They can afford to sell this poison at half the price of the
original, and your artful restaurateur keeps an old bottle or two of the
real product which he fills up, when empty, out of some hidden but
never-failing barrel of the fraudulent mixture round the corner,
charging you, of course, the full price of true Strega. If you complain,
he proudly points to the bottle, the cork, the label: all authentic! No
wonder foreigners, on tasting these concoctions, vow they will never
touch Strega again....
We had a prolonged argument, over the coffee, about this Strega
adulteration, during which I tried to make my friend comprehend how I
thought the grievance ought to be remedied. How? By an injunction. That
was the way to redress these wrongs. You obtain an injunction, I said,
such as the French Chartreuse people obtained against the manufacturers
of the Italian "Certosa," which was thereafter obliged to change its
name to "Val D'Emma." More than once I endeavoured to set forth, in
language intelligible to his understanding, what an injunction
signified; more than once I explained how well-advised the Strega
Company would be to take this course.
In vain!
He always missed my point. He always brought in some personal element,
whereas I, as usual, confined myself to general lines, to the principle
of the thing. Italians are sometimes unfathomably obtuse.
"But what is an injunction?" he repeated.
"If you were a little younger, there might be some hope for you. I would
then try to explain it again, for the fiftieth time. Instead of that,
what do you say to taking a nap?"
"Ah! You have eaten too much."
"Not at all. But please to note that I am tired of explaining things to
people who refuse to understand."
"No doubt, no doubt. Yes. A little sleep might freshen you up."
"And perhaps inspire you with another subject of conversation."
In the little hotel there were no rooms available just then wherein we
might have slumbered, and another apartment higher up the street
promising lively sport for which we were disinclined at that hour, we
moved laboriously into the chestnut woods overhead. Fine old timber,
part of that mysterious Ciminian forest which still covers a large
tract, from within whose ample shade one looks downhill towards the
distant Orte across a broiling stretch of country. There were golden
orioles here, calling to each other from the tree-tops. My friend,
having excavated himself a couch among the troublesome prickly seeds of
this plant, was soon snoring - another senile trait - snoring in a
rhythmical bass accompaniment to their song. I envied him. How some
people can sleep! It is a thing worth watching. They shut their eyes,
and forget to be awake. With a view to imitating his example, I wearied
myself trying to count up the number of orioles I had shot in my
bird-slaying days, and where it happened. Not more than half a dozen,
all told. They are hard to stalk, and hard to see. But of other
birds - how many! Forthwith an endless procession of massacred fowls
began to pass before my mind. One would fain live those ornithological
days over again, and taste the rapturous joy with which one killed that
first nutcracker in the mountain gulley; the first wall-creeper which
fluttered down from the precipice hung with icicles; the Temminck's
stint - victim of a lucky shot, late in the evening, on the banks of the
reservoir; the ruff, the grey-headed green woodpecker, the yellow-billed
Alpine jackdaw, that lanius meridionalis - -
And all those slaughtered beasts - those chamois, first and foremost,
sedulously circumvented amid snowy crags. Where are now their horns, the
trophies? The passion for such sport died out slowly and for no clearly
ascertainable reason, as did, in its turn, the taste for art and
theatres and other things. Sheer satiety, a grain of pity, new
environments - they may all help to explain what was, in its essence, a
molecular change in the brain, driving one to explore new departments of
life.
And now latterly, for some reason equally obscure, the natural history
fancy has revived after lying dormant so long. It may be those three
months spent on the pavements of Florence which incline one's thoughts
to the country and wild things. Social reasons too - a certain weariness
of humanity, and more than weariness; a desire to avoid contact with
creatures Who kill each other so gracelessly and in so doing - for the
killing alone would pass - invoke specially manufactured systems of
ethics and a benevolent God overhead. What has one in common with such
folk?
That may be why I feel disposed to forget mankind and take rambles as of
yore; minded to shoulder a gun and climb trees and collect birds, and
begin, of course, a new series of "field notes." Those old jottings were
conscientiously done and registered sundry things of import to the
naturalist; were they accessible, I should be tempted to extract
therefrom a volume of solid zoological memories in preference to these
travel-pages that register nothing but the crosscurrents of a mind which
tries to see things as they are. For the pursuit brought one into
relations not only with interesting birds and beasts, but with men.
There was Mr. H. of the Linnean Society, whose waxed moustache curled
round upon itself like an ammonite. A great writer of books was Mr. H.,
and a great collector of them. He collected, among other things, a rare
monograph belonging to me and dealing with the former distribution of
the beaver in Bavaria (we were both absorbed in beavers). Nothing I
could do or say would induce him to disgorge it again; he had always
lent it to a friend, who was just on the point of returning it, etc.
etc. Bitterly grieved, I not only forgave him, but put him into
communication with my friend Dr. Girtanner of St. Gallen, another
beaver - and marmot - specialist.
