Albergo Empedocle
The last letter I had from Harold was from Naples.
“We’ve just come back from Pompeii,” he wrote. “On the whole it’s decidedly no go and very tiring. What with the smells and the beggars and the mosquitoes we’re rather off Naples altogether, and we’ve changed our plans and are going to Sicily. The guidebooks say you can run through it in no time; only four places you have to go to, and very little in them. That suits us to a T. Pompeii and the awful Museum here have fairly killed us—except of course Mildred, and perhaps Sir Edwin.
“Now why don’t you come too? I know you’re keen on Sicily, and we all would like it. You would be able to spread yourself no end with your archaeology. For once in my life I should have to listen while you jaw. You’d enjoy discussing temples, gods, etc., with Mildred. She’s taught me a lot, but of course it’s no fun for her, talking to us. Send a wire; I’ll stand the cost. Start at once and we’ll wait for you. The Peaslakes say the same, especially Mildred.
“My not sleeping at night, and my headaches are all right now, thanks very much. As for the blues, I haven’t had any since I’ve been engaged, and don’t intend to. So don’t worry any more. Yours,
I did not go. I could just have managed it, but Sicily was then a very sacred name to me, and the thought of running through it in no time, even with Harold, deterred me. I went afterwards, and as I am well acquainted with all who went then, and have had circumstantial information of all that happened, I think that my account of the affair will be as intelligible as anyone’s.
I am conceited enough to think that if I had gone, the man I love most in the world would not now be in an asylum,
I
The Peaslake party was most harmonious in its composition. Four out of the five were Peaslakes, which partly accounted for the success, but the fifth, Harold, seemed to have been created to go with them. They had started from England soon after his engagement to Mildred Peaslake, and had been flying over Europe for two months. At first they were a little ashamed of their rapidity, but the delight of continual customhouse examinations soon seized them, and they had hardly learnt what “Come in,” and “Hot water, please,” were in one language, before they crossed the frontier and had to learn them in another.
But, as Harold truly said, “People say we don’t see things properly, and are globetrotters, and all that, but after all one travels to enjoy oneself, and no one can say that we aren’t having a ripping time.”
Every party, to be really harmonious, must have a physical and an intellectual centre. Harold provided one, Mildred the other. He settled whether a mountain had to be climbed or a walk taken, and it was his fists that were clenched when a porter was insolent, or a cabman tried to overcharge. Mildred, on the other hand, was the fount of information. It was she who generally held the Baedeker and explained it. She had been expecting her Continental scramble for several years, and had read a fair amount of books for it, which a good memory often enabled her to reproduce.
But they all agreed that she was no dry encyclopedia. Her appetite for facts was balanced by her reverence for imagination.
“It is imagination,” she would say, “that makes the past live again. It sets the centuries at naught.”
“Rather!” was the invariable reply of Harold, who was notoriously deficient in it. Recreating the past was apt to give him a headache, and his thoughts obstinately returned to the unromantic present, which he found quite satisfactory. He was fairly rich, fairly healthy, very much in love,
