What a lot I shall have to tell this dear old uncle! How well we shall understand each other now, how happy he will be to see that I have understood him! We shall speak in that language which I need to speak again after six long years. Loving the East to fanaticism as I do, to me it stands for all that glorious past which the younger generation should appreciate but not blame, all the past with which I find myself so united.
I will tell this dear old uncle (and indeed am I not as old and experienced as he?) that I love my country to-day as I never loved it before, and if only I may be able to prove this I shall ask nothing more of life.
*****
Naples.
I can only write you a few lines to-day. The sea has been so rough that many of the passengers have preferred to remain on board. Some one impertinently asked me if I were afraid to go on shore, but I did not answer, having too much to say. Around me I hear the language which once I spoke with such delight; now it has become odious to me, as odious as that Italy which I have buried like a friend of the past.
Now there is a newspaper boy on board crying with rapture “Another Italian victory.” He offers me a paper. I want to shout my hatred of his country, I want to call from Heaven the vengeance of Allah on these cowardly Italians, but my tongue is tied and my lips will not give utterance to the thoughts I feel. I stand like one dazed.
Surely these accounts of victory are false. Are not these reports prepared beforehand to give courage to the Italian soldiers in their glorious mission of butchering the Turks, those fine valiant men who will stand up for their independence as long as a man remains to fight?
At last I go and lock myself in my cabin, so as not to hear their hateful jubilation, but they follow me even to my solitude. Some one knocks. Reluctantly I open. It is a letter. But there must be some error. Who can have written to me when I particularly asked that I should have no letters until I arrived?
But the letter came from Turkey, and the Turkish stamp almost frightened me: for a long time I had not the courage to open it. When at last I slowly cut the envelope of that letter, I found it contained the cutting of a newspaper which announced the death of the dear old uncle whom more than anyone I was longing to see again.