loose with us; great poets do not do so. But there! you are too young to know what conscience is, and I am afraid you are too old to learn.”
He replied that he was not accustomed to be talked to in this way and did not know what I meant by it.
I said: “Very well, I will leave off preaching, and perhaps you will allow me to conclude with a piece of advice that ought to be acceptable to one whose ambition it is to become a millionaire. You cannot have forgotten where you put your mother’s head. Now, be a sensible boy for once, run away and find it, take it to Dr. Orsi up there in the museum and he will give you plenty of soldi for it—more than you can count, and no questions asked about honour.”
He laughed and said I seemed to take a good deal of interest in the personal appearance of his mother who, he thought, could be trusted to look after herself, and that so long as a woman’s heart was in the right place it did not much matter what she did with her head. Besides, even if he were to find the head, he knew nothing about business and a scientific man in a museum would be sure to get the better of him.
There is no resisting Cupid, so I let him think he had got the better of me, gave him four soldi and added his coin to my collection of similar pieces, while he frisked away back to his friends boasting of his success, as Cupid will. He had not quite done with me, however, he came once more to see whether I should be likely to give him a cigarette, but a rough man caught him, told him not to worry the gentry, boxed his ears for him and drove him from me.
Fancy boxing the ears of a young Greek god off a dolphin’s back within sound of the Fontana Aretusa!
And yet, perhaps the rough man was right. I have sometimes thought since that it cannot have been really Cupid who came to me that evening; I must have been wasting my time and money, as others have done before, upon some false god, false as his counterfeit coin, one of those who go
up and down the world seeking whom they may despoil. Well, let it be so. One does not keep an account of the hours and minutes one spends in a country where the existence of time is scarcely recognised, and as for the money—of all the multitudes of men who have been fooled by Commerce in the guise of Love only a few have had the luck to escape with a total loss not exceeding four-pence half-penny.
the end