“He speaks French worse than you do.”
Any Italian, wishing to express a similar idea, would have said—
“He speaks Italian, it is true, but not so well as you do.”
My meditations were interrupted by Angelo who had been taking stock of our possessions and, on looking into the basket, exclaimed with disgust that we had been robbed of our fish. It was the first I had heard about our fish, but he said the brigadier had given us ten and he had put them into the basket. How could they have got out again? All the afternoon we had been
surrounded by coastguards and policemen whose profession is, as every one knows, to prevent robbery and to take up thieves. Angelo was furious and wanted to drive back and complain to the brigadier, but, on looking further through the basket, we found there were still two fish and I said they would be quite enough for supper—with the sparrows—and he finally agreed that we had better do nothing, it might look as though we thought the brigadier was not up to his business.
“And when the tailor is wearing a coat that does not fit him,” said Angelo, “it is rude to tell him of it.”
So we drove on among the cistus bushes and I asked him about the lottery. Every Saturday morning ninety cards numbered from one to ninety are put into a wheel of fortune and a blind-folded child from the orphan asylum publicly draws out five. Italy is divided into several districts and a drawing takes place in the chief town of each, the winning numbers are telegraphed to the lottery offices all over the country and afterwards posted up and published in the newspapers. Any one wishing to try his luck chooses one or more numbers and
buys a ticket and this choosing of the numbers is a very absorbing business. In the neighbourhood of Castelvetrano at that time the favourite numbers were five and twenty-six and the people were betting on those numbers when they had no special reason for choosing any others. Angelo could not tell why these two numbers were preferred, he could only say that the people found them sympathetic and, as a matter of fact, twenty-six had come out the day before. There are many ways of choosing a number if you find five and twenty-six unsympathetic; you can wait till something remarkable happens to you, look it out in “the useful book that knows” and then bet on its number, for everything really remarkable has a number in the book and, if you do not possess a copy, it can be consulted in a shop as the Post Office Directory can be consulted in London. Or, if nothing remarkable happens to you in real life, perhaps you may have dreamt of a lady in a white dress, or of a man whetting a scythe, or of meeting a snake in the road—anything will do, so long as it strikes you at the time. When you see the country people coming into town on market day you may be sure that each one
has received instructions from relations and friends at home to put something on a number for them.
Some make a practice of gambling every week, others only try their luck when they have a few spare soldi, others only when they have witnessed something irresistibly striking. A favourite way of choosing a number is to get into conversation with certain old monks who have a reputation for spotting winners, if I may so speak. You do not ask the monk for a number outright, you engage him in conversation on general topics and as he understands what is expected of him, though he pretends he does not, he will presently make some such irrelevant remark as, “Do you like flowers?” whereupon you rapidly bring the interview to a conclusion and, if you do not know the number for “flower,” you look it out in the book and bet on it. It occurred to me that possibly that was what the brigadier had been doing with me when he took me into his room to wash.