to report what passed between that great lawyer and the mayor and
councillors assembled. Suffice it that the councillors were
frightened, the date of the unveiling was postponed, and the whole
matter, referred to high authorities in Rome, went darkly drifting
into some form of litigation, and there abides.

Technically, then, neither side may claim that it has won. The statue
has not been unveiled. But the statue has not been displaced.
Practically, though, and morally, the palm is, so far, to the
fishermen. The pedestal does not really irk them at all. On the
contrary, it and the sheeting do cast for them in the heat a pleasant
shadow, of which (the influence of Fleet Street, once felt, never
shaken off, forces me to say) they are not slow to avail themselves.
And the cost of the litigation comes not, you may be sure, out of
their light old pockets, but out of the coffers of some pious rich
folk hereabouts. The Pope remains a prisoner in the Vatican? Well,
here is Umberto, a kind of hostage. Yet with what a difference! Here
is no spiritual king stripped of earthly kingship. Here is an earthly
king kept swaddled up day after day, to be publicly ridiculous. The
fishermen, as I have said, pay him no heed. The mayor, passing along
the road, looks straight in front of him, with an elaborate assumption
of unconcern. So do the councillors. But there are others who look
maliciously up at the hapless figure. Now and again there comes a monk
from the monastery on that hill yonder. He laughs into his beard as he
goes by. Two by two, in their grey cloaks and their blue mantillas,
the little orphan girls are sometimes marched past. There they go, as
I write. Not malice, but a vague horror, is in the eyes they turn.
Umberto, belike, is used as a means to frighten them when, or lest,
they offend. The nun in whose charge they arc crosses herself.