Mildly around his pedestal, among rusty anchors
strewn there on the grass between road and beach, sit the fishermen,
mending their nets or their sails, or whittling bits of wood. What
will you say of these fishermen when----but I outstrip my narrative.
I had no inkling of tragedy when first I came to the statue. I did not
even know it was a statue. I had made by night the short journey from
Genoa to this place beside the sea; and, driving along the coast-road
to the hotel that had been recommended, I passed what in the starlight
looked like nothing but an elderly woman mounted on a square pedestal
and gazing out seaward--a stout, elderly, lonely woman in a poke
bonnet, indescribable except by that old Victorian term `a party,' and
as unlike Balzac's younger brother as only Sarah Gamp's elder sister
could be. How, I wondered in my hotel, came the elder sister of Sarah
Gamp to be here in Liguria and in the twentieth century? How clomb
she, puffing and panting, on to that pedestal? For what argosy of gin
was she straining her old eyes seaward? I knew there would be no sleep
for me until I had solved these problems; and I went forth afoot along
the way I had come. The moon had risen; and presently I saw in the
starlight the `party' who so intrigued me. Eminent, amorphous,
mysterious, there she stood, immobile, voluminous, ghastly beneath the
moon.
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