ruled his own staves because, like Schubert, he could not afford to buy music paper; he wanted all the money he could save to pay a publisher to publish his polka—just as we do in England—and if it succeeded his fortune would be made.  I felt a sinking at the heart, as though he was telling me he had been gazing on the mirage of the lottery until he had dreamt a number.  He had filled about two pages and a half with polka stuff, but had not yet composed the conclusion.

“You see, what I must do is to make it arrive there where the bars end” (he had drawn his bar lines by anticipation); “that will not be difficult; it is the beginning that is difficult—the tema.  It does not much matter now what I write for the coda in those empty bars, but I must fill them all with something.”

I said, “Yes.  That, of course—well, of course, that is the proper spirit in which to compose a polka.”

As I had shown myself so intelligent, he often talked to me about his music and his studies; he had an Italian translation of Cherubini’s Treatise, and had nearly finished

all the exercises down to the end of florid counterpoint in four parts.  His professor was much pleased with him, and had congratulated him upon possessing a mind full of resource and originality—just the sort of mind that is required for composing music of the highest class.  He explained to me that counterpoint is a microcosm.  In life we have destiny from which there is no escape; in counterpoint we have the canto fermo of which not a note may be altered.  Destiny, like the canto fermo, is dictated for us by One who is more learned and more skilful than we; it is for us to accept what is given, and to compose a counterpoint, many counterpoints, that shall flow over and under and through, without breaking any of the rules, until we reach the full close, which is the inevitable end of both counterpoint and life.

I called him Bellini because he told me that the composer of Norma had attained to a proficiency in counterpoint which was miraculous, and that he was the greatest musician the world had ever known.  This high praise was given to Bellini partly, of course, because he was a native of Catania.  London is a long way from Catania, and in England perhaps we rather neglect Italian music of the early part of last century.  Once, at Casale-Monferrato, I heard a travelling company do I Puritani; they did it extremely well, and I thought the music charming, especially one sparkling little tune sung by Sir Giorgio to warn Sir Riccardo that if he should see a couple of fantasmas they would be those of Elvira and Lord Arturo.  Alfio may have been thinking of the maxim, “Ars est celare artem,” and may have meant to say that Bellini had shown himself a more learned contrapuntist than (say) Bach, by concealing his contrapuntal skill more effectually than Bach had managed to conceal his in the Mass in B minor.  While my hair was being cut I examined the polka with interest; it was quite carefully done, the bass was figured all through and the discords were all resolved in the orthodox manner; after the shop

was shut he came over to the albergo and played it to us on the piano in the salon.  I should say it was a very good polka, as polkas go, and certainly more in the manner of the Catanian maestro than in that of the Leipzig cantor.

“And what about Alfio?” I asked.  “Did he also marry a bad woman?”

Then Peppino told me the story of the Figlio di Etna.  He called him this because he came from a village on the slopes of the volcano, where his parents kept a small inn, the Albergo Mongibello, and where also lived his cousin Maria, to whom he was engaged.  In the days when he used to talk to me about his counterpoint, Alfio was about twenty-four, and always so exceedingly cheerful and full of his music that no one would have suspected that his private life was being carried on in an inferno, yet so it was; a widow had fallen in love with him, and had insisted on his living with her.  “And look here,” said Peppino, “the bad day for Alfio was the day when he went to the house of the widow.”  He was too much galantuomo to resist; he had not forgotten Maria but he thought she could wait, and besides, he was at first flattered by the widow’s attentions and amused by the novelty of the situation; but he never cared for the widow, and soon his chains became unbearable.  As Peppino said, “There don’t be some word to tell the infernalness it is when you are loved by the woman you hate.”  He exercised his contrapuntal ingenuity by devising schemes for circumventing this troublesome passage in the canto fermo of his life without breaking any of the rules, and finally hit upon the device of running away.  So many men in a similar difficulty have done the same thing, that his professor, and even the stern Cherubini himself, would have condemned the progression less on account of its harshness and irregularity than because of its lack of originality.  He scraped together about fifty francs and disappeared to Livorno where he soon found work in a barber’s shop, cutting hair, trimming and shaving beards and whiskers,

and making wigs for the theatre.  He wrote the widow two letters containing nothing but conventional compliments, and displayed his resource and originality by posting one in the country and sending the other to a friend in Genoa who posted it there.

After about three months of freedom, counterpoint and hair-dressing, he was sent for to return to his village for a few days and vote; Peppino anticipated my inquiry about the money for the journey by protesting that he knew nothing about the details of politics.  However it may have been managed, Alfio got leave from his employer, went home and voted.  He said nothing about the widow, but he promised Maria to return and marry her in a year, when he should have saved enough money.  He did not know how he was going to do it, but he had to say something.  Then the silly fellow must needs go for a day to Castellinaria to salute his friends in the barber’s shop there—just as murderers seem never to learn that it is injudicious to re-visit the scenes of their crimes.  Naturally the widow heard of his being in the town, they met in the street and had a terrible row.  What frightened poor Alfio most was a sort of half persuasion that perhaps he had behaved badly to her.  But he did not relent; he returned to his village, bade farewell to his family, embraced his adorata mamma, renewed his promise to Maria, went down to Catania, entered the station and turned pale as he saw the widow sitting in a corner with a parcel and a bundle.

“Where are you going?”

“I am coming with you.”

He had let out that he would return to Livorno in a few days, and she had resolved to accompany him, wherever he might be going.  She had sold all her furniture in a hurry and come to Catania, knowing that he must start from there.  She waited for him inside the station when it was open, outside when it was shut; she had to wait four days and four nights.  She refused to leave him.  She bought her own ticket and travelled with him.  They

settled down in Livorno—if that can be called settling down which was a continual hurly-burly; the only repose about it appeared in the bar’s rests to which poor Alfio’s counterpoint was now reduced.  He grew irritable, abused her and beat her; but she was one of those women who love their man more passionately the more he knocks them about.  Maria sent him a post-card for his onomastico, and the widow got hold of it.  This led to his leaving the house for a few nights, but she had