BY THE RAILWAY SIDE


My train drew near to the Via Reggio platform on a day between two of the
harvests of a hot September; the sea was burning blue, and there were a
sombreness and a gravity in the very excesses of the sun as his fires
brooded deeply over the serried, hardy, shabby, seaside ilex-woods. I
had come out of Tuscany and was on my way to the Genovesato: the steep
country with its profiles, bay by bay, of successive mountains grey with
olive-trees, between the flashes of the Mediterranean and the sky; the
country through the which there sounds the twanging Genoese language, a
thin Italian mingled with a little Arabic, more Portuguese, and much
French. I was regretful at leaving the elastic Tuscan speech, canorous
in its vowels set in emphatic _l's_ and _m's_ and the vigorous soft
spring of the double consonants. But as the train arrived its noises
were drowned by a voice declaiming in the tongue I was not to hear again
for months--good Italian. The voice was so loud that one looked for the
audience: Whose ears was it seeking to reach by the violence done to
every syllable, and whose feelings would it touch by its insincerity? The
tones were insincere, but there was passion behind them; and most often
passion acts its own true character poorly, and consciously enough to
make good judges think it a mere counterfeit. Hamlet, being a little
mad, feigned madness. It is when I am angry that I pretend to be angry,
so as to present the truth in an obvious and intelligible form. Thus
even before the words were distinguishable it was manifest that they were
spoken by a man in serious trouble who had false ideas as to what is
convincing in elocution.