Though my meals in those days were all out of doors, his attendance at
dinner-time was rather uncertain; I suspect he retired early in order to
spend the night, like other polygamists, in prayer and fasting. At the
hours of breakfast and luncheon - he knew them as well as I did - he was
generally free, and then quite monopolized my company, climbing up my
leg on to the table, eating out of my hand, sipping sugar-water out of
his own private bowl and, in fact, doing everything I suggested. I did
not suggest impossibilities. A friendship should never be strained to
breaking-point. Had I cared to risk such a calamity, I might have taught
him to play skittles....
For the rest, it is not very amusing to be either a lizard or a snake in
Italy. Lizards are caught in nooses and then tied by one leg and made to
run on the remaining three; or secured by a cord round the neck and
swung about in the air - mighty good sport, this; or deprived of their
tails and given to the baby or cat to play with; or dragged along at the
end of a string, like a reluctant pig that is led to market. There are
quite a number of ways of making lizards feel at home.
With snakes the procedure is simple. They are killed; treated to that
self-same system to which they used to treat us in our arboreal days
when the glassy eye of the serpent, gleaming through the branches, will
have caused our fur to stand on end with horror. No beast provokes human
hatred like that old coiling serpent. Long and cruel must have been his
reign for the memory to have lingered - how many years? Let us say, in
order to be on the safe side, a million. Here, then, is another ghost of
the past, a daylight ghost.
And look around you; the world is full of them. We live amid a legion of
ancestral terrors which creep from their limbo and peer in upon our
weaker moments, ready to make us their prey. A man whose wits are not
firmly rooted in earth, in warm friends and warm food, might well live a
life of ceaseless trepidation. Many do. They brood over their immortal
soul - a ghost. Others there are, whose dreams have altogether devoured
their realities. These live, for the most part, in asylums.
There flits, along this very shore, a ghost of another kind - that of
Shelley. Maybe the spot where they burnt his body can still be pointed
out. I have forgotten all I ever read on that subject. An Italian
enthusiast, the librarian of the Laurentian Library in Florence,
garnered certain information from ancient fishermen of Viareggio in
regard to this occurrence and set it down in a little book, a book with
white covers which I possessed during my Shelley period.
