Marazan (21 page)

It was a brilliant morning. After wandering about the house for a bit I found the cloister; Leglia was sitting in the invalid chair in a shady corner beside a table littered with papers. There was a girl sitting with him, his sister. We suffered a very proper introduction at his hands, after which he returned to his work and left us to amuse each other. She was a girl of the typical Italian type, small, with dark eyes, a lot of black hair, and a very clear complexion.

At the end of a quarter of an hour I had learned that she was an experienced charmer and that she liked her occasional visits to Milan, dancing at the magnificent balls given by the local nobility, officers from the Scuola Cavalliere across the river, and chocolates. After that I felt that I had learned all there was to know about her. She was a good sort in her own way.

Leglia asked me to excuse him while he finished his business. I sat down on the edge of the balustrade and told his sister what a corking breakfast I’d had. Her English was about on a par with my Italian; we tried each in turn with very similar results.

‘Aha!’ she laughed. ‘La colazione Inglese!’ She paused, and thought out a sentence. ‘We have tried,’ she said painfully, ‘that it is made beautiful.’

‘Squisita,’ said Leglia, without looking up. ‘Good to eat.’

‘Si si si!’ she said brightly. ‘Squisita.’

I replied that it was a splendid breakfast and that I
had enjoyed it very much, and got this through at the second attempt. For some time we conversed laboriously about England and the English, till at last we came to the point that was really exercising her mind; did I think the English girls were prettier than the Italians? I knew this gambit of old; I flatter myself that the delicate courtesy of my reply was well up to the high standard set by the officers of the School of Riding. At all events, it went down very well.

She glanced mischievously at her brother. ‘For Giovanni,’ she remarked, ‘I must to find a bride English.’

He spoke very rapidly and tersely to her in Italian, and returned to his writing. She sighed and shook her head.

‘Gli Inglesi,’ she said. ‘Always he talks of England and the English.’

She said that he was mad on England.

We went on gossiping till we were interrupted. The white-haired old man appeared round the corner of the arcade conducting the most gorgeously attired police official that I had ever seen. Leglia sat up as he came in sight.

‘That is good,’ he remarked to me. ‘It is about you that he comes, old bean.’

He put his hands to the wheels of his chair and swivelled himself round to meet the official. He was very nimble in that chair of his. It was the usual motion of a host rising to meet his guest, but one that might well have been forgiven to an invalid. I think that must have been one of the many trifles that combined to build up his great influence in the town. I knew very little of Leglia; I had yet to realise what a popular idol he had become. It took me some time to adjust my ideas to the fact that his popularity was genuine. For centuries the Leglias had been nobles in the town, for centuries the
townspeople had looked to them for a lead. Giovanni da Leglia before the war had been modern enough to please the youngest of them, a shade too modern for their elders. The war put the whole town at his feet. That one of the nobility should go and look at Jerry face to face in the British Flying Corps instead of going to Rome upon the Staff seemed to them a very strange thing, very modern and very wonderful. When he was crippled he became a hero. But when he came back to Florence and took up his hereditary position, when it became evident that his one care was for his people, he became a saint.

Leglia conversed in rapid Italian for a little while with the official, who seemed to be agreeing to everything he said. Presently he beckoned to me. I went up to them, and became aware that the official was scrutinising me carefully. He bowed to me as I came up, and asked if His Excellency would have the egregious kindness to display his passport. I gave it to him; he stamped it with a stamp and pad that he introduced from the tail pocket of his coat, and returned it to me with a flourish. He made a little speech in Italian then, the burden of which was that in all my walks abroad the Civil Power would strew rosebuds in the way and would endeavour to restrain the populace from throwing things at me. I took this with a grain of salt, but it was a fact that for so long as I remained in Florence every carabinier saluted me.

I made a laboured little speech in reply, and presently he bowed himself away.

He was followed by a succession of visitors. To all of them I was introduced. Most of them came upon their lawful occasions to see Leglia at his hour of levée; some, I think, had been summoned only to be introduced to me. I could make nothing of the plan upon which they
had been selected. Mostly they were of the black-coated bourgeois type, some evidently affluent, some less so. There were one or two that seemed to be peasants or small farmers in from the country; there was one that was a pure-blooded gipsy if ever I saw one. All at the conclusion of their business with Leglia turned and looked me up and down. Some of them even made a little speech assuring me of friendship should I be in need of it. I had a set answer which I gave them in reply to this sort of thing; to the others I bowed, and they went away in silence.

The whole show struck me as extremely curious. There was something in the way in which they had all offered their friendship that seemed to me too uniform to be altogether natural. It was as if they were accustomed to it, as if it was all in the day’s work. And here I may say at once that I never found out any more about the conditions under which they offered me this friendship, nor did I inquire. Looking back upon it, I have become convinced in my own mind that it was to the members of some society that Leglia introduced me. I know this much: that they were not Freemasons.

At last they stopped coming. Leglia turned to me.

‘You have now many friends in Florence,’ he said. ‘I do not think that now you may come to any harm.’

I was very much impressed and said as much. ‘It seems to me that you go one better than the law of the land.’

He smiled a little ruefully. ‘The law of the land,’ he said reflectively, ‘he does not always work all of the time. In every country he will not work now and again.’ He sighed. ‘In my country I think he works not so well as he does in England. And the more so with the new Government.’

I began to see dimly what he was driving at. ‘Do you get much trouble in that way?’ I asked.

The girl had disappeared. Leglia motioned to me to sit down; he lay back in his chair and lit one of his innumerable cigarettes. ‘I am Fascist, for myself,’ he said.

He mused a little. ‘Always with a Government of force there will be trouble now and again,’ he said. ‘It must be. And we have many troubles—very many troubles, so that sometimes one will doubt of Fascismo. But for myself, I am Fascist because the old Government was not—not so good, not sincere. Fascismo is for those that love Italy. And Il Duce is a man.’

He leaned towards me and tapped me on the arm. ‘With some,’ he said quietly, ‘Fascismo is as a religion and Il Duce is a God. The people who think so, they are a danger to us all because they are so foolish, so led away. They are—what do you say? Mad. No.…’

‘You mean they get fanatical about it,’ I said.

He brightened. ‘That is the word,’ he said. ‘They are fanatics, for whom the Opposition in Parliament is a heresy. They are so foolish. For them the whole of the business of Government is to make a speech and to say “I am Fascist, I fought for Italia in the war.” ’ The mimicry in his voice was wonderful. ‘More still. They do not think. For them a Ras is as a God, and one above the law though he be smuggler and murderer.’

‘I understand,’ I muttered.

He laid his hand upon my arm again. ‘Do not misjudge my people,’ he said. He spoke royally, but somehow I didn’t want to laugh. ‘They are not as the English. They are as the Irish, I think, much as the Irish. They are so easily inflamed, so easy to lead away with talk, not very responsible. But they will settle; they settle
now to the business of sound government of our great nation. Let only Il Duce live for ten years more, as we pray to the Mother of God daily.’

I glanced at him. ‘And if he dies?’

He flicked the ash from his cigarette. ‘My friend,’ he said quietly, ‘we pray that he will live.’

The sun was bright in the court, blazing down on the flowers in the shade of the arches of the cloister, and the queer dry-looking cactuses in the centre round about the fish-pond. I turned to Leglia.

‘It’s a Government that is open to abuse,’ I said.

He inclined his head proudly. ‘When I think of that, as sometimes I do, I tell you, old bean, I am most proud. The Government stands to be abused; in any other country it would be abused in fact. But in Italy the people are well governed. The people work more hard, and we balance on the Budget.’

‘That’s certainly a damn fine thing to be able to say of the country,’ I remarked. ‘At the same time, the Government is open to abuse. Mattani seems to get away with it here in a way he couldn’t do in any other country.’

He nodded gravely. ‘As you say, Mattani gets away with it.’ He paused. ‘It would be better for my country if he did not. It is the bad example, and makes many difficulties.’

I laughed shortly. ‘It would be better for my country too,’ I said.

He looked at me reflectively. ‘That is so,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps our interests will follow the same road. Is it not so?’

I knocked my pipe out sharply against the balustrade. ‘My interests are pretty simple,’ I said. ‘I want to see him hung.’

He didn’t answer that, but sat staring out over the
courtyard, quite motionless. He seemed to have forgotten my presence; presently I heard him mutter, half to himself:

‘It is but a tool that he makes of Fascismo.…’

I lay back in my chair and filled another pipe. I could see the position clearly now. Leglia wanted to get rid of Mattani, apparently from purely altruistic motives; he thought that he was a bad influence in the country. It seemed to me that Mattani had done him no personal injury, but for the sake of his ideals and for his country Leglia was willing to see him put out of the way—possibly at some danger to himself if his part in the affair should ever come to light. I turned in my chair and smiled a little. What a queer old cuss he was, so idealistic and so foreign!

At that moment England and the life I knew seemed incredibly remote.

‘You think that he would be better hanged?’ I said.

Leglia did not answer. He sat quite motionless in his chair, staring out over his little garden from the shadow of the cloister. I was suddenly ashamed of the bantering tone in which I had spoken. I had been speaking flippantly, but this was a matter of the life or death of a man whom I had never seen, who had done me no harm. God knows, I had little enough cause to speak lightly of him. We were speaking of his death; it was just as likely that we were speaking of my own. I remembered with a start that for all the hospitality and good feeling with which I was surrounded, I was in a foreign country, a country in which Mattani’s power was pretty nearly absolute. It would be time enough to laugh when I was back in England again. I thought of England, and my mind travelled back to Stokenchurch, the crash, and the long night that we had spent in the smoking-room of Six Firs, Joan, Compton, and I, drinking and talking
of what was the best thing to be done for him. And then I knew that it was up to me to see that his murderer was brought to stand a fair trial. If I could do that, I thought, my life would not have been entirely wasted.

Still Leglia was silent. I glanced at him, and my enthusiasm faded away. There was no personal bias about Leglia—of that I am positive. There was an air about Leglia; there had always been the same dignity about him even in his most irresponsible moments in the old days. I felt his dignity very strongly then. He sat there quite motionless, quite impassive, staring out on to his flowers. If ever I saw justice in a man’s face, it was then.

And presently he spoke. ‘Stenning, my friend,’ he said, ‘it is that my country stands at the parting of the ways. These years in Italy have been most difficult since the revolution, most upsetting of all order and moral behaviour. For my country when she is led rightly there stands a glorious future. Of that I am convinced. But the leading must be right, and in that there has been disappointment for us—much disappointment. I can speak, because sitting here and taking no part I have been able to watch the better. There are those of whom we had thought little before the revolution who have shown themselves of a great mind. And there are those on whom we had learned to trust, that have stood but to gain position for themselves and for their own purposes.’

He paused. ‘We had hoped much of Mattani,’ he said quietly. ‘Of all men in Italy save only Il Duce he held the imagination of the people; in Italy that is to say much, though I know it is not quite like that in England. Moreover, he was a little English, and we hoped much from that. Of all men in Italy below Il Duce we had hoped the most of Mattani. And it was all for a disappointment.…’

I could find nothing to say to that.

He continued: ‘Still he holds the imagination of the people by the power of his papers, but his influence for long has been most bad. He holds himself—how do you say?—above the law. For Italy in these times that any man should hold himself above the law I think to be most dangerous, most probably to hinder the progress of our Government, the more so for such a man as Baron Mattani.’

He glanced at me. ‘I am most happy that you should have came to see me,’ he said, ‘for I think it will be of value to my country that the law should be upheld. But the one thing I must press to you. If I can help you to secure Baron Mattani, that he shall stand a trial before the courts of your country; you shall not allow him to be killed before that. Only in that way will the example be of good to Italy.’

‘I can promise that,’ I said. ‘Once we get him he shall have a fair trial.’