PAGE 6
Myself
by
“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.