SISTER MULE
By E. H. W. ATKINSON
IT was about half past mid-day when a young man in a bright blue shirt, a dark blue beret and bright brown corduroy trousers asked me if I would have the kindness to conduct his mule for him to its, and his, native village just along the road. We were on a little ledge of a road about five miles behind, and two or three thousand feet above, the Via Aurelia, the Italian Riviera part of it, on the higher side of Genoa. Things are changed thereabouts since the learned Smelfungus, as Sterne so ungraciously called Smollett, complained that the nobility of Genoa, all merchants, would have nothing to do with restoring the Via Aurelia, since " they take all methods to keep their subjects of the Riviera in poverty and depen- dence " and " carefully avoid all steps towards rendering that country accessible by land." Nowadays the road is there, and a railway, and the people who live on and behind it are in a little less poverty and certainly more independence.
At any rate, for the handiest evidence, here was a young man ready, indeed anxious, to entrust Ills mule to a stranger, a tourist on a travel allowance. His Italian was something less exact, less precisely articu- lated, than that of my Italian friends who try now and again to make me understand what they say. But I gathered the drift. I was, if I would be so genteel, to conduct his animal to the next village, whose name escaped me, so as to allow him to go off elsewhere to do other business. The mule, three hundred metres ahead, was already quietly on the way. I was to keep it in front of me. " Sempeavanti, signore," he said, and waved both hands with a propelling gesture.
In the invigorating air of an early spring morning only one caution- ary thought came to me. "Conosce la mula la casa ? " Would the mule know when she was home ? "Si, signore. Conosce la mule la stalla." There was no further question. I set off to keep the mule in front of me. Sempeaventi. Prudent thoughts, now that I had taken on the responsibility, came a little too readily for mental comfort. The conduct of mules, the conduct even of a single female mule, was something for which nothing in my earlier experience, I thought, had so far fitted me. Moreover, I had forgotten to ask if la mule was feroce. What if she would have none of me, and cared to show it, would be the best direction of escape ? Up the hillside, where she could be seen as she followed me, and might find it difficult to turn to kick ? Or by a desperate leap over some precipice, leaving her snorting at the top ? Let the moment, if it came, decide. Mean- while, a switch of a twig from the roadside would be handy.
La mule, as I came up to her, was munching at the roadside. She turned to inspect me between her blinkers. Evidently a trusting
beast, she was satisfied. Perhaps she was colour-blind. My decent quiet suiting, bought originally to compromise between the demands of a hot climate and the zespectabilities imposed on an official, resembled very little that bright blue shirt, or even the glowing russet trousers. "Avante," I cried. She went ahead. That was encourag- ing. "Sempeavanti," I said. She still went ahead. I knew how to start her, and maybe how to keep her going. But should I know how to stop her ?
Perhaps it was time, I thought, after a couple of hundred hecto- metres, to come to some kind of terms with la mule. I gave her haunches a friendly smack with the palm of my hand. The effect was unexpectedly stimulating. For a few paces she trotted ; then settled back to her comfortable walk. She was not, after all, doing this, like me, for her health or to reduce her girth. She kneW the right pace for the road. I followed. Occasional touches with the switch served only to remind her that I was there.
Having a mule, I thought, should I not ride ? On her back was a structure that might support me. It was based, next to the animal, on a thick pad of fine wool, pressed hard. A framework of carved wood held it together, with strong white leather binding and a broad red piping of some cloth to secure the edges. Over all was a sack ; nothing even so soft as the wool. It was attached to the harness by contrivances that included a length of khaki webbing, with buckles, that some time no doubt had made some British soldier's shoulders sore. But I could find no way of hoisting myself on to this structure. And since I did not know how to get Ia mule to stop, I had no hope of persuading her to stay long enough by some boulder for me to climb on. I gave that up. In any case, in the words of the Act, she was adapted for the carriage of goods only and probably not licensed for passengers. One learns, these days, to be careful.
I ought, perhaps, to talk to her ? I came up a little alongside and spoke—something conversational, like " Come sta ? Fe bello tempo. Did oop old girl. Come va la vita ?" The response was mildly disconcerting. She spoke not ; but she checked her gait a little, as though the was about to think over what I had said. Now thinking was the last thing I wanted her to do. If she began to think, and realised that it was some mere stranger, and a foreigner at that, who had been so familiarly flicking her with a switch, smack- ing her haunches, and trying to talk to her, her processes of thought might be abbreviated, her reactions sudden and mulish. I was about to fall back and into silence when I realised that after all she was of the contemplative type, and I bored her. She had been showing her teeth. I did not like the look of them. But all it was was that she was yawning, just yawning. We continued. Sempeavanti.
My conduct of the mule, I perceived, gave me some kind of status as we approached the village. A goat-herd with a shot-gun minding some goats—he threw stones at them to discourage them from approaching la mule and me too closely—hailed me. I did not know what he said. But he had a shot-gun. I ventured, "Conosce la mule la statue," and he was satisfied. There was substantially the same dialogue with two others, labourers in the vineyards as we passed. To try to explain to them how I came by the mule would be tedious. I knew the golden words : " Conosce Ia mule la stalla."
But did she ? I prevented her from entering the deep porch of a little wayside chapel, though from the look of it she might well have been there before. She passed two or three houses. And at last, unbidden, she pulled up at the fountain. She could not get her head to the water, and a man told me so. I explained that I was not well acquainted with the conduct of mules. Would he show me ? He did. " Manco l'instruzzione," I said. " Vero," said he, judicially. The mule drank. She lifted her head and looked at me. There was perhaps, I fancy, the merest twinkle in her eye. Perhaps she had been quietly thinking all the time. She suffered me to fasten up her harness again. Possibly the twinkle was still there. We had at any rate reached some basis of understanding during our hour and our few kilometres together. She moved back steadily to a house on the road we had come by.
I thought of her again in the evening as I crossed the Piazza S. Francesco in my village back on the Via Aurelia, with its fine bronze statue of St. Francis preaching to the birds, and decided to remember her as " my sister, the mule."
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