VII
APPENDIX
CAPRAIA.
MY DEAR PANOUKIAN,
So you have become a politician! I had hoped for better things.
It is ten years now since I left England, so that I can write to you without the prickly heat of moral prejudice. It is a year since I saw you in Venice, you and her. She had her arm in yours and you did not see me. You saw nothing but her, and she saw nothing but you, and it was clear to me that you were enjoying your tenth honeymoon, which is, surely, a far greater thing than the first, if only you can get to it. You came out of St. Mark’s, you and she, and I was so close that I could have touched you. I shrank into the shadow and watched you feed the pigeons, and then you had tea on the sunlit side of the Piazza and then you strolled toward the Rialto. I took a gondola to the station and fled to Verona, for I could have no room in your tenth Eden. Verona is the very place for a bachelor, which, I there discovered, I have never ceased to be. Verona belongs to Romeo and Juliet, and no other lovers may do more than pass the day there, salute and speed on to Venice. But a bachelor may stay there many days: he will find an excellent local wine, good cigars built round straws, passable food, and the swift-flowing Adige wherein to cast his thoughts. This I did, with a blessing or two to be conveyed to you in Venice. I hope you received them. The Adige bears thoughts and blessings and sewage with equal zest to his goal, as I would all men might do.
I stayed for a month in Verona and I remember little of it but some delicious plums I bought in the marketplace and ate in the amphitheater, spitting the stones down into the arena with a dexterity I have only seen equaled by Matilda in the days of my first acquaintance with her. That is far back now, but there is not a moment of it all that I do not like to remember, and there in the amphitheater I told myself the whole adventure as a story from which I was detached. It moved me more than the house of Juliet, more than all the sorrows of the Scaligers, for it is a modern story and, as Molière said, “Les anciens sont les anciens et nous sommes les gens d’aujourd’hui.”
Aujourd’hui! To-day! That is the marvel, that out of the swiftly moving, ever changing vapor which is life we should achieve anything so positive. To-day never goes. There is a thing called yesterday, but that is only the dust-bin at the door into which we cast our refuse, our failures, our worn-out souls. There is a thing called to-morrow, but that is the storehouse of to-day, bursting with far better things, emotions, loves, hopes, than those we have discarded. But into to-day the whole passionate force of the universe is poured, through us, through all things, and therefore to-day is marvelous.
Here in Italy there is some worship of to-day. There are times and times when it is enough to be alive; and there are times when the light glows magically and the whole body and being of a man melt into it, thrill in worship, and then, however old he be, however burdened with Time’s tricks of the flesh, in his heart there are songs and dancing.
In England we cling to the past, we never know to-day, we never dare open the storehouse of tomorrow, for we are all trained in the house of Mother Hubbard. I have loved England dearly since I have lived away from her. I can begin, I think, to understand. She is weary, maybe; she has many hours of boredom. She is, alas, a country where grapes grow under glass, where, I sometimes think, men do not grow at all. She is a country of adolescents; her sons seem never to be troubled by the difficulties which beset the adult mind; they rush ahead, careless of danger because they never see it; their lives hang upon a precarious luck: they are impelled, not, I believe, as other nations fancy, by greed or conceit, but by that furious energy which attends upon the adolescent hatred of being left out of things. A grown man can tolerably gauge his capacity, but the desires of a youth are constantly excited by the desires of others; he must acquire lest others obtain; he must love every maiden and yield to none; he must be forever donning new habits to persuade himself that he is more a man than the grown men among whom enviously he moves. He is filled with a fevered curiosity about himself, but never dares stay to satisfy it, lest he should miss an opportunity of bidding for the admiration and praise of others which he would far rather have than their sympathy. Sympathy he dreads, for it forces him back upon himself, brings him too near to seeing himself without excitement. . . . So far, my observations, carefully selected, take me.