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Page 41
The great age of the Count - he seemed to be the representative
in the world of some vanished empire - gave his irony a certain
indirection. Everybody laughed. And he added: "Even your word
`murder,' I believe, was originally the name of a fine imposed by
the Danes on a village unless it could be proved that the person
found dead was an Englishman!
"I wonder when, precisely, the world began to regard it as a
crime to kill an Englishman?"
The parchment on the bones of his face wrinkled into a sort of
smile. His greatest friend on the Riviera was this pipe-smoking
Briton.
Then suddenly, with a nimble gesture that one would not believe
possible in the aged, he stripped back his sleeve and exhibited a
long, curiously twisted scar, as though a bullet had plowed along
the arm.
"Alas, monsieur," he said, "I myself live in the most primitive
condition of society! I pay a tribute for life . . . . Ah! no,
monsieur; it is not to the Camorra that I pay. It is quite
unromantic. I think my secretary carries it in his books as a
pension to an indigent relative."
He turned to the American
"Believe me, monsieur, my estates in Salerno are not what they
were; the olive trees are old and all drains on my income are a
burden - even this gratuity. I thought I should be rid of it;
but, alas, the extraordinary conception of justice in your
country!"
He broke the cigarette in his fingers, and flung the pieces over
the terrace.
"In the great range of mountains," he began, "slashing across the
American states and beautifully named the Alleghanies, there is a
vast measure of coal beds. It is thither that the emigrants from
Southern Europe journey. They mine out the coal, sometimes
descending into the earth through pits, or what in your language
are called shafts, and sometimes following the stratum of the
coal bed into the hill.
"This underworld, monsieur - this, sunless world, built
underneath the mountains, is a section of Europe slipped under
the American Republic. The language spoken there is not English.
The men laboring in those buried communities cry out sparate when
they are about to shoot down the coal with powder. It is Italy
under there. There is a river called the Monongahela in those
mountains. It is an Indian name."
He paused.
"And so, monsieur, what happened along it doubtless reminded me
of Cooper's story - Bough of Oak and the case of Corporal Flint."
He took another cigarette out of a box on the table, but he did
not light it.
"In one of the little mining villages along this river with the
enchanting name there was a man physically like the people of the
Iliad; and with that, monsieur, he had a certain cast of mind not
unHellenic. He was tall, weighed two hundred and forty pounds,
lean as a gladiator, and in the vigor of golden youth.
"There were no wars to journey after and no adventures; but there
was danger and adventure here. This land was full of cockle,
winnowed out of Italy, Austria and the whole south of Europe. It
took courage and the iron hand of the state to keep the peace.
Here was a life of danger; and this Ionian - big, powerful,
muscled like the heroes of the Circus Maximus - entered this
perilous service.
"Monsieur, I have said his mind was Hellenic, like his big,
wonderful body. Mark you how of heroic antiquity it was! It was
his boast, among the perils that constantly beset him, that no
criminal should ever take his life; that, if ever he should
receive a mortal wound from the hand of the assassins about him,
he would not wait to die in agony by it. He himself would sever
the damaged thread of life and go out like a man!
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