Short stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
The blue bay with its pointed ships and the white town lay below them,
distant, flat, serene. There was upon this vista a peace that a bird
knows when high in the air it surveys the world, a great calm thing
rolling noiselessly toward the end of the mystery. Here on the height
one felt the existence of the universe scornfully defining the pain
in ten thousand minds. The sky was an arch of stolid sapphire. Even
to the mountains raising their mighty shapes from the valley, this
headlong rush of the fugitives was too minute. The sea, the sky, and
the hills combined in their grandeur to term this misery inconsequent.
Then too it sometimes happened that a face seen as it passed on the
flood reflected curiously the spirit of them all and still more. One
saw then a woman of the opinion of the vaults above the clouds. When
a child cried it cried always because of some adjacent misfortune,
some discomfort of a pack-saddle or rudeness of an encircling arm. In
the dismal melody of this flight there were often sounding chords of
apathy. Into these preoccupied countenances, one felt that needles
could be thrust without purchasing a scream. The trail wound here and
there as the sheep had willed in the making of it.
Although this throng seemed to prove that the whole of humanity was
fleeing in one direction--with every tie severed that binds us to the
soil--a young man was walking rapidly up the mountain, hastening to
a side of the path from time to time to avoid some particularly wide
rush of people and cattle. He looked at everything in agitation and
pity. Frequently he called admonitions to maniacal fugitives, and at
other moments he exchanged strange stares with the imperturbable ones.
They seemed to him to wear merely the expressions of so many boulders
rolling down the hill. He exhibited wonder and awe with his pitying
glances.
Turning once toward the rear, he saw a man in the uniform of a
lieutenant of infantry marching the same way. He waited then,
subconsciously elate at a prospect of being able to make into words
the emotion which heretofore had only been expressed in the flash of
eyes and sensitive movements of his flexible mouth. He spoke to the
officer in rapid French, waving his arms wildly, and often pointing
with a dramatic finger. "Ah, this is too cruel, too cruel, too cruel.
Is it not? I did not think it would be as bad as this. I did not
think--God's mercy--I did not think at all. And yet I am a Greek. Or at
least my father was a Greek. I did not come here to fight. I am really
a correspondent, you see? I was to write for an Italian paper. I have
been educated in Italy. I have spent nearly all my life in Italy. At
the schools and universities! I knew nothing of war! I was a student--a
student. I came here merely because my father was a Greek, and for his
sake I thought of Greece--I loved Greece. But I did not dream----"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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