The men at the tables made
me a god! Nor did I think them worse for this. Why should I? A man
unknown, unkempt, unshaven, in tatters, covered with weeks of travel
and mud, and in a suit that originally cost not ten shillings; having
slept in leaves and ferns, and forest places, crosses a river at dusk
and enters a town furtively, not by the road. He is a foreigner; he
carries a great club. Is it not much wiser to arrest such a man? Why
yes, evidently. And when you have arrested him, can you do more than
let him go without proof, on his own word? Hardly!
Thus I loved the people of Calestano, especially for this strange
adventure they had given me; and next day, having slept in a human
room, I went at sunrise up the mountain sides beyond and above their
town, and so climbed by a long cleft the _second_ spur of the
Apennines: the spur that separated me from the _third_ river, the
Parma. And my goal above the Parma (when I should have crossed it) was
a place marked in the map 'Tizzano'. To climb this second spur, to
reach and cross the Parma in the vale below, to find Tizzano, I left
Calestano on that fragrant morning; and having passed and drawn a
little hamlet called Frangi, standing on a crag, I went on up the
steep vale and soon reached the top of the ridge, which here dips a
little and allows a path to cross over to the southern side.
It is the custom of many, when they get over a ridge, to begin
singing. Nor did I fail, early as was the hour, to sing in passing
this the second of my Apennine summits. I sang easily with an open
throat everything that I could remember in praise of joy; and I did
not spare the choruses of my songs, being even at pains to imitate
(when they were double) the various voices of either part.
Now, so much of the Englishman was in me that, coming round a corner
of rock from which one first sees Beduzzo hanging on its ledge (as you
know), and finding round this corner a peasant sitting at his ease, I
was ashamed. For I did not like to be overheard singing fantastic
songs. But he, used to singing as a solitary pastime, greeted me, and
we walked along together, pointing out to each other the glories of
the world before us and exulting in the morning. It was his business
to show me things and their names: the great Mountain of the
Pilgrimage to the South, the strange rock of Castel-Nuovo; in the far
haze the plain of Parma; and Tizzano on its high hill, the ridge
straight before me. He also would tell me the name in Italian of the
things to hand - my boots, my staff, my hat; and I told him their names
in French, all of which he was eager to learn.
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