Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General

“One night Brummel, evidently bent on testing the old sailor’s head, seated himself next him, making it his business to pass the decanters as briskly as he could. The admiral asked nothing better; filled and drank bumpers. Not content with this legitimate test, Brummel watched his opportunity when the admiral’s head was turned, and filled his glass up to the brim. Four or five times was the trick repeated, and with success; when at last the admiral, turning quickly around, caught him in the very act, with the decanter still in his hand. Fixing his eyes upon him with the fierceness of a tiger, the old man said, ‘Drink it, sir – drink it!’ and so terrified was Brummel by the manner and the look that he raised the glass to his lips and drained it, while all at the table were convulsed with laughter.”

The Brummel school – that is, the primrose-glove adventurers – were a very different order of men from the present-day fellows, who take a turn in Circassia or China, or a campaign with Garibaldi; and who, with all their defects, are men of mettle and pluck and daring. Of these latter I found my new acquaintance to be one.

He sketched off the early part of the “expedition” graphically enough for me, showing the disorder and indiscipline natural to a force where every nationality of Europe was represented, and not by its most favourable types.

“I had an Irish servant,” said he, “whose blunders would fill a volume. His prevailing impression, perhaps not ill-founded on the whole, was, that we all had come out for pillage; and while a certain reserve withheld most of us from avowing this fact, he spoke of it openly and freely, expatiating admiringly on Captain This and Major That, who had done a fine stroke of work in such a store, or such another country-house. As for his blunders, they never ceased. I was myself the victim of an absurd one. On the march from Melazzo I got a severe strain in the chest by my horse falling and rolling over me. No bone was broken, but I was much bruised, and a considerable extravasation of blood took place under the skin. Of course I could not move, and I was provided with a sort of litter, and slung between two mules. The doctor prescribed a strong dose of laudanum, which set me to sleep, and despatched Peter back to Melazzo with an order for a certain ointment, which he was to bring without delay, as the case was imminent; this was impressed upon him, as the fellow was much given to wandering off, when sent of a message, after adventures of his own.

“Fully convinced that I was in danger, away went Peter, very sad about me, but even more distressed lest he should forget what he was sent for. He kept repeating the words over and over as he went, till they became by mere repetition something perfectly incomprehensible, so that when he reached Melazzo nobody could make head or tail of his message. Group after group gathered about and interrogated him, and at last, by means of pantomime, discovered that his master was very ill. Signs were made to inquire if bleeding was required, or if it was a case for amputation, but he still shook his head in negative. ‘Is he dying?’ asked one, making a gesture to indicate lying down. Peter assented. ‘Oh, then it is the unzione estrema he wants!’ ‘That’s it,’ cried Peter, joyfully – ‘unzione it is.’ Two priests were speedily found and despatched; and I awoke out of a sound sleep under a tree to see three lighted candles on each side of me, and two priests in full vestments standing at my feet and gabbling away in a droning sort of voice, while Peter blubbered and wrung his hands unceasingly. A jolly burst of laughter from me soon dispelled the whole illusion, and Peter had to hide himself for shame for a week after.”

“What became of the fellow – was he killed in the campaign?”

“Killed! nothing of the kind; he rose to be an officer, served on Nullo’s staff, and is at this very hour in Poland, and, if I mistake not, a major.”

“Men of this stamp make occasionally great careers,” said I, carelessly.

“No, sir,” replied he, very gravely. “To do anything really brilliant, the adventurer must have been a gentleman at one time or other: the common fellow stops short at petty larcenies; the man of good blood always goes in for the mint.”

“There was, then,” asked I, “a good deal of what the Yankees call ‘pocketing’ in that campaign of Garibaldi’s?”

“Less than one might suppose. Have you not occasionally seen men at a dinner-party pass this and refuse that, waiting for the haunch, or the pheasant, or the blackcock that they are certain is coming, when all of a sudden the jellies and ices make their appearance, and the curtain falls? So it was with many of us; we were all waiting for Rome, and licking our lips for the Vatican and the Cardinals’ palaces, when in came the Piedmontese and finished the entertainment. If I meet you here to-morrow, I can tell you more about this;” and so saying he arose, gave me an easy nod, and strolled away.

“Who is that most agreeable gentleman who took his coffee with me?” asked I of the waiter as I entered the salle.

“It’s the Generale Inglese, who served with Garibaldi.”

“And his name?”

“Ah, per bacco! I never heard his name – Garibaldi calls him Giorgio, and the ladies who call here to take him out to drive now and then always say Giorgino – not that he’s so very small, for all that.”

My Garibaldian friend failed in his appointment with me this morning. We were to have gone together to a gallery, or a collection of ancient armour, or something of this sort, but he probably saw, as your clever adventurer will see, with half an eye, that I could be no use to him – that I was a wayfarer like himself on life’s highroad; and prudently turned round on his side and went to sleep again.

There is no quality so distinctive in this sort of man or woman – for adventurer has its feminine – as the rapid intuition with which he seizes on all available people, and throws aside all the unprofitable ones. A money-changer detecting a light napoleon is nothing to it. What are the traits by which they guide their judgment – what the tests by which they try humanity, I do not know, but that they do read a stranger at first sight is indisputable. That he found out Cornelius O’Dowd wasn’t a member of the British Cabinet, or a junior partner in Baring’s, was, you may sneeringly conjecture, no remarkable evidence of acuteness. But why should he discover the fact – fact it is – that he’d never be one penny the richer by knowing me, and that intercourse with me was about as profitable as playing a match at billiards “for the table”?

Say what people will against roguery and cheating, rail as they may at the rapacity and rascality one meets with, I declare and protest, after a good deal of experience, that the world is a very poor world to him who is not the mark of some roguery! When you are too poor to be cheated, you are too insignificant to be cherished; and the man that is not worth humbugging isn’t very far from bankruptcy.

It gave me a sort of shock, therefore, when I saw that my friend took this view of me, and I strolled down moodily enough to the Chamber of Deputies. Turin is a dreary city for a lounger; even a resident finds that he must serve a seven years’ apprenticeship before he gets any footing in its stiff ungenial society – for of all Italians, nothing socially is less graceful than a Piedmontese. They have none of the courteous civility, none of the urbane gentleness of the peninsular Italians. They are cold, reserved, proud, and eminently awkward; not the less so, perhaps, that their habitual tongue is the very vilest jargon that ever disfigured a human mouth. Of course this is an efficient barrier against intercourse with strangers; and though French is spoken in society, it bears about the same relation to that language at Paris, as what is called pigeon-English at Hong-Kong does to the tongue in use in Belgravia.

When I reached the Palazzo Carignan, as the Chamber is called, the séance was nearly over, and a scene of considerable uproar prevailed. There had been a somewhat sharp altercation between General Bixio and the “Left,” and M. Mordini had repeatedly appealed to the President to make the General recall some offensive epithets he had bestowed on the “party of movement.” There were the usual cries and gesticulations, the shouts of derision, the gestures of menace; and, above all, the tinkle-tinkle of the Presidents bell, which was no more minded than the summons for a waiter in an Irish inn; and on they went in this hopeless way, till some one, I don’t know why, cried out, “That’s enough – we are satisfied;” by which it seemed that somebody had apologised, but for what, or how, or to whom, I have not the very vaguest conception.

With all their depreciation of France, the Italians are the most persistent imitators of Frenchmen, and the Chamber was exactly a copy of the French Chamber in the old Louis Philippe days – all violence, noise, sensational intensity, and excitement.

I have often heard public speakers mention the difficulty of adjusting the voice to the size of a room in which they found themselves for the first time, and the remark occurred to me as figuratively displaying one of the difficulties of Italian public men. The speakers in reality never clearly knew how far their words were to carry – whether they spoke to the Chamber or to the Country.

Is there or is there not a public opinion in Italy? Can the public speaker direct his words over the heads of his immediate surrounders to countless thousands beyond them? If he cannot, Parliament is but a debating-club, with the disadvantage of not being able to select the subjects for discussion.

The glow of patriotism is never rightly warm, nor is the metal of party truly malleable, without the strong blast of a public opinion.

The Turin Chamber has no echo in the country; and, so far as I see, the Italians are far more eager to learn what is said in the French Parliament than in their own.

I remember an old waiter at the Hibernian Hotel in Dublin, who got a prize in the lottery and retired into private life, but who never could hear a bell ring without crying out, “Coming, sir.” The Italians remind me greatly of him: they have had such a terrible time of flunkeyism, that they start at every summons, no matter what hand be on the bell-rope.

To be sure the French did bully them awfully in the last war. Never was an alliance more dearly paid for. We ourselves are not a very compliant or conciliating race, but we can remember what it cost us to submit to French insolence and pretension in the Crimea; and yet we did submit to it, not always with a good grace, but in some fashion or other.

Here comes my Garibaldino again, and with a proposal to go down to Genoa and look at the Italian fleet. I don’t suppose that either of us know much of the subject; and indeed I feel, in my ignorance, that I might be a senior Lord of the Admiralty – but that is only another reason for the inquiry. “One is nothing,” says Mr Puff, “if he ain’t critical” So Heaven help the Italian navy under the conjoint commentaries of myself and my friend! Meanwhile, and before we start, one word more of Turin.

A FRIEND OF GIOBERTS: BEING A REMINISCENCE OF SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO

Here I am at the “Feder” in Turin – as dirty a hotel, be it said passingly, as you’ll find out of Ireland, and seventeen long years it is since I saw it first. Italy has changed a good deal in the meanwhile – changed rulers, landmarks, systems, and ideas; not so my old acquaintance, the Feder! There’s the dirty waiter flourishing his dirtier napkin; and there’s the long low-ceilinged table-d’hôte room, stuffy and smoky, and suffocating as ever; and there are the little grinning coteries of threes and fours round small tables soaking their rolls in chocolate, and puffing their “Cavours,” with faces as innocent of soap as they were before the war of the liberation. After all, perhaps, I’d have no objection if some friend would cry out, “Why, Con, my boy, you don’t look a day older than when I saw you here in ‘46, I think! I protest you have not changed in the least. What elixir vitæ have you swallowed, old fellow? Not a wrinkle, nor a grey hair,” and so on. And yet seventeen years taken out of the working part of a man’s life – that period that corresponds with the interval between after breakfast, we’ll say, and an hour before dinner – makes a great gap in existence; for I did very little as a boy, being not an early riser, perhaps, and now, in the evening of my days, I have got a theory that a man ought to dine early and never work after it. Though I’m half ashamed, on so short an acquaintance with my reader, to mention a personal incident, I can scarcely avoid – indeed I cannot avoid – relating a circumstance connected with my first visit to the “Hotel Feder.”

I was newly married when I came abroad for a short wedding-tour. The world at that time required new-married people to lay in a small stock of Continental notions, to assist their connubiality and enable them to wear the yoke with the graceful ease of foreigners; and so Mrs O’D. and I started with one heart, one passport, and – what’s not so pleasant – one hundred pounds, to comply with this ordinance. Of course, once over the border – once in France – it was enough. So we took up our abode in a very unpretending little hotel of Boulogne-sur-Mer called “La Cour de Madrid,” where we boarded for the moderate sum of eleven francs fifty centimes per diem – the odd fifty being saved by my wife not taking the post-prandial cup of coffee and rum.

There was not much to see at Boulogne, and we soon saw it. For a week or so Mrs O’D. used to go out muffled like one of the Sultan’s five hundred wives, protesting that she’d surely be recognised; but she grew out of the delusion at last, and discovered that our residence at the Cour de Madrid as effectually screened us from all remark or all inquiry as if we had taken up our abode in the Catacombs.

Now when one has got a large stock of any commodity on hand – I don’t care what it is – there’s nothing so provoking as not to find a market. Mrs O’D.‘s investment was bashfulness. She was determined to be the most timid, startled, modest, and blushing creature that ever wore orange-flowers; and yet there was not a man, woman, or child in the whole town that cared to know whether the act for which she left England was a matrimony or a murder.

“Don’t you hate this place, Cornelius?” – she never called me Con in the honeymoon. “Isn’t it the dullest, dreariest hole you have ever been in?”

“Not with you.”

“Then don’t yawn when you say so. I abhor it. It’s dirty, it’s vulgar, it’s dear.”

“No, no. It ain’t dear, my love; don’t say, dear.”

“Billiards perhaps, and filthy cigars, and that greenish bitter – anisette, I think they call it – are cheap enough, perhaps; but these are all luxuries I can’t share in.”

Here was the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand that presaged the first connubial hurricane. A married friend – one of much experience and long-suffering – had warned me of this, saying, “Don’t fancy you’ll escape, old fellow; but do the way the Ministry do about Turkey – put the evil day off; diplomatise, promise, cajole, threaten a bit if needs be, but postpone;” and, strong with these precepts, I negotiated, as the phrase is, and, with a dash of reckless liberality that I tremble at now as I record it, I said, “You’ve only to say where – nothing but where to, and I’ll take you – up the Rhine, down the Danube, Egypt, the Cataracts – ”

“I don’t want to go so far,” said she, dryly. “Italy will do.”

This was a stunner. I hoped the impossible would have stopped her, but she caught at the practicable, and foiled me.

“There’s only one objection,” said I, musing.

“And what may that be? Not money, I hope.”

“Heaven forbid – no. It’s the language. We get on here tolerably well, for the waiter speaks broken English; but in Italy, dearest, English is unknown.”

“Let us learn Italian, then. My aunt Groves said I had a remarkable talent for languages.”

I groaned inwardly at this, for the same aunt Groves had vouched for a sum of seventeen hundred and odd pounds as her niece’s fortune, but which was so beautifully “tied up,” as they called it, that neither Chancellor nor Master were ever equal to the task of untying it.

“Of course, dearest, let us learn Italian;” and I thought how I’d crush a junior counsel some day with a smashing bit of Dante.

We started that same night – travelled on day after day – crossed Mont Cenis in a snow-storm, and reached the Feder as wayworn and wretched-looking a pair as ever travelled on an errand of bliss and beatitude.

“In for a penny” is very Irish philosophy, but I can’t help that; so I wrote to my brother Peter to sell out another hundred for me out of the “Threes,” saying “dear Paulina’s health required a little change to a milder climate” (it was snowing when I wrote, and the thermometer over the chimneypiece at 9° Reaumur, with windows that wouldn’t shut, and a marble floor without carpet) – “that the balmy air of Italy” (my teeth chattered as I set it down) “would soon restore her; and indeed already she seemed to feel the change.” That she did, for she was crouching over a pan of charcoal ashes, with a railroad wrapper over her shoulders.

It’s no use going over what is in every one’s experience on first coming south of the Alps – the daily, hourly difficulty of not believing that you have taken a wrong road and got into Siberia; and strangest of all it is to see how little the natives think of it. I declare I often thought soap must be a great refrigerant, and I wish some chemist would inquire into the matter.