“August 16th.—My ‘At Home’ day was made memorable by the appearance of the Empress Eugénie, who brought a remedy for little Eileen’s cold. It was a plaster, which she showed me how to use. I cannot say how touched we were by this act, so thoughtful and kind—that poor childless widow! She seems to have a particularly tender feeling for Eileen, indeed Mdlle. d’Allonville has told me so.”
The rest of the Aldershot Diary is filled with military activities up to the date of the expiration of my husband’s time there, and his appointment to the command of the South Eastern District with Dover Castle as our home. But between the two commands came an interlude filled with a tour through some parts of Italy I had not seen before, and a visit to the Villa Cyrnos at Cap Martin, whither the Empress had invited us.
CHAPTER XX
ITALY AGAIN
IN January, 1896, we left Aldershot on a raw foggy day, with the usual winter brown-paper sky, the essence of dreariness, on leave for the land I love best. At Turin our train for Genoa was filled with poor young soldiers off to Abyssinia, the Italian Government having followed our example in the policy of “expansion”; with what success was soon seen. An Italian told us that “good coffee” was to be had from there, amongst other desirable commodities. So the poor young conscripts were being sent to fetch the good coffee, etc. They were singing in a chorus of tenor voices as they went, after affectionately kissing the comrades who had come to see them off.
At sunrise we arrived at Naples, Vesuvius looking like a great amethyst, transparent in the golden haze from the sun which rose just behind it. I must say the Neapolitan population struck me as very wretched; the men were no better than the poor creatures one might see in Whitechapel any day, and dressed, like them, in shoddy clothing. The poor skeleton mules and horses were covered with picturesque brass-mounted harness instead of flesh, and I saw no red-sashed, brown-limbed lazzaroni such as were supposed to dance tarantelle on the shore. Certainly there is not much dancing and singing in their hungry-looking descendants.
January 17th was a memorable day, spent at Pompeii. One must see the place for oneself. Familiar with it though you may be through books and paintings, Pompeii takes you by surprise. The suddenness of that entrance into the City of the Dead is a surprise to a newcomer, such as I was. To come into the city at once by the “Street of Tombs,” which carries you steeply upwards into the interior—no turnstiles at the gate, no ticket collectors, no leave-your-umbrella-at-the-door; this natural way of entering gave me a strange sensation as if I were walking into the past. The present day was non-existent. Though we were three and a half hours circulating about those theatres, baths, villas, shops, through the narrow streets, with their deep ruts and stepping stones, I was so absorbed in the fascination of realising the life of those days that I never needed to rest for a moment, and the day had grown very hot. One rather drags oneself through a museum, but we were here under the sky, and Vesuvius, the author of this destruction, was there in very truth, looking down on us as we wandered through the remnants of his victim.
As to beauty of colour there is here a great feast for the painter. What could surpass, on a day like that, the simple beauty of those positive reds and yellows and blues of walls and pillars in that light, back-grounded by the tender blue of mountains delicately crested with the white of their snows? The positive strong foreground colours emphasised by the delicacy of the background! The absolute silence of the place was impressive and very welcome.
The Diary had better “carry on” here: “Sunday, January 19th.—To Capri and Sorrento on our way to Amalfi. There is a string of names! I feel I can’t pronounce them to myself with adequate relish. To Mass at 8, and then at 9 by steamer to Capri, touching at Sorrento on our way. Three hours’ passage over a very dark blue sea, which was flecked with foam off Castellamare. Capri is all I expected, a mass of orange and lemon groves in its lower part, with wonderful crags soaring abruptly, in places, out of the clear green water. Tiberius’s villa is perched on the edge of a fearful precipice that has memories connected with his cruelties which one tries to smother. Indeed, all around one, in those scenes of Nature’s loveliness, the detestable doings of man against man are but too persistently obtruding themselves on the mind which is seeking only restful pleasure.
“We were driven to the Hotel Quisisana (‘Here one gets well’), very high up on a steep ridge, where the village is, and were sorry to find our pleasure marred by being set down to déjeuner with as repulsive a company of Teutons as one could see. The perspective of those feeding faces, along the edge of the table, tried me horribly. They say the Germans are outnumbering the British as tourists in Italy now. Nowhere do their loud voices and rude manners jar upon our sensibility so painfully as in Italy. The Frau next to me actually sniffed at four bottles out of the cruet in succession, poking them into her nose before she satisfied herself that she had found the right sauce for her chop! What’s to be done with such people?
“We had not much time to give to the lovely island, for the little steamer had to take us to Sorrento at two o’clock. We put up there at the Hotel Tramontano, and had a stroll at sunset, with views of the coast and Vesuvius that spread out beyond the reach of my well-meaning, but inadequate, pen. I can’t help the impulse of recording the things of beauty I have seen. It is owing to a wish to preserve such precious things in my memory, to waste nothing of them, and to record my gratitude as well.”