The church clock, however, strikes twelve.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The water fell off a ledge like lead—­like a chain with thick white links.  The train ran out into a steep green meadow, and Jacob saw striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy.

A motor car full of Italian officers ran along the flat road and kept up with the train, raising dust behind it.  There were trees laced together with vines—­as Virgil said.  Here was a station; and a tremendous leave-taking going on, with women in high yellow boots and odd pale boys in ringed socks.  Virgil’s bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy.  It was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms.  Then at Milan there were sharp-winged hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figures over the roofs.

These Italian carriages get damnably hot with the afternoon sun on them, and the chances are that before the engine has pulled to the top of the gorge the clanking chain will have broken.  Up, up, up, it goes, like a train on a scenic railway.  Every peak is covered with sharp trees, and amazing white villages are crowded on ledges.  There is always a white tower on the very summit, flat red-frilled roofs, and a sheer drop beneath.  It is not a country in which one walks after tea.  For one thing there is no grass.  A whole hillside will be ruled with olive trees.  Already in April the earth is clotted into dry dust between them.  And there are neither stiles nor footpaths, nor lanes chequered with the shadows of leaves nor eighteenth-century inns with bow-windows, where one eats ham and eggs.  Oh no, Italy is all fierceness, bareness, exposure, and black priests shuffling along the roads.  It is strange, too, how you never get away from villas.

Still, to be travelling on one’s own with a hundred pounds to spend is a fine affair.  And if his money gave out, as it probably would, he would go on foot.  He could live on bread and wine—­the wine in straw bottles—­ for after doing Greece he was going to knock off Rome.  The Roman civilization was a very inferior affair, no doubt.  But Bonamy talked a lot of rot, all the same.  “You ought to have been in Athens,” he would say to Bonamy when he got back.  “Standing on the Parthenon,” he would say, or “The ruins of the Coliseum suggest some fairly sublime reflections,” which he would write out at length in letters.  It might turn to an essay upon civilization.  A comparison between the ancients and moderns, with some pretty sharp hits at Mr. Asquith—­something in the style of Gibbon.

A stout gentleman laboriously hauled himself in, dusty, baggy, slung with gold chains, and Jacob, regretting that he did not come of the Latin race, looked out of the window.