So ended the meeting of the Triumvirs, Roosevelt, Griscom and Belknap. To those who helped them in their work it was of such profound interest, that the sixth of April remains the culminating point of the whole Messina business.
What did it mean to them?
All three are men of action, who delight too much in doing to waste much time in talking about what they have done. They felt it none the less for all that. A single sentence from a letter of Mr. Griscom’s tells us more than a volume of official reports.
“I may say personally, I have had the most valuable and interesting experience of my lifetime.”
We said at the time that the rain was the only drawback to the complete success of Mr. Roosevelt’s visit. Looking back at that memorable sixth of April, we are not so sure of this. Was it not really best things happened as they did? All the distinguished visitors received a more exact idea of the actual conditions under which the work they planned was carried out, than if the day had been fair. For more than three months that cruel earthquake rain continued, with only a few rare days of fair weather. The peculiar rain may in some measure have been due to the fine dust discharged into the atmosphere, since every drop of rain is formed around such a particle. This may, the scientists say, account for the rain at Messina. Peculiar rains have been observed after other earthquakes. The trouble is that earthquakes are so rare that the scientists cannot tell whether the rain was a mere coincidence or due in some measure to the disturbance. “The change of the electrical potential due to the earthquake might serve to start a rain, and altogether one is inclined to suspect that the rain was at least started by the earthquake,” writes one expert. The truth is the scientists themselves are all “up a tree” about that mysterious rain. Rosina Calabresi, Timothy, and all the simple people who endured it, have no such doubts. To them, to us, perhaps to Mr. Roosevelt, it remains a rain apart, unlike all others!
XV
EASTER
“Oggi il Signor è morto.”
“Dead? Impossible, we heard he was better!”
Gasperone smiled patiently, pointed to heaven and repeated the greeting that, in Sicily, people give each other on Good Friday: “Today our Lord is dead.”
I had come to spend Easter at Camp; Gasperone met me at the station. His words brought a faint uneasiness that returned whenever the greeting was repeated: I heard it many times that day—from Caterina, Zenobia, Zia Maddalena, a dozen others—and always it brought that faint shock, as if there was something especially significant to us in the words.