Margherita in prison was crazily recalling the strains of
the waltz she had heard—Ah, what ages ago it seemed!—when she was yet a happy girl, as pure as Arethusa in Hellas, and through the waltz I heard the young voice again over my shoulder. He was asking me to give him bronze for an Italian nickel piece of twenty centesimi. It was a bad one. I told him so and accused him of attempting to utter counterfeit coin. He laid his two hands on his breast, raised his elbows, threw back his head with conscious innocence and swore on the honour of his mother that the coin was good. He did it so well—so beautifully—that for a moment I was tempted to wonder whether he might perhaps be speaking the truth, but I glanced again at his coin and recovered myself.
“Now look here, Cupid,” I said, “I don’t want to breathe a syllable against the honour of your mother, but you know better than anyone that when a woman loses her head you are generally to blame. This is your doing”—and I took out of my pocket and showed him a post-card I had bought that morning in the Via Roma with a reproduction of the Venere Anadiomene. “And men also have lost their heads because of you. I am not the only one who has heard about the Duca di Bronte and Lady Hamilton. Look round at these beautiful ladies and at these brave officers and young men—do they not bear upon their forms and features the signatures of Arethusa’s foreign visitors? You ought to be able to decipher that palimpsest, if anyone can, for it was you who taught them to write; Ortigia would never have seen them if it had not been for you. And why are they sitting under the trees and walking about in the moonlight, do you suppose?”
He replied that they had come out to listen to the music and he wished there were more of them because then he would get more pennies.
“What!” I exclaimed; “people who do not even recognise a modulation to the dominant when they hear one come out to listen to music! You know better than that. They have not come out because of Gounod, they
have come because of you. It is always the same old story. It was your fault that Alpheus chased Arethusa out of Greece and that Proserpine was carried off from Enna. It was you who suggested to those Phœnician traders that the nurse of the little Eumæus would be good company for them, and you who made her consent to go. This music, of which I should have heard more this evening but for your frequent interruptions, you were at the bottom of it all. And it is because you are always hanging about the theatre that those wretched puppets are so constantly going mad for love of one another.”
He pouted and said I was making myself disagreeable and that there had been plenty to praise him.
I replied: “Yes; you swallow the praise, but you won’t listen to the blame.”
He said that as for the praise or the blame it was nothing to him one way or the other. He was too much interested in the future of the race to care about any of those old stories—they bored him—and, please, wouldn’t I leave off preaching and give him four soldi?
I replied: “You have immortal youth without the troublesome necessity of periodically dying and rising again; on that stage of the world where we mortals, untrained amateurs, improvise the drama of our lives, you have always been behind the scenes, inspiring and stage-managing more history and more poetry than has ever been written; without you Clio would never have built herself a treasure-house or, if she had made one, her sisters would have found in it nothing worth stealing; it is you who direct the modulation from the old generation to the young; it is your voice that is heard every Easter behind the bells and the music of the Gloria. And now you ask for riches! No wonder we complain that you are unreasonable. Can you not be satisfied and, in looking after the future of the race, put a little more variety into its history and its poetry? Why do you so often begin a story as comedy and end it as tragedy? It is unworthy of you to play fast and