CHAPTER XXIII

IN WHICH WE LUXURIATE IN A TIDELESS SEA AND WITNESS A BLOODLESS BATTLE

Let me say at once that not only is the Rimini bathing the best in the world, so far as I know, but the sands are the best too; and the fishing-boats that flit in and out of the little harbour have the best burnt-umber sails.

The English are learning to enjoy _plage_ life, but they are not naturally ready for its beguilements as the French and Italians are; while the Germans, after their wont, overdo it, with a coarse self-consciousness and their always visible intention of extracting the last drop of material bliss. The Italians are children in the water and on the sands: the dark, hairy men, the placid, olive-hued women with subterranean fires. At Rimini, where it is really hot, one lives all day in bathing clothes, alternately in the water and out; but from twelve to one everyone is eating, and from one to three everyone is asleep--except the indefatigable children. In those hours the sands under the tent awnings present the appearance of a battle-field, strewn with the prismatic dead. This to the human eye; to the eye of a sand insect the scene must be more like the South Downs to a Wealden labourer, such are the undulating contours of the full-length Italian parents who repose in profusion and negligence on every hand.

These parents were more entertaining to me than any of the younger bathers: they were so patiently happy; so sensibly careless of their habiliments; so wisely unmindful of their bulk; such creatures of comfort. Their pretty daughters and slender sons had their vanities; the parents were without any.

I had often wondered when abroad what kind of impression one makes. All these swarthy Italian men, for example, looked like tenors: but what type did I, for instance, suggest to the Italian eye, if any? There are many more casts of face in England than in Italy, and several more than in France; and now that whiskers have gone out and clean shaving is the fashion it must puzzle the continental caricaturist to fix the English type. But of one thing I feel certain, that our little party broke no hearts. No dark Italian eyes looked yearningly our way: the Carusi will always win there.

Few of the Italians, young or old, thought of swimming. Their pleasure was to stand about or make lazy voyages on the double-canoe rafts, meanwhile carrying on conversations with their tent at terrific range. Only the English or an eccentric native thought of swimming, and the English, so far as I know, were confined to our own party.

I say we were the only English; but is that quite just? For on the first morning, while I was arranging with the bathing master in his little _guichet_ for our tickets and so forth, he sent for one of the bathing men to be our particular attendant, on the grounds that he was English, or, at any rate, knew English. "The Englishman," therefore, he became in our minds; but what English! He had one word--"awry"--which meant the very opposite, "All right," and this he used continually. He could also say "ole man." No more. The secret of his reputation as a linguist was a sojourn he had made in San Francisco; but it is extremely easy, I take it, in San Francisco, to consort only with your own countrymen, no matter what race is yours, and therefore avoid the necessity of learning any new tongue. The Englishman, however, was our friend. He taught the children to swim; he placed his double canoe at our exclusive disposal at a heavy cost; he fixed the awning of the tent; he procured additional deck-chairs; he brought bottles.

And once he fought for us. During his momentary absence one morning we had received some attention from another of the men, and the Englishman had heard about it. Such a liberty was, of course, outrageous and must be punished; and the Englishman set to work to chastise this upstart and interloper. The attendants had cubicles at the head of the little pier, side by side, and the Englishman and his foe chose this site for their battle, for all the world to see. They began by calling each other names at a distance of a yard; then they closed up and shouted these and other names into each other's very mouths. Then they took to fisticuffs. Not, however, in any vulgar northern way, upon each other's body, but on the doors and walls of each other's cubicle. They fought like this for ten minutes, beating the woodwork mercilessly, every blow being accompanied by a new epithet, which it is fortunate was not in any language that we understood; and then they disappeared within, each in his own lair. For a while there was silence, to the intense regret of the _plage_, but not for long; for the Englishman would think of something good which he had not yet called the other, and would come out and call it him, with a knock-out blow on the panel; and the other would remember a terrible insult which had been hurled at him a year or two ago and which, in the excitement of the past few minutes, had escaped his memory, and he would fire this into the Englishman with an undercut on the pitch pine. They came out so rhythmically that one could almost believe they were consulting slang dictionaries in the meanwhile; and then the warfare gradually died down, as the dictionaries gave out, and in half an hour they were in friendly intercourse again. From the circumstance that the other man ever after avoided us, we gathered that the Englishman had won.