marina on which Teresa stood to welcome the return of her promesso, who was stricken to death as he was clasped in her outstretched arms, defined themselves with the engraved sharpness of evening in the south. As we entered this zone of liquid twilight, I could see the fishing boats drawn up on the beach, the open arch of the funicular station, the crowd on the quay awaiting the mild daily excitement of the boat from the mainland, and at the sight of all those things, unchanged and peaceful, I had for the moment more strongly than ever the sense that there had been no war and there was no war, and that I should presently step back into the days that preceded those nightmare years. In a moment now I shall be able to distinguish a tall white-flannelled figure, who will wave his hat as he catches sight of me in the bow of the first disembarking boat that comes from the steamer, and he will move forward to the steps, and he will say "Hullo!" and I shall say "Hullo!" as I step ashore to find that to-day is linked on without break to the summer of 1914 when I was here last. I may have been to Naples for a night, or did I only leave by the morning boat to-day? I really do not know....
And then I saw that Francis was not among the little group of islanders on the quay. Probably he had not got the telegram I sent from Rome to-day, for the postmaster of Alatri is no friend to telegrams, and, as I have often thought, keeps one in his desk for a day or two, in order to teach you not to be in such a hurry. And when he thinks you have learned your lesson, he has it delivered, two or three days afterwards, among your letters. But in spite of this perfectly adequate method of accounting for the undoubted fact that Francis had not come to meet the boat, I felt an inward resurgence of the uneasiness with which I had received his request that I should come out in March if possible, and not wait till April. I had accounted for that at the time by a reasonable explanation, and I could account, also reasonably, for his absence. But I could now, as the funicular railway drew us up like a bucket from the well, into the higher sunlit slopes of the island, account for both by one and the same explanation. He was ill when last he wrote....
I found a porter in the Piazza, who shouldered my luggage, and I went on ahead, striving to convince myself, with quite decent success, that I was being afraid "even where no fear was," and yielded myself up, though I walked briskly in order to put an end to my ominous surmises, to the enchantment of the hour, and of the sense that I really had arrived again. The little huddled town, with the Piazza from the doors and arches of which any moment the chorus of light-opera might issue with short skirts and "catchy" chorus, was quite unchanged, save that at this hour of sunset it used always to be guttural with Teutonic tourists, and a place to be avoided by the genuine islander. Unchanged, too, was the narrow street, where two could scarcely walk abreast, that led out to the hill-side on which the villa was perched; there was the narrow slit of blue overhead, and the vegetable shop and the tobacconist's and the trattoria with the smell of spilt wine issuing from it and the lean cat blinking at the doorway. The same children apparently ran up against one's legs, the tailor was putting up his shutters, and two Americans, as always, were buying picture-postcards at the stationer's. The path dipped downwards, ran level between olive groves and villas, made a right turn and a left turn, and there above me was the flight of steps that led steeply up by the whitewashed wall of the garden, and above the wall, still catching the last rays of the sun, was the stone-pine, and behind it, greyish-white and green-shuttered, the house, where in a minute now Francis would welcome me. My bedroom shutters I saw were open, and blankets were being aired on the window-sill, and this looked as if I was expected.
I opened the garden gate, pulling at the string that lifted the latch inside, and a great wave of the scent of wallflower and freesias poured over me, warm from their day-long sunning underneath the southern wall, and intoxicatingly sweet. And even as I inhaled the first breath of it, a woman came out of the dining-room door that opens on to the terrace. She was dressed in the uniform of a hospital nurse.
"We were expecting you," she said, speaking with that precise utterance of foreigners. "I hope you have had a good journey."