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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Twilight in Italy, by D.H. Lawrence
+#7 in our series by D.H. Lawrence
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+Title: Twilight in Italy
+
+Author: D.H. Lawrence
+
+Release Date: December, 2005 [EBook #9497]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 6, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWILIGHT IN ITALY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+TWILIGHT IN ITALY
+
+
+By D. H. Lawrence
+
+1916
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE CRUCIFIX ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS
+
+ON THE LAGO DI GARDA
+  1 _The Spinner and the Monks_
+  2 _The Lemon Gardens_
+  3 _The Theatre_
+  4 _San Gaudenzio_
+  5 _The Dance_
+  6 _Il Duro_
+  7 _John_
+
+ITALIANS IN EXILE
+
+THE RETURN JOURNEY
+
+
+
+
+_The Crucifix Across the Mountains_
+
+
+The imperial road to Italy goes from Munich across the Tyrol, through
+Innsbruck and Bozen to Verona, over the mountains. Here the great
+processions passed as the emperors went South, or came home again from
+rosy Italy to their own Germany.
+
+And how much has that old imperial vanity clung to the German soul? Did
+not the German kings inherit the empire of bygone Rome? It was not a
+very real empire, perhaps, but the sound was high and splendid.
+
+Maybe a certain Groessenwahn is inherent in the German nature. If only
+nations would realize that they have certain natural characteristics, if
+only they could understand and agree to each other's particular nature,
+how much simpler it would all be.
+
+The imperial procession no longer crosses the mountains, going South.
+That is almost forgotten, the road has almost passed out of mind. But
+still it is there, and its signs are standing.
+
+The crucifixes are there, not mere attributes of the road, yet still
+having something to do with it. The imperial processions, blessed by the
+Pope and accompanied by the great bishops, must have planted the holy
+idol like a new plant among the mountains, there where it multiplied and
+grew according to the soil, and the race that received it.
+
+As one goes among the Bavarian uplands and foothills, soon one realizes
+here is another land, a strange religion. It is a strange country,
+remote, out of contact. Perhaps it belongs to the forgotten, imperial
+processions.
+
+Coming along the clear, open roads that lead to the mountains, one
+scarcely notices the crucifixes and the shrines. Perhaps one's interest
+is dead. The crucifix itself is nothing, a factory-made piece of
+sentimentalism. The soul ignores it.
+
+But gradually, one after another looming shadowily under their hoods,
+the crucifixes seem to create a new atmosphere over the whole of the
+countryside, a darkness, a weight in the air that is so unnaturally
+bright and rare with the reflection from the snows above, a darkness
+hovering just over the earth. So rare and unearthly the light is, from
+the mountains, full of strange radiance. Then every now and again recurs
+the crucifix, at the turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow
+and a mystery under its pointed hood.
+
+I was startled into consciousness one evening, going alone over a marshy
+place at the foot of the mountains, when the sky was pale and unearthly,
+invisible, and the hills were nearly black. At a meeting of the tracks
+was a crucifix, and between the feet of the Christ a handful of withered
+poppies. It was the poppies I saw, then the Christ.
+
+It was an old shrine, the wood-sculpture of a Bavarian peasant. The
+Christ was a peasant of the foot of the Alps. He had broad cheekbones
+and sturdy limbs. His plain, rudimentary face stared fixedly at the
+hills, his neck was stiffened, as if in resistance to the fact of the
+nails and the cross, which he could not escape. It was a man nailed down
+in spirit, but set stubbornly against the bondage and the disgrace. He
+was a man of middle age, plain, crude, with some of the meanness of the
+peasant, but also with a kind of dogged nobility that does not yield its
+soul to the circumstance. Plain, almost blank in his soul, the
+middle-aged peasant of the crucifix resisted unmoving the misery of his
+position. He did not yield. His soul was set, his will was fixed. He was
+himself, let his circumstances be what they would, his life fixed down.
+
+Across the marsh was a tiny square of orange-coloured light, from the
+farm-house with the low, spreading roof. I remembered how the man and
+his wife and the children worked on till dark, silent and intent,
+carrying the hay in their arms out of the streaming thunder-rain into
+the shed, working silent in the soaking rain.
+
+The body bent forward towards the earth, closing round on itself; the
+arms clasped full of hay, clasped round the hay that presses soft and
+close to the breast and the body, that pricks heat into the arms and the
+skin of the breast, and fills the lungs with the sleepy scent of dried
+herbs: the rain that falls heavily and wets the shoulders, so that the
+shirt clings to the hot, firm skin and the rain comes with heavy,
+pleasant coldness on the active flesh, running in a trickle down towards
+the loins, secretly; this is the peasant, this hot welter of physical
+sensation. And it is all intoxicating. It is intoxicating almost like a
+soporific, like a sensuous drug, to gather the burden to one's body in
+the rain, to stumble across the living grass to the shed, to relieve
+one's arms of the weight, to throw down the hay on to the heap, to feel
+light and free in the dry shed, then to return again into the chill,
+hard rain, to stoop again under the rain, and rise to return again with
+the burden.
+
+It is this, this endless heat and rousedness of physical sensation which
+keeps the body full and potent, and flushes the mind with a blood heat,
+a blood sleep. And this sleep, this heat of physical experience, becomes
+at length a bondage, at last a crucifixion. It is the life and the
+fulfilment of the peasant, this flow of sensuous experience. But at last
+it drives him almost mad, because he cannot escape.
+
+For overhead there is always the strange radiance of the mountains,
+there is the mystery of the icy river rushing through its pink shoals
+into the darkness of the pine-woods, there is always the faint tang of
+ice on the air, and the rush of hoarse-sounding water.
+
+And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless
+immunity from the flux and the warmth of life. Overhead they transcend
+all life, all the soft, moist fire of the blood. So that a man must
+needs live under the radiance of his own negation.
+
+There is a strange, clear beauty of form about the men of the Bavarian
+highlands, about both men and women. They are large and clear and
+handsome in form, with blue eyes very keen, the pupil small, tightened,
+the iris keen, like sharp light shining on blue ice. Their large,
+full-moulded limbs and erect bodies are distinct, separate, as if they
+were perfectly chiselled out of the stuff of life, static, cut off.
+Where they are everything is set back, as in a clear frosty air.
+
+Their beauty is almost this, this strange, clean-cut isolation, as if
+each one of them would isolate himself still further and for ever from
+the rest of his fellows.
+
+Yet they are convivial, they are almost the only race with the souls of
+artists. Still they act the mystery plays with instinctive fullness of
+interpretation, they sing strangely in the mountain fields, they love
+make-belief and mummery, their processions and religious festivals are
+profoundly impressive, solemn, and rapt.
+
+It is a race that moves on the poles of mystic sensual delight. Every
+gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression is a symbolic
+utterance.
+
+For learning there is sensuous experience, for thought there is myth and
+drama and dancing and singing. Everything is of the blood, of the
+senses. There is no mind. The mind is a suffusion of physical heat, it
+is not separated, it is kept submerged.
+
+At the same time, always, overhead, there is the eternal, negative
+radiance of the snows. Beneath is life, the hot jet of the blood playing
+elaborately. But above is the radiance of changeless not-being. And life
+passes away into this changeless radiance. Summer and the prolific
+blue-and-white flowering of the earth goes by, with the labour and the
+ecstasy of man, disappears, and is gone into brilliance that hovers
+overhead, the radiant cold which waits to receive back again all that
+which has passed for the moment into being.
+
+The issue is too much revealed. It leaves the peasant no choice. The
+fate gleams transcendent above him, the brightness of eternal,
+unthinkable not-being. And this our life, this admixture of labour and
+of warm experience in the flesh, all the time it is steaming up to the
+changeless brilliance above, the light of the everlasting snows. This is
+the eternal issue.
+
+Whether it is singing or dancing or play-acting or physical transport of
+love, or vengeance or cruelty, or whether it is work or sorrow or
+religion, the issue is always the same at last, into the radiant
+negation of eternity. Hence the beauty and completeness, the finality of
+the highland peasant. His figure, his limbs, his face, his motion, it is
+all formed in beauty, and it is all completed. There is no flux nor hope
+nor becoming, all is, once and for all. The issue is eternal, timeless,
+and changeless. All being and all passing away is part of the issue,
+which is eternal and changeless. Therefore there is no becoming and no
+passing away. Everything is, now and for ever. Hence the strange beauty
+and finality and isolation of the Bavarian peasant.
+
+It is plain in the crucifixes. Here is the essence rendered in sculpture
+of wood. The face is blank and stiff, almost expressionless. One
+realizes with a start how unchanging and conventionalized is the face of
+the living man and woman of these parts, handsome, but motionless as
+pure form. There is also an underlying meanness, secretive, cruel. It is
+all part of the beauty, the pure, plastic beauty. The body also of the
+Christus is stiff and conventionalized, yet curiously beautiful in
+proportion, and in the static tension which makes it unified into one
+clear thing. There is no movement, no possible movement. The being is
+fixed, finally. The whole body is locked in one knowledge, beautiful,
+complete. It is one with the nails. Not that it is languishing or dead.
+It is stubborn, knowing its own undeniable being, sure of the absolute
+reality of the sensuous experience. Though he is nailed down upon an
+irrevocable fate, yet, within that fate he has the power and the delight
+of all sensuous experience. So he accepts the fate and the mystic
+delight of the senses with one will, he is complete and final. His
+sensuous experience is supreme, a consummation of life and death
+at once.
+
+It is the same at all times, whether it is moving with the scythe on the
+hill-slopes, or hewing the timber, or steering the raft down the river
+which is all effervescent with ice; whether it is drinking in the
+Gasthaus, or making love, or playing some mummer's part, or hating
+steadily and cruelly, or whether it is kneeling in spellbound subjection
+in the incense-filled church, or walking in the strange, dark,
+subject-procession to bless the fields, or cutting the young birch-trees
+for the feast of Frohenleichnam, it is always the same, the dark,
+powerful mystic, sensuous experience is the whole of him, he is mindless
+and bound within the absoluteness of the issue, the unchangeability of
+the great icy not-being which holds good for ever, and is supreme.
+
+Passing further away, towards Austria, travelling up the Isar, till the
+stream becomes smaller and whiter and the air is colder, the full
+glamour of the northern hills, which are so marvellously luminous and
+gleaming with flowers, wanes and gives way to a darkness, a sense of
+ominousness. Up there I saw another little Christ, who seemed the very
+soul of the place. The road went beside the river, that was seething
+with snowy ice-bubbles, under the rocks and the high, wolf-like
+pine-trees, between the pinkish shoals. The air was cold and hard and
+high, everything was cold and separate. And in a little glass case
+beside the road sat a small, hewn Christ, the head resting on the hand;
+and he meditates, half-wearily, doggedly, the eyebrows lifted in strange
+abstraction, the elbow resting on the knee. Detached, he sits and dreams
+and broods, wearing his little golden crown of thorns, and his little
+cloak of red flannel that some peasant woman has stitched for him.
+
+No doubt he still sits there, the small, blank-faced Christ in the cloak
+of red flannel, dreaming, brooding, enduring, persisting. There is a
+wistfulness about him, as if he knew that the whole of things was too
+much for him. There was no solution, either, in death. Death did not
+give the answer to the soul's anxiety. That which is, is. It does not
+cease to be when it is cut. Death cannot create nor destroy. What
+is, is.
+
+The little brooding Christ knows this. What is he brooding, then? His
+static patience and endurance is wistful. What is it that he secretly
+yearns for, amid all the placidity of fate? 'To be, or not to be,' this
+may be the question, but is it not a question for death to answer. It is
+not a question of living or not-living. It is a question of being--to be
+or not to be. To persist or not to persist, that is not the question;
+neither is it to endure or not to endure. The issue, is it eternal
+not-being? If not, what, then, is being? For overhead the eternal
+radiance of the snow gleams unfailing, it receives the efflorescence of
+all life and is unchanged, the issue is bright and immortal, the snowy
+not-being. What, then, is being?
+
+As one draws nearer to the turning-point of the Alps, towards the
+culmination and the southern slope, the influence of the educated world
+is felt once more. Bavaria is remote in spirit, as yet unattached. Its
+crucifixes are old and grey and abstract, small like the kernel of the
+truth. Further into Austria they become new, they are painted white,
+they are larger, more obtrusive. They are the expressions of a later,
+newer phase, more introspective and self-conscious. But still they are
+genuine expressions of the people's soul.
+
+Often one can distinguish the work of a particular artist here and there
+in a district. In the Zemm valley, in the heart of the Tyrol, behind
+Innsbruck, there are five or six crucifixes by one sculptor. He is no
+longer a peasant working out an idea, conveying a dogma. He is an
+artist, trained and conscious, probably working in Vienna. He is
+consciously trying to convey a _feeling_, he is no longer striving
+awkwardly to render a truth, a religious fact.
+
+The chief of his crucifixes stands deep in the Klamm, in the dank gorge
+where it is always half-night. The road runs under the rock and the
+trees, half-way up the one side of the pass. Below, the stream rushes
+ceaselessly, embroiled among great stones, making an endless loud noise.
+The rock face opposite rises high overhead, with the sky far up. So that
+one is walking in a half-night, an underworld. And just below the path,
+where the pack-horses go climbing to the remote, infolded villages, in
+the cold gloom of the pass hangs the large, pale Christ. He is larger
+than life-size. He has fallen forward, just dead, and the weight of the
+full-grown, mature body hangs on the nails of the hands. So the dead,
+heavy body drops forward, sags, as if it would tear away and fall under
+its own weight.
+
+It is the end. The face is barren with a dead expression of weariness,
+and brutalized with pain and bitterness. The rather ugly, passionate
+mouth is set for ever in the disillusionment of death. Death is the
+complete disillusionment, set like a seal over the whole body and being,
+over the suffering and weariness and the bodily passion.
+
+The pass is gloomy and damp, the water roars unceasingly, till it is
+almost like a constant pain. The driver of the pack-horses, as he comes
+up the narrow path in the side of the gorge, cringes his sturdy
+cheerfulness as if to obliterate himself, drawing near to the large,
+pale Christ, and he takes his hat off as he passes, though he does not
+look up, but keeps his face averted from the crucifix. He hurries by in
+the gloom, climbing the steep path after his horses, and the large white
+Christ hangs extended above.
+
+The driver of the pack-horses is afraid. The fear is always there in
+him, in spite of his sturdy, healthy robustness. His soul is not sturdy.
+It is blenched and whitened with fear. The mountains are dark overhead,
+the water roars in the gloom below. His heart is ground between the
+mill-stones of dread. When he passes the extended body of the dead
+Christ he takes off his hat to the Lord of Death. Christ is the Deathly
+One, He is Death incarnate.
+
+And the driver of the pack-horses acknowledges this deathly Christ as
+supreme Lord. The mountain peasant seems grounded upon fear, the fear of
+death, of physical death. Beyond this he knows nothing. His supreme
+sensation is in physical pain, and in its culmination. His great climax,
+his consummation, is death. Therefore he worships it, bows down before
+it, and is fascinated by it all the while. It is his fulfilment, death,
+and his approach to fulfilment is through physical pain.
+
+And so these monuments to physical death are found everywhere in the
+valleys. By the same hand that carved the big Christ, a little further
+on, at the end of a bridge, was another crucifix, a small one. This
+Christ had a fair beard, and was thin, and his body was hanging almost
+lightly, whereas the other Christ was large and dark and handsome. But
+in this, as well as in the other, was the same neutral triumph of death,
+complete, negative death, so complete as to be abstract, beyond cynicism
+in its completeness of leaving off.
+
+Everywhere is the same obsession with the fact of physical pain,
+accident, and sudden death. Wherever a misfortune has befallen a man,
+there is nailed up a little memorial of the event, in propitiation of
+the God of hurt and death. A man is standing up to his waist in water,
+drowning in full stream, his arms in the air. The little painting in its
+wooden frame is nailed to the tree, the spot is sacred to the accident.
+Again, another little crude picture fastened to a rock: a tree, falling
+on a man's leg, smashes it like a stalk, while the blood flies up.
+Always there is the strange ejaculation of anguish and fear, perpetuated
+in the little paintings nailed up in the place of the disaster.
+
+This is the worship, then, the worship of death and the approaches to
+death, physical violence, and pain. There is something crude and
+sinister about it, almost like depravity, a form of reverting, turning
+back along the course of blood by which we have come.
+
+Turning the ridge on the great road to the south, the imperial road to
+Rome, a decisive change takes place. The Christs have been taking on
+various different characters, all of them more or less realistically
+conveyed. One Christus is very elegant, combed and brushed and foppish
+on his cross, as Gabriele D'Annunzio's son posing as a martyred saint.
+The martyrdom of this Christ is according to the most polite convention.
+The elegance is very important, and very Austrian. One might almost
+imagine the young man had taken up this striking and original position
+to create a delightful sensation among the ladies. It is quite in the
+Viennese spirit. There is something brave and keen in it, too. The
+individual pride of body triumphs over every difficulty in the
+situation. The pride and satisfaction in the clean, elegant form, the
+perfectly trimmed hair, the exquisite bearing, are more important than
+the fact of death or pain. This may be foolish, it is at the same time
+admirable.
+
+But the tendency of the crucifix, as it nears the ridge to the south, is
+to become weak and sentimental. The carved Christs turn up their faces
+and roll back their eyes very piteously, in the approved Guido Reni
+fashion. They are overdoing the pathetic turn. They are looking to
+heaven and thinking about themselves, in self-commiseration. Others
+again are beautiful as elegies. It is dead Hyacinth lifted and extended
+to view, in all his beautiful, dead youth. The young, male body droops
+forward on the cross, like a dead flower. It looks as if its only true
+nature were to be dead. How lovely is death, how poignant, real,
+satisfying! It is the true elegiac spirit.
+
+Then there are the ordinary, factory-made Christs, which are not very
+significant. They are as null as the Christs we see represented in
+England, just vulgar nothingness. But these figures have gashes of red,
+a red paint of blood, which is sensational.
+
+Beyond the Brenner, I have only seen vulgar or sensational crucifixes.
+There are great gashes on the breast and the knees of the Christ-figure,
+and the scarlet flows out and trickles down, till the crucified body has
+become a ghastly striped thing of red and white, just a sickly thing of
+striped red.
+
+They paint the rocks at the corners of the tracks, among the mountains;
+a blue and white ring for the road to Ginzling, a red smear for the way
+to St Jakob. So one follows the blue and white ring, or the three
+stripes of blue and white, or the red smear, as the case may be. And the
+red on the rocks, the dabs of red paint, are of just the same colour as
+the red upon the crucifixes; so that the red upon the crucifixes is
+paint, and the signs on the rocks are sensational, like blood.
+
+I remember the little brooding Christ of the Isar, in his little cloak
+of red flannel and his crown of gilded thorns, and he remains real and
+dear to me, among all this violence of representation.
+
+'_Couvre-toi de gloire, Tartarin--couvre-toi de flanelle._' Why should
+it please me so that his cloak is of red flannel?
+
+In a valley near St Jakob, just over the ridge, a long way from the
+railway, there is a very big, important shrine by the roadside. It is a
+chapel built in the baroque manner, florid pink and cream outside, with
+opulent small arches. And inside is the most startling sensational
+Christus I have ever seen. He is a big, powerful man, seated after the
+crucifixion, perhaps after the resurrection, sitting by the grave. He
+sits sideways, as if the extremity were over, finished, the agitation
+done with, only the result of the experience remaining. There is some
+blood on his powerful, naked, defeated body, that sits rather hulked.
+But it is the face which is so terrifying. It is slightly turned over
+the hulked, crucified shoulder, to look. And the look of this face, of
+which the body has been killed, is beyond all expectation horrible. The
+eyes look at one, yet have no seeing in them, they seem to see only
+their own blood. For they are bloodshot till the whites are scarlet, the
+iris is purpled. These red, bloody eyes with their stained pupils,
+glancing awfully at all who enter the shrine, looking as if to see
+through the blood of the late brutal death, are terrible. The naked,
+strong body has known death, and sits in utter dejection, finished,
+hulked, a weight of shame. And what remains of life is in the face,
+whose expression is sinister and gruesome, like that of an unrelenting
+criminal violated by torture. The criminal look of misery and hatred on
+the fixed, violated face and in the bloodshot eyes is almost impossible.
+He is conquered, beaten, broken, his body is a mass of torture, an
+unthinkable shame. Yet his will remains obstinate and ugly, integral
+with utter hatred.
+
+It is a great shock to find this figure sitting in a handsome, baroque,
+pink-washed shrine in one of those Alpine valleys which to our thinking
+are all flowers and romance, like the picture in the Tate Gallery.
+'Spring in the Austrian Tyrol' is to our minds a vision of pristine
+loveliness. It contains also this Christ of the heavy body defiled by
+torture and death, the strong, virile life overcome by physical
+violence, the eyes still looking back bloodshot in consummate hate
+and misery.
+
+The shrine was well kept and evidently much used. It was hung with
+ex-voto limbs and with many gifts. It was a centre of worship, of a sort
+of almost obscene worship. Afterwards the black pine-trees and the river
+of that valley seemed unclean, as if an unclean spirit lived there. The
+very flowers seemed unnatural, and the white gleam on the mountain-tops
+was a glisten of supreme, cynical horror.
+
+After this, in the populous valleys, all the crucifixes were more or
+less tainted and vulgar. Only high up, where the crucifix becomes
+smaller and smaller, is there left any of the old beauty and religion.
+Higher and higher, the monument becomes smaller and smaller, till in the
+snows it stands out like a post, or a thick arrow stuck barb upwards.
+The crucifix itself is a small thing under the pointed hood, the barb of
+the arrow. The snow blows under the tiny shed, upon the little, exposed
+Christ. All round is the solid whiteness of snow, the awful curves and
+concaves of pure whiteness of the mountain top, the hollow whiteness
+between the peaks, where the path crosses the high, extreme ridge of the
+pass. And here stands the last crucifix, half buried, small and tufted
+with snow. The guides tramp slowly, heavily past, not observing the
+presence of the symbol, making no salute. Further down, every mountain
+peasant lifted his hat. But the guide tramps by without concern. His is
+a professional importance now.
+
+On a small mountain track on the Jaufen, not far from Meran, was a
+fallen Christus. I was hurrying downhill to escape from an icy wind
+which almost took away my consciousness, and I was looking up at the
+gleaming, unchanging snow-peaks all round. They seemed like blades
+immortal in the sky. So I almost ran into a very old Martertafel. It
+leaned on the cold, stony hillside surrounded by the white peaks in the
+upper air.
+
+The wooden hood was silver-grey with age, and covered, on the top, with
+a thicket of lichen, which stuck up in hoary tufts. But on the rock at
+the foot of the post was the fallen Christ, armless, who had tumbled
+down and lay in an unnatural posture, the naked, ancient wooden
+sculpture of the body on the naked, living rock. It was one of the old
+uncouth Christs hewn out of bare wood, having the long, wedge-shaped
+limbs and thin flat legs that are significant of the true spirit, the
+desire to convey a religious truth, not a sensational experience.
+
+The arms of the fallen Christ had broken off at the shoulders, and they
+hung on their nails, as ex-voto limbs hang in the shrines. But these
+arms dangled from the palms, one at each end of the cross, the muscles,
+carved sparely in the old wood, looking all wrong, upside down. And the
+icy wind blew them backwards and forwards, so that they gave a painful
+impression, there in the stark, sterile place of rock and cold. Yet I
+dared not touch the fallen body of the Christ, that lay on its back in
+so grotesque a posture at the foot of the post. I wondered who would
+come and take the broken thing away, and for what purpose.
+
+
+
+
+_On the Lago di Garda_
+
+
+
+_1_
+
+THE SPINNER AND THE MONKS
+
+
+The Holy Spirit is a Dove, or an Eagle. In the Old Testament it was an
+Eagle; in the New Testament it is a Dove.
+
+And there are, standing over the Christian world, the Churches of the
+Dove and the Churches of the Eagle. There are, moreover, the Churches
+which do not belong to the Holy Spirit at all, but which are built to
+pure fancy and logic; such as the Wren Churches in London.
+
+The Churches of the Dove are shy and hidden: they nestle among trees,
+and their bells sound in the mellowness of Sunday; or they are gathered
+into a silence of their own in the very midst of the town, so that one
+passes them by without observing them; they are as if invisible,
+offering no resistance to the storming of the traffic.
+
+But the Churches of the Eagle stand high, with their heads to the skies,
+as if they challenged the world below. They are the Churches of the
+Spirit of David, and their bells ring passionately, imperiously, falling
+on the subservient world below.
+
+The Church of San Francesco was a Church of the Dove. I passed it
+several times in the dark, silent little square, without knowing it was
+a church. Its pink walls were blind, windowless, unnoticeable, it gave
+no sign, unless one caught sight of the tan curtain hanging in the door,
+and the slit of darkness beneath. Yet it was the chief church of
+the village.
+
+But the Church of San Tommaso perched over the village. Coming down the
+cobbled, submerged street, many a time I looked up between the houses
+and saw the thin old church standing above in the light, as if it
+perched on the house-roofs. Its thin grey neck was held up stiffly,
+beyond was a vision of dark foliage, and the high hillside.
+
+I saw it often, and yet for a long time it never occurred to me that it
+actually existed. It was like a vision, a thing one does not expect to
+come close to. It was there standing away upon the house-tops, against a
+glamour of foliaged hillside. I was submerged in the village, on the
+uneven, cobbled street, between old high walls and cavernous shops and
+the houses with flights of steps.
+
+For a long time I knew how the day went, by the imperious clangour of
+midday and evening bells striking down upon the houses and the edge of
+the lake. Yet it did not occur to me to ask where these bells rang. Till
+at last my everyday trance was broken in upon, and I knew the ringing of
+the Church of San Tommaso. The church became a living connexion with me.
+
+So I set out to find it, I wanted to go to it. It was very near. I could
+see it from the piazza by the lake. And the village itself had only a
+few hundreds of inhabitants. The church must be within a stone's throw.
+
+Yet I could not find it. I went out of the back door of the house, into
+the narrow gully of the back street. Women glanced down at me from the
+top of the flights of steps, old men stood, half-turning, half-crouching
+under the dark shadow of the walls, to stare. It was as if the strange
+creatures of the under-shadow were looking at me. I was of
+another element.
+
+The Italian people are called 'Children of the Sun'. They might better
+be called 'Children of the Shadow'. Their souls are dark and nocturnal.
+If they are to be easy, they must be able to hide, to be hidden in lairs
+and caves of darkness. Going through these tiny chaotic backways of the
+village was like venturing through the labyrinth made by furtive
+creatures, who watched from out of another element. And I was pale, and
+clear, and evanescent, like the light, and they were dark, and close,
+and constant, like the shadow.
+
+So I was quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the
+village. I could not find my way. I hurried towards the broken end of a
+street, where the sunshine and the olive trees looked like a mirage
+before me. And there above me I saw the thin, stiff neck of old San
+Tommaso, grey and pale in the sun. Yet I could not get up to the church,
+I found myself again on the piazza.
+
+Another day, however, I found a broken staircase, where weeds grew in
+the gaps the steps had made in falling, and maidenhair hung on the
+darker side of the wall. I went up unwillingly, because the Italians
+used this old staircase as a privy, as they will any deep side-passage.
+
+But I ran up the broken stairway, and came out suddenly, as by a
+miracle, clean on the platform of my San Tommaso, in the
+tremendous sunshine.
+
+It was another world, the world of the eagle, the world of fierce
+abstraction. It was all clear, overwhelming sunshine, a platform hung in
+the light. Just below were the confused, tiled roofs of the village, and
+beyond them the pale blue water, down below; and opposite, opposite my
+face and breast, the clear, luminous snow of the mountain across the
+lake, level with me apparently, though really much above.
+
+I was in the skies now, looking down from my square terrace of cobbled
+pavement, that was worn like the threshold of the ancient church. Round
+the terrace ran a low, broad wall, the coping of the upper heaven where
+I had climbed.
+
+There was a blood-red sail like a butterfly breathing down on the blue
+water, whilst the earth on the near side gave off a green-silver smoke
+of olive trees, coming up and around the earth-coloured roofs.
+
+It always remains to me that San Tommaso and its terrace hang suspended
+above the village, like the lowest step of heaven, of Jacob's ladder.
+Behind, the land rises in a high sweep. But the terrace of San Tommaso
+is let down from heaven, and does not touch the earth.
+
+I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries
+of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous creature. My
+senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced darkness. My
+skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if
+it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical
+contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the
+enclosure. It was a thick, fierce darkness of the senses. But my
+soul shrank.
+
+I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the
+marvellous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed to
+distil me into itself.
+
+Across, the heavy mountain crouched along the side of the lake, the
+upper half brilliantly white, belonging to the sky, the lower half dark
+and grim. So, then, that is where heaven and earth are divided. From
+behind me, on the left, the headland swept down out of a great,
+pale-grey, arid height, through a rush of russet and crimson, to the
+olive smoke and the water of the level earth. And between, like a blade
+of the sky cleaving the earth asunder, went the pale-blue lake, cleaving
+mountain from mountain with the triumph of the sky.
+
+Then I noticed that a big, blue-checked cloth was spread on the parapet
+before me, over the parapet of heaven. I wondered why it hung there.
+
+Turning round, on the other side of the terrace, under a caper-bush that
+hung like a blood-stain from the grey wall above her, stood a little
+grey woman whose fingers were busy. Like the grey church, she made me
+feel as if I were not in existence. I was wandering by the parapet of
+heaven, looking down. But she stood back against the solid wall, under
+the caper-bush, unobserved and unobserving. She was like a fragment of
+earth, she was a living stone of the terrace, sun-bleached. She took no
+notice of me, who was hesitating looking down at the earth beneath. She
+stood back under the sun-bleached solid wall, like a stone rolled down
+and stayed in a crevice.
+
+Her head was tied in a dark-red kerchief, but pieces of hair, like dirty
+snow, quite short, stuck out over her ears. And she was spinning. I
+wondered so much, that I could not cross towards her. She was grey, and
+her apron, and her dress, and her kerchief, and her hands and her face
+were all sun-bleached and sun-stained, greyey, bluey, browny, like
+stones and half-coloured leaves, sunny in their colourlessness. In my
+black coat, I felt myself wrong, false, an outsider.
+
+She was spinning, spontaneously, like a little wind. Under her arm she
+held a distaff of dark, ripe wood, just a straight stick with a clutch
+at the end, like a grasp of brown fingers full of a fluff of blackish,
+rusty fleece, held up near her shoulder. And her fingers were plucking
+spontaneously at the strands of wool drawn down from it. And hanging
+near her feet, spinning round upon a black thread, spinning busily, like
+a thing in a gay wind, was her shuttle, her bobbin wound fat with the
+coarse, blackish worsted she was making.
+
+All the time, like motion without thought, her fingers teased out the
+fleece, drawing it down to a fairly uniform thickness: brown, old,
+natural fingers that worked as in a sleep, the thumb having a long grey
+nail; and from moment to moment there was a quick, downward rub, between
+thumb and forefinger, of the thread that hung in front of her apron, the
+heavy bobbin spun more briskly, and she felt again at the fleece as she
+drew it down, and she gave a twist to the thread that issued, and the
+bobbin spun swiftly.
+
+Her eyes were clear as the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were
+dear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was like a
+sun-worn stone.
+
+'You are spinning,' I said to her.
+
+Her eyes glanced over me, making no effort of attention.
+
+'Yes,' she said.
+
+She saw merely a man's figure, a stranger standing near. I was a bit of
+the outside, negligible. She remained as she was, clear and sustained
+like an old stone upon the hillside. She stood short and sturdy, looking
+for the most part straight in front, unseeing, but glancing from time to
+time, with a little, unconscious attention, at the thread. She was
+slightly more animated than the sunshine and the stone and the
+motionless caper-bush above her. Still her fingers went along the strand
+of fleece near her breast.
+
+'That is an old way of spinning,' I said.
+
+'What?'
+
+She looked up at me with eyes clear and transcendent as the heavens. But
+she was slightly roused. There was the slight motion of the eagle in her
+turning to look at me, a faint gleam of rapt light in her eyes. It was
+my unaccustomed Italian.
+
+'That is an old way of spinning,' I repeated.
+
+'Yes--an old way,' she repeated, as if to say the words so that they
+should be natural to her. And I became to her merely a transient
+circumstance, a man, part of the surroundings. We divided the gift of
+speech, that was all.
+
+She glanced at me again, with her wonderful, unchanging eyes, that were
+like the visible heavens, unthinking, or like two flowers that are open
+in pure clear unconsciousness. To her I was a piece of the environment.
+That was all. Her world was clear and absolute, without consciousness of
+self. She was not self-conscious, because she was not aware that there
+was anything in the universe except _her_ universe. In her universe I
+was a stranger, a foreign _signore_. That I had a world of my own, other
+than her own, was not conceived by her. She did not care.
+
+So we conceive the stars. We are told that they are other worlds. But
+the stars are the clustered and single gleaming lights in the night-sky
+of our world. When I come home at night, there are the stars. When I
+cease to exist as the microcosm, when I begin to think of the cosmos,
+then the stars are other worlds. Then the macrocosm absorbs me. But the
+macrocosm is not me. It is something which I, the microcosm, am not.
+
+So that there is something which is unknown to me and which nevertheless
+exists. I am finite, and my understanding has limits. The universe is
+bigger than I shall ever see, in mind or spirit. There is that which
+is not me.
+
+If I say 'The planet Mars is inhabited,' I do not know what I mean by
+'inhabited', with reference to the planet Mars. I can only mean that
+that world is not my world. I can only know there is that which is not
+me. I am the microcosm, but the macrocosm is that also which I am not.
+
+The old woman on the terrace in the sun did not know this. She was
+herself the core and centre to the world, the sun, and the single
+firmament. She knew that I was an inhabitant of lands which she had
+never seen. But what of that! There were parts of her own body which she
+had never seen, which physiologically she could never see. They were
+none the less her own because she had never seen them. The lands she had
+not seen were corporate parts of her own living body, the knowledge she
+had not attained was only the hidden knowledge of her own self. She
+_was_ the substance of the knowledge, whether she had the knowledge in
+her mind or not. There was nothing which was not herself, ultimately.
+Even the man, the male, was part of herself. He was the mobile, separate
+part, but he was none the less herself because he was sometimes severed
+from her. If every apple in the world were cut in two, the apple would
+not be changed. The reality is the apple, which is just the same in the
+half-apple as in the whole.
+
+And she, the old spinning-woman, was the apple, eternal, unchangeable,
+whole even in her partiality. It was this which gave the wonderful clear
+unconsciousness to her eyes. How could she be conscious of herself when
+all was herself?
+
+She was talking to me of a sheep that had died, but I could not
+understand because of her dialect. It never occurred to her that I could
+not understand. She only thought me different, stupid. And she talked
+on. The ewes had lived under the house, and a part was divided off for
+the he-goat, because the other people brought their she-goats to be
+covered by the he-goat. But how the ewe came to die I could not
+make out.
+
+Her fingers worked away all the time in a little, half-fretful movement,
+yet spontaneous as butterflies leaping here and there. She chattered
+rapidly on in her Italian that I could not understand, looking meanwhile
+into my face, because the story roused her somewhat. Yet not a feature
+moved. Her eyes remained candid and open and unconscious as the skies.
+Only a sharp will in them now and then seemed to gleam at me, as if to
+dominate me.
+
+Her shuttle had caught in a dead chicory plant, and spun no more. She
+did not notice. I stooped and broke off the twigs. There was a glint of
+blue on them yet. Seeing what I was doing, she merely withdrew a few
+inches from the plant. Her bobbin hung free.
+
+She went on with her tale, looking at me wonderfully. She seemed like
+the Creation, like the beginning of the world, the first morning. Her
+eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless.
+
+Her thread broke. She seemed to take no notice, but mechanically picked
+up the shuttle, wound up a length of worsted, connected the ends from
+her wool strand, set the bobbin spinning again, and went on talking, in
+her half-intimate, half-unconscious fashion, as if she were talking to
+her own world in me.
+
+So she stood in the sunshine on the little platform, old and yet like
+the morning, erect and solitary, sun-coloured, sun-discoloured, whilst I
+at her elbow, like a piece of night and moonshine, stood smiling into
+her eyes, afraid lest she should deny me existence.
+
+Which she did. She had stopped talking, did not look at me any more, but
+went on with her spinning, the brown shuttle twisting gaily. So she
+stood, belonging to the sunshine and the weather, taking no more notice
+of me than of the dark-stained caper-bush which hung from the wall above
+her head, whilst I, waiting at her side, was like the moon in the
+daytime sky, overshone, obliterated, in spite of my black clothes.
+
+'How long has it taken you to do that much?' I asked.
+
+She waited a minute, glanced at her bobbin.
+
+'This much? I don't know. A day or two.'
+
+'But you do it quickly.'
+
+She looked at me, as if suspiciously and derisively. Then, quite
+suddenly, she started forward and went across the terrace to the great
+blue-and-white checked cloth that was drying on the wall. I hesitated.
+She had cut off her consciousness from me. So I turned and ran away,
+taking the steps two at a time, to get away from her. In a moment I was
+between the walls, climbing upwards, hidden.
+
+The schoolmistress had told me I should find snowdrops behind San
+Tommaso. If she had not asserted such confident knowledge I should have
+doubted her translation of _perce-neige_. She meant Christmas roses all
+the while.
+
+However, I went looking for snowdrops. The walls broke down suddenly,
+and I was out in a grassy olive orchard, following a track beside pieces
+of fallen overgrown masonry. So I came to skirt the brink of a steep
+little gorge, at the bottom of which a stream was rushing down its steep
+slant to the lake. Here I stood to look for my snowdrops. The grassy,
+rocky bank went down steep from my feet. I heard water tittle-tattling
+away in deep shadow below. There were pale flecks in the dimness, but
+these, I knew, were primroses. So I scrambled down.
+
+Looking up, out of the heavy shadow that lay in the cleft, I could see,
+right in the sky, grey rocks shining transcendent in the pure empyrean.
+'Are they so far up?' I thought. I did not dare to say, 'Am I so far
+down?' But I was uneasy. Nevertheless it was a lovely place, in the cold
+shadow, complete; when one forgot the shining rocks far above, it was a
+complete, shadowless world of shadow. Primroses were everywhere in nests
+of pale bloom upon the dark, steep face of the cleft, and tongues of
+fern hanging out, and here and there under the rods and twigs of bushes
+were tufts of wrecked Christmas roses, nearly over, but still, in the
+coldest corners, the lovely buds like handfuls of snow. There had been
+such crowded sumptuous tufts of Christmas roses everywhere in the
+stream-gullies, during the shadow of winter, that these few remaining
+flowers were hardly noticeable.
+
+I gathered instead the primroses, that smelled of earth and of the
+weather. There were no snowdrops. I had found the day before a bank of
+crocuses, pale, fragile, lilac-coloured flowers with dark veins,
+pricking up keenly like myriad little lilac-coloured flames among the
+grass, under the olive trees. And I wanted very much to find the
+snowdrops hanging in the gloom. But there were not any.
+
+I gathered a handful of primroses, then I climbed suddenly, quickly out
+of the deep watercourse, anxious to get back to the sunshine before the
+evening fell. Up above I saw the olive trees in the sunny golden grass,
+and sunlit grey rocks immensely high up. I was afraid lest the evening
+would fall whilst I was groping about like an otter in the damp and the
+darkness, that the day of sunshine would be over.
+
+Soon I was up in the sunshine again, on the turf under the olive trees,
+reassured. It was the upper world of glowing light, and I was
+safe again.
+
+All the olives were gathered, and the mills were going night and day,
+making a great, acrid scent of olive oil in preparation, by the lake.
+The little stream rattled down. A mule driver 'Hued!' to his mules on
+the Strada Vecchia. High up, on the Strada Nuova, the beautiful, new,
+military high-road, which winds with beautiful curves up the
+mountain-side, crossing the same stream several times in clear-leaping
+bridges, travelling cut out of sheer slope high above the lake, winding
+beautifully and gracefully forward to the Austrian frontier, where it
+ends: high up on the lovely swinging road, in the strong evening
+sunshine, I saw a bullock wagon moving like a vision, though the
+clanking of the wagon and the crack of the bullock whip responded close
+in my ears.
+
+Everything was clear and sun-coloured up there, clear-grey rocks
+partaking of the sky, tawny grass and scrub, browny-green spires of
+cypresses, and then the mist of grey-green olives fuming down to the
+lake-side. There was no shadow, only clear sun-substance built up to the
+sky, a bullock wagon moving slowly in the high sunlight, along the
+uppermost terrace of the military road. It sat in the warm stillness of
+the transcendent afternoon.
+
+The four o'clock steamer was creeping down the lake from the Austrian
+end, creeping under the cliffs. Far away, the Verona side, beyond the
+Island, lay fused in dim gold. The mountain opposite was so still, that
+my heart seemed to fade in its beating as if it too would be still. All
+was perfectly still, pure substance. The little steamer on the floor of
+the world below, the mules down the road cast no shadow. They too were
+pure sun-substance travelling on the surface of the sun-made world.
+
+A cricket hopped near me. Then I remembered that it was Saturday
+afternoon, when a strange suspension comes over the world. And then,
+just below me, I saw two monks walking in their garden between the
+naked, bony vines, walking in their wintry garden of bony vines and
+olive trees, their brown cassocks passing between the brown vine-stocks,
+their heads bare to the sunshine, sometimes a glint of light as their
+feet strode from under their skirts.
+
+It was so still, everything so perfectly suspended, that I felt them
+talking. They marched with the peculiar march of monks, a long, loping
+stride, their heads together, their skirts swaying slowly, two brown
+monks with hidden hands, sliding under the bony vines and beside the
+cabbages, their heads always together in hidden converse. It was as if I
+were attending with my dark soul to their inaudible undertone. All the
+time I sat still in silence, I was one with them, a partaker, though I
+could hear no sound of their voices. I went with the long stride of
+their skirted feet, that slid springless and noiseless from end to end
+of the garden, and back again. Their hands were kept down at their
+sides, hidden in the long sleeves, and the skirts of their robes. They
+did not touch each other, nor gesticulate as they walked. There was no
+motion save the long, furtive stride and the heads leaning together. Yet
+there was an eagerness in their conversation. Almost like
+shadow-creatures ventured out of their cold, obscure element, they went
+backwards and forwards in their wintry garden, thinking nobody could
+see them.
+
+Across, above them, was the faint, rousing dazzle of snow. They never
+looked up. But the dazzle of snow began to glow as they walked, the
+wonderful, faint, ethereal flush of the long range of snow in the
+heavens, at evening, began to kindle. Another world was coming to pass,
+the cold, rare night. It was dawning in exquisite, icy rose upon the
+long mountain-summit opposite. The monks walked backwards and forwards,
+talking, in the first undershadow.
+
+And I noticed that up above the snow, frail in the bluish sky, a frail
+moon had put forth, like a thin, scalloped film of ice floated out on
+the slow current of the coming night. And a bell sounded.
+
+And still the monks were pacing backwards and forwards, backwards and
+forwards, with a strange, neutral regularity.
+
+The shadows were coming across everything, because of the mountains in
+the west. Already the olive wood where I sat was extinguished. This was
+the world of the monks, the rim of pallor between night and day. Here
+they paced, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, in the
+neutral, shadowless light of shadow.
+
+Neither the flare of day nor the completeness of night reached them,
+they paced the narrow path of the twilight, treading in the neutrality
+of the law. Neither the blood nor the spirit spoke in them, only the
+law, the abstraction of the average. The infinite is positive and
+negative. But the average is only neutral. And the monks trod backward
+and forward down the line of neutrality.
+
+Meanwhile, on the length of mountain-ridge, the snow grew
+rosy-incandescent, like heaven breaking into blossom. After all, eternal
+not-being and eternal being are the same. In the rosy snow that shone in
+heaven over a darkened earth was the ecstasy of consummation. Night and
+day are one, light and dark are one, both the same in the origin and in
+the issue, both the same in the moment, of ecstasy, light fused in
+darkness and darkness fused in light, as in the rosy snow above
+the twilight.
+
+But in the monks it was not ecstasy, in them it was neutrality, the
+under earth. Transcendent, above the shadowed, twilit earth was the rosy
+snow of ecstasy. But spreading far over us, down below, was the
+neutrality of the twilight, of the monks. The flesh neutralizing the
+spirit, the spirit neutralizing the flesh, the law of the average
+asserted, this was the monks as they paced backward and forward.
+
+The moon climbed higher, away from the snowy, fading ridge, she became
+gradually herself. Between the roots of the olive tree was a rosy-tipped
+daisy just going to sleep. I gathered it and put it among the frail,
+moony little bunch of primroses, so that its sleep should warm the rest.
+Also I put in some little periwinkles, that were very blue, reminding me
+of the eyes of the old woman.
+
+The day was gone, the twilight was gone, and the snow was invisible as I
+came down to the side of the lake. Only the moon, white and shining, was
+in the sky, like a woman glorying in her own loveliness as she loiters
+superbly to the gaze of all the world, looking sometimes through the
+fringe of dark olive leaves, sometimes looking at her own superb,
+quivering body, wholly naked in the water of the lake.
+
+My little old woman was gone. She, all day-sunshine, would have none of
+the moon. Always she must live like a bird, looking down on all the
+world at once, so that it lay all subsidiary to herself, herself the
+wakeful consciousness hovering over the world like a hawk, like a sleep
+of wakefulness. And, like a bird, she went to sleep as the shadows came.
+
+She did not know the yielding up of the senses and the possession of the
+unknown, through the senses, which happens under a superb moon. The
+all-glorious sun knows none of these yieldings up. He takes his way. And
+the daisies at once go to sleep. And the soul of the old spinning-woman
+also closed up at sunset, the rest was a sleep, a cessation.
+
+It is all so strange and varied: the dark-skinned Italians ecstatic in
+the night and the moon, the blue-eyed old woman ecstatic in the busy
+sunshine, the monks in the garden below, who are supposed to unite both,
+passing only in the neutrality of the average. Where, then, is the
+meeting-point: where in mankind is the ecstasy of light and dark
+together, the supreme transcendence of the afterglow, day hovering in
+the embrace of the coming night like two angels embracing in the
+heavens, like Eurydice in the arms of Orpheus, or Persephone embraced
+by Pluto?
+
+Where is the supreme ecstasy in mankind, which makes day a delight and
+night a delight, purpose an ecstasy and a concourse in ecstasy, and
+single abandon of the single body and soul also an ecstasy under the
+moon? Where is the transcendent knowledge in our hearts, uniting sun and
+darkness, day and night, spirit and senses? Why do we not know that the
+two in consummation are one; that each is only part; partial and alone
+for ever; but that the two in consummation are perfect, beyond the range
+of loneliness or solitude?
+
+
+
+_2_
+
+THE LEMON GARDENS
+
+
+The padrone came just as we were drinking coffee after dinner. It was
+two o'clock, because the steamer going down the lake to Desenzano had
+bustled through the sunshine, and the rocking of the water still made
+lights that danced up and down upon the wall among the shadows by
+the piano.
+
+The signore was very apologetic. I found him bowing in the hall, cap in
+one hand, a slip of paper in the other, protesting eagerly, in broken
+French, against disturbing me.
+
+He is a little, shrivelled man, with close-cropped grey hair on his
+skull, and a protruding jaw, which, with his gesticulations, always
+makes me think of an ancient, aristocratic monkey. The signore is a
+gentleman, and the last, shrivelled representative of his race. His only
+outstanding quality, according to the villagers, is his avarice.
+
+_'Mais--mais, monsieur--je crains que--que--que je vous derange--'_
+
+He spreads wide his hands and bows, looking up at me with implicit brown
+eyes, so ageless in his wrinkled, monkey's face, like onyx. He loves to
+speak French, because then he feels grand. He has a queer, naive,
+ancient passion to be grand. As the remains of an impoverished family,
+he is not much better than a well-to-do peasant. But the old spirit is
+eager and pathetic in him.
+
+He loves to speak French to me. He holds his chin and waits, in his
+anxiety for the phrase to come. Then it stammers forth, a little rush,
+ending in Italian. But his pride is all on edge: we must continue
+in French.
+
+The hall is cold, yet he will not come into the large room. This is not
+a courtesy visit. He is not here in his quality of gentleman. He is only
+an anxious villager.
+
+'_Voyez, monsieur--cet--cet--qu'est-ce que--qu'est-ce que veut dire
+cet--cela?_'
+
+He shows me the paper. It is an old scrap of print, the picture of an
+American patent door-spring, with directions: 'Fasten the spring either
+end up. Wind it up. Never unwind.'
+
+It is laconic and American. The signore watches me anxiously, waiting,
+holding his chin. He is afraid he ought to understand my English. I
+stutter off into French, confounded by the laconic phrases of the
+directions. Nevertheless, I make it clear what the paper says.
+
+He cannot believe me. It must say something else as well. He has not
+done anything contrary to these directions. He is most distressed.
+
+'_Mais, monsieur, la porte--la porte--elle ferme_ pas--_elle s'ouvre_--'
+
+He skipped to the door and showed me the whole tragic mystery. The door,
+it is shut--_ecco_! He releases the catch, and pouf!--she flies open.
+She flies _open_. It is quite final.
+
+The brown, expressionless, ageless eyes, that remind me of a monkey's,
+or of onyx, wait for me. I feel the responsibility devolve upon me. I
+am anxious.
+
+'Allow me,' I said, 'to come and look at the door.'
+
+I feel uncomfortably like Sherlock Holmes. The padrone protests--_non,
+monsieur, non, cela vous derange_--that he only wanted me to translate
+the words, he does not want to disturb me. Nevertheless, we go. I feel I
+have the honour of mechanical England in my hands.
+
+The Casa di Paoli is quite a splendid place. It is large, pink and
+cream, rising up to a square tower in the centre, throwing off a painted
+loggia at either extreme of the facade. It stands a little way back from
+the road, just above the lake, and grass grows on the bay of cobbled
+pavement in front. When at night the moon shines full on this pale
+facade, the theatre is far outdone in staginess.
+
+The hall is spacious and beautiful, with great glass doors at either
+end, through which shine the courtyards where bamboos fray the sunlight
+and geraniums glare red. The floor is of soft red tiles, oiled and
+polished like glass, the walls are washed grey-white, the ceiling is
+painted with pink roses and birds. This is half-way between the outer
+world and the interior world, it partakes of both.
+
+The other rooms are dark and ugly. There is no mistake about their being
+interior. They are like furnished vaults. The red-tiled, polished floor
+in the drawing-room seems cold and clammy, the carved, cold furniture
+stands in its tomb, the air has been darkened and starved to death, it
+is perished.
+
+Outside, the sunshine runs like birds singing. Up above, the grey rocks
+build the sun-substance in heaven, San Tommaso guards the terrace. But
+inside here is the immemorial shadow.
+
+Again I had to think of the Italian soul, how it is dark, cleaving to
+the eternal night. It seems to have become so, at the Renaissance, after
+the Renaissance.
+
+In the Middle Ages Christian Europe seems to have been striving, out of
+a strong, primitive, animal nature, towards the self-abnegation and the
+abstraction of Christ. This brought about by itself a great sense of
+completeness. The two halves were joined by the effort towards the one
+as yet unrealized. There was a triumphant joy in the Whole.
+
+But the movement all the time was in one direction, towards the
+elimination of the flesh. Man wanted more and more to become purely free
+and abstract. Pure freedom was in pure abstraction. The Word was
+absolute. When man became as the Word, a pure law, then he was free.
+
+But when this conclusion was reached, the movement broke. Already
+Botticelli painted Aphrodite, queen of the senses, supreme along with
+Mary, Queen of Heaven. And Michelangelo suddenly turned back on the
+whole Christian movement, back to the flesh. The flesh was supreme and
+god-like, in the oneness of the flesh, in the oneness of our physical
+being, we are one with God, with the Father. God the Father created man
+in the flesh, in His own image. Michelangelo swung right back to the old
+Mosaic position. Christ did not exist. To Michelangelo there was no
+salvation in the spirit. There was God the Father, the Begetter, the
+Author of all flesh. And there was the inexorable law of the flesh, the
+Last Judgement, the fall of the immortal flesh into Hell.
+
+This has been the Italian position ever since. The mind, that is the
+Light; the senses, they are the Darkness. Aphrodite, the queen of the
+senses, she, born of the sea-foam, is the luminousness of the gleaming
+senses, the phosphorescence of the sea, the senses become a conscious
+aim unto themselves; she is the gleaming darkness, she is the luminous
+night, she is goddess of destruction, her white, cold fire consumes and
+does not create.
+
+This is the soul of the Italian since the Renaissance. In the sunshine
+he basks asleep, gathering up a vintage into his veins which in the
+night-time he will distil into ecstatic sensual delight, the intense,
+white-cold ecstasy of darkness and moonlight, the raucous, cat-like,
+destructive enjoyment, the senses conscious and crying out in their
+consciousness in the pangs of the enjoyment, which has consumed the
+southern nation, perhaps all the Latin races, since the Renaissance.
+
+It is a lapse back, back to the original position, the Mosaic position,
+of the divinity of the flesh, and the absoluteness of its laws. But also
+there is the Aphrodite-worship. The flesh, the senses, are now
+self-conscious. They know their aim. Their aim is in supreme sensation.
+They seek the maximum of sensation. They seek the reduction of the
+flesh, the flesh reacting upon itself, to a crisis, an ecstasy, a
+phosphorescent transfiguration in ecstasy.
+
+The mind, all the time, subserves the senses. As in a cat, there is
+subtlety and beauty and the dignity of the darkness. But the fire is
+cold, as in the eyes of a cat, it is a green fire. It is fluid,
+electric. At its maximum it is the white ecstasy of phosphorescence, in
+the darkness, always amid the darkness, as under the black fur of a cat.
+Like the feline fire, it is destructive, always consuming and reducing
+to the ecstasy of sensation, which is the end in itself.
+
+There is the I, always the I. And the mind is submerged, overcome. But
+the senses are superbly arrogant. The senses are the absolute, the
+god-like. For I can never have another man's senses. These are me, my
+senses absolutely me. And all that is can only come to me through my
+senses. So that all is me, and is administered unto me. The rest, that
+is not me, is nothing, it is something which is nothing. So the Italian,
+through centuries, has avoided our Northern purposive industry, because
+it has seemed to him a form of nothingness.
+
+It is the spirit of the tiger. The tiger is the supreme manifestation of
+the senses made absolute. This is the
+
+    Tiger, tiger burning bright,
+    In the forests of the night
+
+of Blake. It does indeed burn within the darkness. But the
+_essential_ fate, of the tiger is cold and white, a white ecstasy.
+It is seen in the white eyes of the blazing cat. This is the supremacy
+of the flesh, which devours all, and becomes transfigured into a
+magnificent brindled flame, a burning bush indeed.
+
+This is one way of transfiguration into the eternal flame, the
+transfiguration through ecstasy in the flesh. Like the tiger in the
+night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until this fuel blazes up
+in me to the consummate fire of the Infinite. In the ecstacy I am
+Infinite, I become again the great Whole, I am a flame of the One White
+Flame which is the Infinite, the Eternal, the Originator, the Creator,
+the Everlasting God. In the sensual ecstasy, having drunk all blood and
+devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire, I am infinite.
+
+This is the way of the tiger; the tiger is supreme. His head is
+flattened as if there were some great weight on the hard skull,
+pressing, pressing, pressing the mind into a stone, pressing it down
+under the blood, to serve the blood. It is the subjugate instrument of
+the blood. The will lies above the loins, as it were at the base of the
+spinal column, there is the living will, the living mind of the tiger,
+there in the slender loins. That is the node, there in the spinal cord.
+
+So the Italian, so the soldier. This is the spirit of the soldier. He,
+too, walks with his consciousness concentrated at the base of the spine,
+his mind subjugated, submerged. The will of the soldier is the will of
+the great cats, the will to ecstasy in destruction, in absorbing life
+into his own life, always his own life supreme, till the ecstasy burst
+into the white, eternal flame, the Infinite, the Flame of the Infinite.
+Then he is satisfied, he has been consummated in the Infinite.
+
+This is the true soldier, this is the immortal climax of the senses.
+This is the acme of the flesh, the one superb tiger who has devoured all
+living flesh, and now paces backwards and forwards in the cage of its
+own infinite, glaring with blind, fierce, absorbed eyes at that which is
+nothingness to it.
+
+The eyes of the tiger cannot see, except with the light from within
+itself, by the light of its own desire. Its own white, cold light is so
+fierce that the other warm light of day is outshone, it is not, it does
+not exist. So the white eyes of the tiger gleam to a point of
+concentrated vision, upon that which does not exist. Hence its
+terrifying sightlessness. The something which I know I am is hollow
+space to its vision, offers no resistance to the tiger's looking. It can
+only see of me that which it knows I am, a scent, a resistance, a
+voluptuous solid, a struggling warm violence that it holds overcome, a
+running of hot blood between its Jaws, a delicious pang of live flesh in
+the mouth. This it sees. The rest is not.
+
+And what is the rest, that which is-not the tiger, that which the tiger
+is-not? What is this?
+
+What is that which parted ways with the terrific eagle-like angel of the
+senses at the Renaissance? The Italians said, 'We are one in the Father:
+we will go back.' The Northern races said, 'We are one in Christ: we
+will go on.'
+
+What _is_ the consummation in Christ? Man knows satisfaction when he
+surpasses all conditions and becomes, to himself, consummate in the
+Infinite, when he reaches a state of infinity. In the supreme ecstasy
+of the flesh, the Dionysic ecstasy, he reaches this state. But how does
+it come to pass in Christ?
+
+It is not the mystic ecstasy. The mystic ecstasy is a special sensual
+ecstasy, it is the senses satisfying themselves with a self-created
+object. It is self-projection into the self, the sensuous self satisfied
+in a projected self.
+
+    Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
+
+    Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for
+    theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
+
+The kingdom of heaven is this Infinite into which we may be consummated,
+then, if we are poor in spirit or persecuted for righteousness' sake.
+
+    Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other
+    also.
+
+    Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that
+    hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and
+    persecute you.
+
+    Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is
+    perfect.
+
+To be perfect, to be one with God, to be infinite and eternal, what
+shall we do? We must turn the other cheek, and love our enemies.
+
+Christ is the lamb which the eagle swoops down upon, the dove taken by
+the hawk, the deer which the tiger devours.
+
+What then, if a man come to me with a sword, to kill me, and I do not
+resist him, but suffer his sword and the death from his sword, what am
+I? Am I greater than he, am I stronger than he? Do I know a consummation
+in the Infinite, I, the prey, beyond the tiger who devours me? By my
+non-resistance I have robbed him of his consummation. For a tiger knows
+no consummation unless he kill a violated and struggling prey. There is
+no consummation merely for the butcher, nor for a hyena. I can rob the
+tiger of his ecstasy, his consummation, his very __my non-resistance. In
+my non-resistance the tiger is infinitely destroyed.
+
+But I, what am I? 'Be ye therefore perfect.' Wherein am I perfect in
+this submission? Is there an affirmation, behind my negation, other than
+the tiger's affirmation of his own glorious infinity?
+
+What is the Oneness to which I subscribe, I who offer no resistance in
+the flesh?
+
+Have I only the negative ecstasy of being devoured, of becoming thus
+part of the Lord, the Great Moloch, the superb and terrible God? I have
+this also, this subject ecstasy of consummation. But is there
+nothing else?
+
+The Word of the tiger is: my senses are supremely Me, and my senses are
+God in me. But Christ said: God is in the others, who are not-me. In all
+the multitude of the others is God, and this is the great God, greater
+than the God which is Me. God is that which is Not-Me.
+
+And this is the Christian truth, a truth complementary to the pagan
+affirmation: 'God is that which is Me.'
+
+God is that which is Not-Me. In realizing the Not-Me I am consummated, I
+become infinite. In turning the other cheek I submit to God who is
+greater than I am, other than I am, who is in that which is not me. This
+is the supreme consummation. To achieve this consummation I love my
+neighbour as myself. My neighbour is all that is not me. And if I love
+all this, have I not become one with the Whole, is not my consummation
+complete, am I not one with God, have I not achieved the Infinite?
+
+After the Renaissance the Northern races continued forward to put into
+practice this religious belief in the God which is Not-Me. Even the idea
+of the saving of the soul was really negative: it was a question of
+escaping damnation. The Puritans made the last great attack on the God
+who is Me. When they beheaded Charles the First, the king by Divine
+Right, they destroyed, symbolically, for ever, the supremacy of the Me
+who am the image of God, the Me of the flesh, of the senses, Me, the
+tiger burning bright, me the king, the Lord, the aristocrat, me who am
+divine because I am the body of God.
+
+After the Puritans, we have been gathering data for the God who is
+not-me. When Pope said 'Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The
+proper study of mankind is Man,' he was stating the proposition: A man
+is right, he is consummated, when he is seeking to know Man, the great
+abstract; and the method of knowledge is by the analysis, which is the
+destruction, of the Self. The proposition up to that time was, a man is
+the epitome of the universe. He has only to express himself, to fulfil
+his desires, to satisfy his supreme senses.
+
+Now the change has come to pass. The individual man is a limited being,
+finite in himself. Yet he is capable of apprehending that which is not
+himself. 'The proper study of mankind is Man.' This is another way of
+saying, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' Which means, a man
+is consummated in his knowledge of that which is not himself, the
+abstract Man. Therefore the consummation lies in seeking that other, in
+knowing that other. Whereas the Stuart proposition was: 'A man is
+consummated in expressing his own Self.'
+
+The new spirit developed into the empirical and ideal systems of
+philosophy. Everything that is, is consciousness. And in every man's
+consciousness, Man is great and illimitable, whilst the individual is
+small and fragmentary. Therefore the individual must sink himself in the
+great whole of Mankind.
+
+This is the spirituality of Shelley, the perfectibility of man. This is
+the way in which we fulfil the commandment, 'Be ye therefore perfect,
+even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.' This is Saint
+Paul's, 'Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.'
+
+When a man knows everything and understands everything, then he will be
+perfect, and life will be blessed. He is capable of knowing everything
+and understanding everything. Hence he is justified in his hope of
+infinite freedom and blessedness.
+
+The great inspiration of the new religion was the inspiration of
+freedom. When I have submerged or distilled away my concrete body and my
+limited desires, when I am like the skylark dissolved in the sky yet
+filling heaven and earth with song, then I am perfect, consummated in
+the Infinite. When I am all that is not-me, then I have perfect liberty,
+I know no limitation. Only I must eliminate the Self.
+
+It was this religious belief which expressed itself in science. Science
+was the analysis of the outer self, the elementary substance of the
+self, the outer world. And the machine is the great reconstructed
+selfless power. Hence the active worship to which we were given at the
+end of the last century, the worship of mechanized force.
+
+Still we continue to worship that which is not-me, the Selfless world,
+though we would fain bring in the Self to help us. We are shouting the
+Shakespearean advice to warriors: 'Then simulate the action of the
+tiger.' We are trying to become again the tiger, the supreme, imperial,
+warlike Self. At the same time our ideal is the selfless world
+of equity.
+
+We continue to give service to the Selfless God, we worship the great
+selfless oneness in the spirit, oneness in service of the great
+humanity, that which is Not-Me. This selfless God is He who works for
+all alike, without consideration. And His image is the machine which
+dominates and cows us, we cower before it, we run to serve it. For it
+works for all humanity alike.
+
+At the same time, we want to be warlike tigers. That is the horror: the
+confusing of the two ends. We warlike tigers fit ourselves out with
+machinery, and our blazing tiger wrath is emitted through a machine. It
+is a horrible thing to see machines hauled about by tigers, at the mercy
+of tigers, forced to express the tiger. It is a still more horrible
+thing to see tigers caught up and entangled and torn in machinery. It is
+horrible, a chaos beyond chaos, an unthinkable hell.
+
+The tiger is not wrong, the machine is not wrong, but we, liars,
+lip-servers, duplicate fools, we are unforgivably wrong. We say: 'I will
+be a tiger because I love mankind; out of love for other people, out of
+selfless service to that which is not me, I will even become a tiger.'
+Which is absurd. A tiger devours because it is consummated in devouring,
+it achieves its absolute self in devouring. It does not devour because
+its unselfish conscience bids it do so, for the sake of the other deer
+and doves, or the other tigers.
+
+Having arrived at the one extreme of mechanical selflessness, we
+immediately embrace the other extreme of the transcendent Self. But we
+try to be both at once. We do not cease to be the one before we become
+the other. We do not even play the roles in turn. We want to be the
+tiger and the deer both in one. Which is just ghastly nothingness. We
+try to say, 'The tiger is the lamb and the lamb is the tiger.' Which is
+nil, nihil, nought.
+
+The padrone took me into a small room almost contained in the thickness
+of the wall. There the Signora's dark eyes glared with surprise and
+agitation, seeing me intrude. She is younger than the Signore, a mere
+village tradesman's daughter, and, alas, childless.
+
+It was quite true, the door stood open. Madame put down the screw-driver
+and drew herself erect. Her eyes were a flame of excitement. This
+question of a door-spring that made the door fly open when it should
+make it close roused a vivid spark in her soul. It was she who was
+wrestling with the angel of mechanism.
+
+She was about forty years old, and flame-like and fierily sad. I think
+she did not know she was sad. But her heart was eaten by some impotence
+in her life.
+
+She subdued her flame of life to the little padrone. He was strange and
+static, scarcely human, ageless, like a monkey. She supported him with
+her flame, supported his static, ancient, beautiful form, kept it
+intact. But she did not believe in him.
+
+Now, the Signora Gemma held her husband together whilst he undid the
+screw that fixed the spring. If they had been alone, she would have done
+it, pretending to be under his direction. But since I was there, he did
+it himself; a grey, shaky, highly-bred little gentleman, standing on a
+chair with a long screw-driver, whilst his wife stood behind him, her
+hands half-raised to catch him if he should fall. Yet he was strangely
+absolute, with a strange, intact force in his breeding.
+
+They had merely adjusted the strong spring to the shut door, and
+stretched it slightly in fastening it to the door-jamb, so that it drew
+together the moment the latch was released, and the door flew open.
+
+We soon made it right. There was a moment of anxiety, the screw was
+fixed. And the door swung to. They were delighted. The Signora Gemma,
+who roused in me an electric kind of melancholy, clasped her hands
+together in ecstasy as the door swiftly shut itself.
+
+'_Ecco!_' she cried, in her vibrating, almost warlike woman's voice:
+'_Ecco!_'
+
+Her eyes were aflame as they looked at the door. She ran forward to try
+it herself. She opened the door expectantly, eagerly. Pouf!--it shut
+with a bang.
+
+'_Ecco!_' she cried, her voice quivering like bronze, overwrought but
+triumphant.
+
+I must try also. I opened the door. Pouf! It shut with a bang. We all
+exclaimed with joy.
+
+Then the Signor di Paoli turned to me, with a gracious, bland, formal
+grin. He turned his back slightly on the woman, and stood holding his
+chin, his strange horse-mouth grinning almost pompously at me. It was an
+affair of gentlemen. His wife disappeared as if dismissed. Then the
+padrone broke into cordial motion. We must drink.
+
+He would show me the estate. I had already seen the house. We went out
+by the glass doors on the left, into the domestic courtyard.
+
+It was lower than the gardens round it, and the sunshine came through
+the trellised arches on to the flagstones, where the grass grew fine and
+green in the cracks, and all was deserted and spacious and still. There
+were one or two orange-tubs in the light.
+
+Then I heard a noise, and there in the corner, among all the pink
+geraniums and the sunshine, the Signora Gemma sat laughing with a baby.
+It was a fair, bonny thing of eighteen months. The Signora was
+concentrated upon the child as he sat, stolid and handsome, in his
+little white cap, perched on a bench picking at the pink geraniums.
+
+She laughed, bent forward her dark face out of the shadow, swift into a
+glitter of sunshine near the sunny baby, laughing again excitedly,
+making mother-noises. The child took no notice of her. She caught him
+swiftly into the shadow, and they were obscured; her dark head was
+against the baby's wool jacket, she was kissing his neck, avidly, under
+the creeper leaves. The pink geraniums still frilled joyously in
+the sunshine.
+
+I had forgotten the padrone. Suddenly I turned to him inquiringly.
+
+'The Signora's nephew,' he explained, briefly, curtly, in a small voice.
+It was as if he were ashamed, or too deeply chagrined.
+
+The woman had seen us watching, so she came across the sunshine with the
+child, laughing, talking to the baby, not coming out of her own world to
+us, not acknowledging us, except formally.
+
+The Signor Pietro, queer old horse, began to laugh and neigh at the
+child, with strange, rancorous envy. The child twisted its face to cry.
+The Signora caught it away, dancing back a few yards from her
+old husband.
+
+'I am a stranger,' I said to her across the distance. 'He is afraid of a
+stranger.'
+
+'No, no,' she cried back, her eyes flaring up. 'It is the man. He always
+cries at the men.'
+
+She advanced again, laughing and roused, with the child in her arms. Her
+husband stood as if overcast, obliterated. She and I and the baby, in
+the sunshine, laughed a moment. Then I heard the neighing, forced laugh
+of the old man. He would not be left out. He seemed to force himself
+forward. He was bitter, acrid with chagrin and obliteration, struggling
+as if to assert his own existence. He was nullified.
+
+The woman also was uncomfortable. I could see she wanted to go away with
+the child, to enjoy him alone, with palpitating, pained enjoyment. It
+was her brother's boy. And the old padrone was as if nullified by her
+ecstasy over the baby. He held his chin, gloomy, fretful, unimportant.
+
+He was annulled. I was startled when I realized it. It was as though his
+reality were not attested till he had a child. It was as if his _raison
+d'etre_ had been to have a son. And he had no children. Therefore he had
+no _raison d'etre_. He was nothing, a shadow that vanishes into nothing.
+And he was ashamed, consumed by his own nothingness.
+
+I was startled. This, then, is the secret of Italy's attraction for us,
+this phallic worship. To the Italian the phallus is the symbol of
+individual creative immortality, to each man his own Godhead. The child
+is but the evidence of the Godhead.
+
+And this is why the Italian is attractive, supple, and beautiful,
+because he worships the Godhead in the flesh. We envy him, we feel pale
+and insignificant beside him. Yet at the same time we feel superior to
+him, as if he were a child and we adult.
+
+Wherein are we superior? Only because we went beyond the phallus in the
+search of the Godhead, the creative origin. And we found the physical
+forces and the secrets of science.
+
+We have exalted Man far above the man who is in each one of us. Our aim
+is a perfect humanity, a perfect and equable human consciousness,
+selfless. And we obtain it in the subjection, reduction, analysis, and
+destruction of the Self. So on we go, active in science and mechanics,
+and social reform.
+
+But we have exhausted ourselves in the process. We have found great
+treasures, and we are now impotent to use them. So we have said: 'What
+good are these treasures, they are vulgar nothings.' We have said: 'Let
+us go back from this adventuring, let us enjoy our own flesh, like the
+Italian.' But our habit of life, our very constitution, prevents our
+being quite like the Italian. The phallus will never serve us as a
+Godhead, because we do not believe in it: no Northern race does.
+Therefore, either we set ourselves to serve our children, calling them
+'the future', or else we turn perverse and destructive, give ourselves
+joy in the destruction of the flesh.
+
+The children are not the future. The living truth is the future. Time
+and people do not make the future. Retrogression is not the future.
+Fifty million children growing up purposeless, with no purpose save the
+attainment of their own individual desires, these are not the future,
+they are only a disintegration of the past. The future is in living,
+growing truth, in advancing fulfilment.
+
+But it is no good. Whatever we do, it is within the greater will towards
+self-reduction and a perfect society, analysis on the one hand, and
+mechanical construction on the other. This will dominates us as a whole,
+and until the whole breaks down, the will must persist. So that now,
+continuing in the old, splendid will for a perfect selfless humanity, we
+have become inhuman and unable to help ourselves, we are but attributes
+of the great mechanized society we have created on our way to
+perfection. And this great mechanized society, being selfless, is
+pitiless. It works on mechanically and destroys us, it is our master
+and our God.
+
+It is past the time to leave off, to cease entirely from what we are
+doing, and from what we have been doing for hundreds of years. It is
+past the time to cease seeking one Infinite, ignoring, striving to
+eliminate the other. The Infinite is twofold, the Father and the Son,
+the Dark and the Light, the Senses and the Mind, the Soul and the
+Spirit, the self and the not-self, the Eagle and the Dove, the Tiger and
+the Lamb. The consummation of man is twofold, in the Self and in
+Selflessness. By great retrogression back to the source of darkness in
+me, the Self, deep in the senses, I arrive at the Original, Creative
+Infinite. By projection forth from myself, by the elimination of my
+absolute sensual self, I arrive at the Ultimate Infinite, Oneness in the
+Spirit. They are two Infinites, twofold approach to God. And man must
+know both.
+
+But he must never confuse them. They are eternally separate. The lion
+shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally shall devour the
+lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured. Man knows the great
+consummation in the flesh, the sensual ecstasy, and that is eternal.
+Also the spiritual ecstasy of unanimity, that is eternal. But the two
+are separate and never to be confused. To neutralize the one with the
+other is unthinkable, an abomination. Confusion is horror and
+nothingness.
+
+The two Infinites, negative and positive, they are always related, but
+they are never identical. They are always opposite, but there exists a
+relation between them. This is the Holy Ghost of the Christian Trinity.
+And it is this, the relation which is established between the two
+Infinites, the two natures of God, which we have transgressed,
+forgotten, sinned against. The Father is the Father, and the Son is the
+Son. I may know the Son and deny the Father, or know the Father and deny
+the Son. But that which I may never deny, and which I have denied, is
+the Holy Ghost which relates the dual Infinites into One Whole, which
+relates and keeps distinct the dual natures of God. To say that the two
+are one, this is the inadmissible lie. The two are related, by the
+intervention of the Third, into a Oneness.
+
+There are two ways, there is not only One. There are two opposite ways
+to consummation. But that which relates them, like the base of the
+triangle, this is the constant, the Absolute, this makes the Ultimate
+Whole. And in the Holy Spirit I know the Two Ways, the Two Infinites,
+the Two Consummations. And knowing the Two, I admit the Whole. But
+excluding One, I exclude the Whole. And confusing the two, I make
+nullity nihil.
+
+'_Mais_,' said the Signore, starting from his scene of ignominy, where
+his wife played with another man's child, '_mais--voulez-vous vous
+promener dans mes petites terres?_'
+
+It came out fluently, he was so much roused in self-defence and
+self-assertion.
+
+We walked under the pergola of bony vine-stocks, secure in the sunshine
+within the walls, only the long mountain, parallel with us, looking in.
+
+I said how I liked the big vine-garden, I asked when it ended. The pride
+of the padrone came back with a click. He pointed me to the terrace, to
+the great shut lemon-houses above. They were all his. But--he shrugged
+his Italian shoulders--it was nothing, just a little garden, _vous
+savez, monsieur_. I protested it was beautiful, that I loved it, and
+that it seemed to me _very_ large indeed. He admitted that today,
+perhaps, it was beautiful.
+
+'_Perche--parce que--il fait un tempo--cosi--tres bell'--tres beau,
+ecco!_'
+
+He alighted on the word _beau_ hurriedly, like a bird coming to ground
+with a little bounce.
+
+The terraces of the garden are held up to the sun, the sun falls full
+upon them, they are like a vessel slanted up, to catch the superb, heavy
+light. Within the walls we are remote, perfect, moving in heavy spring
+sunshine, under the bony avenue of vines. The padrone makes little
+exclamatory noises that mean nothing, and teaches me the names of
+vegetables. The land is rich and black.
+
+Opposite us, looking down on our security, is the long, arched mountain
+of snow. We climbed one flight of steps, and we could see the little
+villages on the opposite side of the lake. We climbed again, and could
+see the water rippling.
+
+We came to a great stone building that I had thought was a storehouse,
+for open-air storage, because the walls are open halfway up, showing the
+darkness inside and the corner pillar very white and square and distinct
+in front of it.
+
+Entering carelessly into the dimness, I started, for at my feet was a
+great floor of water, clear and green in its obscurity, going down
+between the walls, a reservoir in the gloom. The Signore laughed at my
+surprise. It was for irrigating the land, he said. It stank, slightly,
+with a raw smell; otherwise, I said, what a wonderful bath it would
+make. The old Signore gave his little neighing laugh at the idea.
+
+Then we climbed into a great loft of leaves, ruddy brown, stored in a
+great bank under the roof, seeming to give off a little red heat, as
+they gave off the lovely perfume of the hills. We passed through, and
+stood at the foot of the lemon-house. The big, blind building rose high
+in the sunshine before us.
+
+All summer long, upon the mountain slopes steep by the lake, stands the
+rows of naked pillars rising out of the green foliage like ruins of
+temples: white, square pillars of masonry, standing forlorn in their
+colonnades and squares, rising up the mountain-sides here and there, as
+if they remained from some great race that had once worshipped here. And
+still, in the winter, some are seen, standing away in lonely places
+where the sun streams full, grey rows of pillars rising out of a broken
+wall, tier above tier, naked to the sky, forsaken.
+
+They are the lemon plantations, and the pillars are to support the heavy
+branches of the trees, but finally to act as scaffolding of the great
+wooden houses that stand blind and ugly, covering the lemon trees in
+the winter.
+
+In November, when cold winds came down and snow had fallen on the
+mountains, from out of the storehouses the men were carrying timber, and
+we heard the clang of falling planks. Then, as we walked along the
+military road on the mountain-side, we saw below, on the top of the
+lemon gardens, long, thin poles laid from pillar to pillar, and we heard
+the two men talking and singing as they walked across perilously,
+placing the poles. In their clumsy zoccoli they strode easily across,
+though they had twenty or thirty feet to fall if they slipped. But the
+mountain-side, rising steeply, seemed near, and above their heads the
+rocks glowed high into the sky, so that the sense of elevation must have
+been taken away. At any rate, they went easily from pillar-summit to
+pillar-summit, with a great cave of space below. Then again was the
+rattle and clang of planks being laid in order, ringing from the
+mountain-side over the blue lake, till a platform of timber, old and
+brown, projected from the mountain-side, a floor when seen from above, a
+hanging roof when seen from below. And we, on the road above, saw the
+men sitting easily on this flimsy hanging platform, hammering the
+planks. And all day long the sound of hammering echoed among the rocks
+and olive woods, and came, a faint, quick concussion, to the men on the
+boats far out. When the roofs were on they put in the fronts, blocked in
+between the white pillars withhold, dark wood, in roughly made panels.
+And here and there, at irregular intervals, was a panel of glass, pane
+overlapping pane in the long strip of narrow window. So that now these
+enormous, unsightly buildings bulge out on the mountain-sides, rising in
+two or three receding tiers, blind, dark, sordid-looking places.
+
+In the morning I often lie in bed and watch the sunrise. The lake lies
+dim and milky, the mountains are dark blue at the back, while over them
+the sky gushes and glistens with light. At a certain place on the
+mountain ridge the light burns gold, seems to fuse a little groove on
+the hill's rim. It fuses and fuses at this point, till of a sudden it
+comes, the intense, molten, living light. The mountains melt suddenly,
+the light steps down, there is a glitter, a spangle, a clutch of
+spangles, a great unbearable sun-track flashing across the milky lake,
+and the light falls on my face. Then, looking aside, I hear the little
+slotting noise which tells me they are opening the lemon gardens, a long
+panel here and there, a long slot of darkness at irregular intervals
+between the brown wood and the glass stripes.
+
+'_Voulez-vous_'--the Signore bows me in with outstretched
+hand--'_voulez-vous entrer, monsieur?_'
+
+I went into the lemon-house, where the poor threes seem to mope in the
+darkness. It is an immense, dark, cold place. Tall lemon trees, heavy
+with half-visible fruit, crowd together, and rise in the gloom. They
+look like ghosts in the darkness of the underworld, stately, and as if
+in life, but only grand shadows of themselves. And lurking here and
+there, I see one of the pillars, But he, too, seems a shadow, not one of
+the dazzling white fellows I knew. Here we are trees, men, pillars, the
+dark earth, the sad black paths, shut in in this enormous box. It is
+true, there are long strips of window and slots of space, so that the
+front is striped, and an occasional beam of light fingers the leaves of
+an enclosed tree and the sickly round lemons. But it is nevertheless
+very gloomy.
+
+'But it is much colder in here than outside,' I said.
+
+'Yes,' replied the Signore, 'now. But at night--I _think_--'
+
+I almost wished it were night to try. I wanted to imagine the trees
+cosy. They seemed now in the underworld. Between the lemon trees, beside
+the path, were little orange trees, and dozens of oranges hanging like
+hot coals in the twilight. When I warm my hands at them the Signore
+breaks me off one twig after another, till I have a bunch of burning
+oranges among dark leaves, a heavy bouquet. Looking down the Hades of
+the lemon-house, the many ruddy-clustered oranges beside the path remind
+me of the lights of a village along the lake at night, while the pale
+lemons above are the stars. There is a subtle, exquisite scent of lemon
+flowers. Then I notice a citron. He hangs heavy and bloated upon so
+small a tree, that he seems a dark green enormity. There is a great host
+of lemons overhead, half-visible, a swarm of ruddy oranges by the paths,
+and here and there a fat citron. It is almost like being under the sea.
+
+At the corners of the path were round little patches of ash and stumps
+of charred wood, where fires had been kindled inside the house on cold
+nights. For during the second and third weeks in January the snow came
+down so low on the mountains that, after climbing for an hour, I found
+myself in a snow lane, and saw olive orchards on lawns of snow.
+
+The padrone says that all lemons and sweet oranges are grafted on a
+bitter-orange stock. The plants raised from seed, lemon and sweet
+orange, fell prey to disease, so the cultivators found it safe only to
+raise the native bitter orange, and then graft upon it.
+
+And the maestra--she is the schoolmistress, who wears black gloves while
+she teaches us Italian--says that the lemon was brought by St Francis of
+Assisi, who came to the Garda here and founded a church and a monastery.
+Certainly the church of San Francesco is very old and dilapidated, and
+its cloisters have some beautiful and original carvings of leaves and
+fruit upon the pillars, which seem to connect San Francesco with the
+lemon. I imagine him wandering here with a lemon in his pocket. Perhaps
+he made lemonade in the hot summer. But Bacchus had been before him in
+the drink trade.
+
+Looking at his lemons, the Signore sighed. I think he hates them. They
+are leaving him in the lurch. They are sold retail at a halfpenny each
+all the year round. 'But that is as dear, or dearer, than in England,' I
+say. 'Ah, but,' says the maestra, 'that is because your lemons are
+outdoor fruit from Sicily. _Pero_--one of our lemons is as good as _two_
+from elsewhere.'
+
+It is true these lemons have an exquisite fragrance and perfume, but
+whether their force as lemons is double that of an ordinary fruit is a
+question. Oranges are sold at fourpence halfpenny the kilo--it comes
+about five for twopence, small ones. The citrons are sold also by weight
+in Salo for the making of that liqueur known as 'Cedro'. One citron
+fetches sometimes a shilling or more, but then the demand is necessarily
+small. So that it is evident, from these figures, the Lago di Garda
+cannot afford to grow its lemons much longer. The gardens are already
+many of them in ruins, and still more 'Da Vendere'.
+
+We went out of the shadow of the lemon-house on to the roof of the
+section below us. When we came to the brink of the roof I sat down. The
+padrone stood behind me, a shabby, shaky little figure on his roof in
+the sky, a little figure of dilapidation, dilapidated as the
+lemon-houses themselves.
+
+We were always level with the mountain-snow opposite. A film of pure
+blue was on the hills to the right and the left. There had been a wind,
+but it was still now. The water breathed an iridescent dust on the far
+shore, where the villages were groups of specks.
+
+On the low level of the world, on the lake, an orange-sailed boat leaned
+slim to the dark-blue water, which had flecks of foam. A woman went
+down-hill quickly, with two goats and a sheep. Among the olives a man
+was whistling.
+
+'_Voyez_,' said the padrone, with distant, perfect melancholy. 'There
+was once a lemon garden also there--you see the short pillars, cut off
+to make a pergola for the vine. Once there were twice as many lemons as
+now. Now we must have vine instead. From that piece of land I had two
+hundred lire a year, in lemons. From the vine I have only eighty.'
+
+'But wine is a valuable crop,' I said.
+
+'Ah--_cosi-cosi_! For a man who grows much. For me--_poco, poco--peu_.'
+
+Suddenly his face broke into a smile of profound melancholy, almost a
+grin, like a gargoyle. It was the real Italian melancholy, very
+deep, static.
+
+'_Vous voyez, monsieur_--the lemon, it is all the year, all the year.
+But the vine--one crop--?'
+
+He lifts his shoulders and spreads his hands with that gesture of
+finality and fatality, while his face takes the blank, ageless look of
+misery, like a monkey's. There is no hope. There is the present. Either
+that is enough, the present, or there is nothing.
+
+I sat and looked at the lake. It was beautiful as paradise, as the first
+creation. On the shores were the ruined lemon-pillars standing out in
+melancholy, the clumsy, enclosed lemon-houses seemed ramshackle, bulging
+among vine stocks and olive trees. The villages, too, clustered upon
+their churches, seemed to belong to the past. They seemed to be
+lingering in bygone centuries.
+
+'But it is very beautiful,' I protested. 'In England--'
+
+'Ah, in England,' exclaimed the padrone, the same ageless, monkey-like
+grin of fatality, tempered by cunning, coming on his face, 'in England
+you have the wealth--_les richesses_--you have the mineral coal and the
+machines, _vous savez_. Here we have the sun--'
+
+He lifted his withered hand to the sky, to the wonderful source of that
+blue day, and he smiled, in histrionic triumph. But his triumph was only
+histrionic. The machines were more to his soul than the sun. He did not
+know these mechanisms, their great, human-contrived, inhuman power, and
+he wanted to know them. As for the sun, that is common property, and no
+man is distinguished by it. He wanted machines, machine production,
+money, and human power. He wanted to know the joy of man who has got the
+earth in his grip, bound it up with railways, burrowed it with iron
+fingers, subdued it. He wanted this last triumph of the ego, this last
+reduction. He wanted to go where the English have gone, beyond the Self,
+into the great inhuman Not Self, to create the great unliving creators,
+the machines, out of the active forces of nature that existed
+before flesh.
+
+But he is too old. It remains for the young Italian to embrace his
+mistress, the machine.
+
+I sat on the roof of the lemon-house, with the lake below and the snowy
+mountain opposite, and looked at the ruins on the old, olive-fuming
+shores, at all the peace of the ancient world still covered in sunshine,
+and the past seemed to me so lovely that one must look towards it,
+backwards, only backwards, where there is peace and beauty and no more
+dissonance.
+
+I thought of England, the great mass of London, and the black, fuming,
+laborious Midlands and north-country. It seemed horrible. And yet, it
+was better than the padrone, this old, monkey-like cunning of fatality.
+It is better to go forward into error than to stay fixed inextricably
+in the past.
+
+Yet what should become of the world? There was London and the industrial
+counties spreading like a blackness over all the world, horrible, in the
+end destructive. And the Garda was so lovely under the sky of sunshine,
+it was intolerable. For away, beyond, beyond all the snowy Alps, with
+the iridescence of eternal ice above them, was this England, black and
+foul and dry, with her soul worn down, almost worn away. And England was
+conquering the world with her machines and her horrible destruction of
+natural life. She was conquering the whole world.
+
+And yet, was she not herself finished in this work? She had had enough.
+She had conquered the natural life to the end: she was replete with the
+conquest of the outer world, satisfied with the destruction of the Self.
+She would cease, she would turn round; or else expire.
+
+If she still lived, she would begin to build her knowledge into a great
+structure of truth. There it lay, vast masses of rough-hewn knowledge,
+vast masses of machines and appliances, vast masses of ideas and
+methods, and nothing done with it, only teeming swarms of disintegrated
+human beings seething and perishing rapidly away amongst it, till it
+seems as if a world will be left covered with huge ruins, and scored by
+strange devices of industry, and quite dead, the people disappeared,
+swallowed up in the last efforts towards a perfect, selfless society.
+
+
+
+_3_
+
+THE THEATRE
+
+
+During carnival a company is playing in the theatre. On Christmas Day
+the padrone came in with the key of his box, and would we care to see
+the drama? The theatre was small, a mere nothing, in fact; a mere affair
+of peasants, you understand; and the Signor Di Paoli spread his hands
+and put his head on one side, parrot-wise; but we might find a little
+diversion--_un peu de divertiment_. With this he handed me the key.
+
+I made suitable acknowledgements, and was really impressed. To be handed
+the key of a box at the theatre, so simply and pleasantly, in the large
+sitting-room looking over the grey lake of Christmas Day; it seemed to
+me a very graceful event. The key had a chain and a little shield of
+bronze, on which was beaten out a large figure 8.
+
+So the next day we went to see _I Spettri_, expecting some good, crude
+melodrama. The theatre is an old church. Since that triumph of the deaf
+and dumb, the cinematograph, has come to give us the nervous excitement
+of speed--grimace agitation, and speed, as of flying atoms, chaos--many
+an old church in Italy has taken a new lease of life.
+
+This cast-off church made a good theatre. I realized how cleverly it had
+been constructed for the dramatic presentation of religious ceremonies.
+The east end is round, the walls are windowless, sound is well
+distributed. Now everything is theatrical, except the stone floor and
+two pillars at the back of the auditorium, and the slightly
+ecclesiastical seats below.
+
+There are two tiers of little boxes in the theatre, some forty in all,
+with fringe and red velvet, and lined with dark red paper, quite like
+real boxes in a real theatre. And the padrone's is one of the best. It
+just holds three people.
+
+We paid our threepence entrance fee in the stone hall and went upstairs.
+I opened the door of Number 8, and we were shut in our little cabin,
+looking down on the world. Then I found the barber, Luigi, bowing
+profusely in a box opposite. It was necessary to make bows all round:
+ah, the chemist, on the upper tier, near the barber; how-do-you-do to
+the padrona of the hotel, who is our good friend, and who sits, wearing
+a little beaver shoulder-cape, a few boxes off; very cold salutation to
+the stout village magistrate with the long brown beard, who leans
+forward in the box facing the stage, while a grouping of faces look out
+from behind him; a warm smile to the family of the Signora Gemma, across
+next to the stage. Then we are settled.
+
+I cannot tell why I hate the village magistrate. He looks like a family
+portrait by a Flemish artist, he himself weighing down the front of the
+picture with his portliness and his long brown beard, whilst the faces
+of his family are arranged in two groups for the background. I think he
+is angry at our intrusion. He is very republican and self-important. But
+we eclipse him easily, with the aid of a large black velvet hat, and
+black furs, and our Sunday clothes.
+
+Downstairs the villagers are crowding, drifting like a heavy current.
+The women are seated, by church instinct, all together on the left, with
+perhaps an odd man at the end of a row, beside his wife. On the right,
+sprawling in the benches, are several groups of bersaglieri, in grey
+uniforms and slanting cock's-feather hats; then peasants, fishermen, and
+an odd couple or so of brazen girls taking their places on the
+men's side.
+
+At the back, lounging against the pillars or standing very dark and
+sombre, are the more reckless spirits of the village. Their black felt
+hats are pulled down, their cloaks are thrown over their mouths, they
+stand very dark and isolated in their moments of stillness, they shout
+and wave to each other when anything occurs.
+
+The men are clean, their clothes are all clean washed. The rags of the
+poorest porter are always well washed. But it is Sunday tomorrow, and
+they are shaved only on a Sunday. So that they have a week's black
+growth on their chins. But they have dark, soft eyes, unconscious and
+vulnerable. They move and balance with loose, heedless motion upon their
+clattering zoccoli, they lounge with wonderful ease against the wall at
+the back, or against the two pillars, unconscious of the patches on
+their clothes or of their bare throats, that are knotted perhaps with a
+scarlet rag. Loose and abandoned, they lounge and talk, or they watch
+with wistful absorption the play that is going on.
+
+They are strangely isolated in their own atmosphere, and as if revealed.
+It is as if their vulnerable being was exposed and they have not the wit
+to cover it. There is a pathos of physical sensibility and mental
+inadequacy. Their mind is not sufficiently alert to run with their
+quick, warm senses.
+
+The men keep together, as if to support each other, the women also are
+together; in a hard, strong herd. It is as if the power, the hardness,
+the triumph, even in this Italian village, were with the women in their
+relentless, vindictive unity.
+
+That which drives men and women together, the indomitable necessity, is
+like a bondage upon the people. They submit as under compulsion, under
+constraint. They come together mostly in anger and in violence of
+destructive passion. There is no comradeship between men and women, none
+whatsoever, but rather a condition of battle, reserve, hostility.
+
+On Sundays the uncomfortable, excited, unwilling youth walks for an hour
+with his sweetheart, at a little distance from her, on the public
+highway in the afternoon. This is a concession to the necessity for
+marriage. There is no real courting, no happiness of being together,
+only the roused excitement which is based on a fundamental hostility.
+There is very little flirting, and what there is is of the subtle, cruel
+kind, like a sex duel. On the whole, the men and women avoid each other,
+almost shun each other. Husband and wife are brought together in a
+child, which they both worship. But in each of them there is only the
+great reverence for the infant, and the reverence for fatherhood or
+motherhood, as the case may be; there is no spiritual love.
+
+In marriage, husband and wife wage the subtle, satisfying war of sex
+upon each other. It gives a profound satisfaction, a profound intimacy.
+But it destroys all joy, all unanimity in action.
+
+On Sunday afternoons the uncomfortable youth walks by the side of his
+maiden for an hour in the public highway. Then he escapes; as from a
+bondage he goes back to his men companions. On Sunday afternoons and
+evenings the married woman, accompanied by a friend or by a child--she
+dare not go alone, afraid of the strange, terrible sex-war between her
+and the drunken man--is seen leading home the wine-drunken, liberated
+husband. Sometimes she is beaten when she gets home. It is part of the
+process. But there is no synthetic love between men and women, there is
+only passion, and passion is fundamental hatred, the act of love is
+a fight.
+
+The child, the outcome, is divine. Here the union, the oneness, is
+manifest. Though spirit strove with spirit, in mortal conflict, during
+the sex-passion, yet the flesh united with flesh in oneness. The phallus
+is still divine. But the spirit, the mind of man, this has
+become nothing.
+
+So the women triumph. They sit down below in the theatre, their
+perfectly dressed hair gleaming, their backs very straight, their heads
+carried tensely. They are not very noticeable. They seem held in
+reserve. They are just as tense and stiff as the men are slack and
+abandoned. Some strange will holds the women taut. They seem like
+weapons, dangerous. There is nothing charming nor winning about them; at
+the best a full, prolific maternity, at the worst a yellow poisonous
+bitterness of the flesh that is like a narcotic. But they are too strong
+for the men. The male spirit, which would subdue the immediate flesh to
+some conscious or social purpose, is overthrown. The woman in her
+maternity is the law-giver, the supreme authority. The authority of the
+man, in work, in public affairs, is something trivial in comparison. The
+pathetic ignominy of the village male is complete on Sunday afternoon,
+on his great day of liberation, when he is accompanied home, drunk but
+sinister, by the erect, unswerving, slightly cowed woman. His drunken
+terrorizing is only pitiable, she is so obviously the more
+constant power.
+
+And this is why the men must go away to America. It is not the money. It
+is the profound desire to rehabilitate themselves, to recover some
+dignity as men, as producers, as workers, as creators from the spirit,
+not only from the flesh. It is a profound desire to get away from women
+altogether, the terrible subjugation to sex, the phallic worship.
+
+The company of actors in the little theatre was from a small town away
+on the plain, beyond Brescia. The curtain rose, everybody was still,
+with that profound, naive attention which children give. And after a few
+minutes I realized that _I Spettri_ was Ibsen's _Ghosts_. The peasants
+and fishermen of the Garda, even the rows of ungovernable children, sat
+absorbed in watching as the Norwegian drama unfolded itself.
+
+The actors are peasants. The leader is the son of a peasant proprietor.
+He is qualified as a chemist, but is unsettled, vagrant, prefers
+play-acting. The Signer Pietro di Paoli shrugs his shoulders and
+apologizes for their vulgar accent. It is all the same to me. I am
+trying to get myself to rights with the play, which I have just lately
+seen in Munich, perfectly produced and detestable.
+
+It was such a change from the hard, ethical, slightly mechanized
+characters in the German play, which was as perfect an interpretation as
+I can imagine, to the rather pathetic notion of the Italian peasants,
+that I had to wait to adjust myself.
+
+The mother was a pleasant, comfortable woman harassed by something, she
+did not quite know what. The pastor was a ginger-haired caricature
+imitated from the northern stage, quite a lay figure. The peasants never
+laughed, they watched solemnly and absorbedly like children. The servant
+was just a slim, pert, forward hussy, much too flagrant. And then the
+son, the actor-manager: he was a dark, ruddy man, broad and thick-set,
+evidently of peasant origin, but with some education now; he was the
+important figure, the play was his.
+
+And he was strangely disturbing. Dark, ruddy, and powerful, he could not
+be the blighted son of 'Ghosts', the hectic, unsound, northern issue of
+a diseased father. His flashy Italian passion for his half-sister was
+real enough to make one uncomfortable: something he wanted and would
+have in spite of his own soul, something which fundamentally he did
+not want.
+
+It was this contradiction within the man that made the play so
+interesting. A robust, vigorous man of thirty-eight, flaunting and
+florid as a rather successful Italian can be, there was yet a secret
+sickness which oppressed him. But it was no taint in the blood, it was
+rather a kind of debility in the soul. That which he wanted and would
+have, the sensual excitement, in his soul he did not want it, no, not at
+all. And yet he must act from his physical desires, his physical will.
+
+His true being, his real self, was impotent. In his soul he was
+dependent, forlorn. He was childish and dependent on the mother. To hear
+him say, '_Grazia, mamma!_' would have tormented the mother-soul in any
+woman living. Such a child crying in the night! And for what?
+
+For he was hot-blooded, healthy, almost in his prime, and free as a man
+can be in his circumstances. He had his own way, he admitted no
+thwarting. He governed his circumstances pretty much, coming to our
+village with his little company, playing the plays he chose himself. And
+yet, that which he would have he did not vitally want, it was only a
+sort of inflamed obstinacy that made him so insistent, in the masculine
+way. He was not going to be governed by women, he was not going to be
+dictated to in the least by any one. And this because he was beaten by
+his own flesh.
+
+His real man's soul, the soul that goes forth and builds up a new world
+out of the void, was ineffectual. It could only revert to the senses.
+His divinity was the phallic divinity. The other male divinity, which is
+the spirit that fulfils in the world the new germ of an idea, this was
+denied and obscured in him, unused. And it was this spirit which cried
+out helplessly in him through the insistent, inflammable flesh. Even
+this play-acting was a form of physical gratification for him, it had in
+it neither real mind nor spirit.
+
+It was so different from Ibsen, and so much more moving. Ibsen is
+exciting, nervously sensational. But this was really moving, a real
+crying in the night. One loved the Italian nation, and wanted to help it
+with all one's soul. But when one sees the perfect Ibsen, how one hates
+the Norwegian and Swedish nations! They are detestable.
+
+They seem to be fingering with the mind the secret places and sources of
+the blood, impertinent, irreverent, nasty. There is a certain
+intolerable nastiness about the real Ibsen: the same thing is in
+Strindberg and in most of the Norwegian and Swedish writings. It is with
+them a sort of phallic worship also, but now the worship is mental and
+perverted: the phallus is the real fetish, but it is the source of
+uncleanliness and corruption and death, it is the Moloch, worshipped in
+obscenity.
+
+Which is unbearable. The phallus is a symbol of creative divinity. But
+it represents only part of creative divinity. The Italian has made it
+represent the whole. Which is now his misery, for he has to destroy his
+symbol in himself.
+
+Which is why the Italian men have the enthusiasm for war, unashamed.
+Partly it is the true phallic worship, for the phallic principle is to
+absorb and dominate all life. But also it is a desire to expose
+themselves to death, to know death, that death may destroy in them this
+too strong dominion of the blood, may once more liberate the spirit of
+outgoing, of uniting, of making order out of chaos, in the outer world,
+as the flesh makes a new order from chaos in begetting a new life, set
+them free to know and serve a greater idea.
+
+The peasants below sat and listened intently, like children who hear and
+do not understand, yet who are spellbound. The children themselves sit
+spellbound on the benches till the play is over. They do not fidget or
+lose interest. They watch with wide, absorbed eyes at the mystery, held
+in thrall by the sound of emotion.
+
+But the villagers do not really care for Ibsen. They let it go. On the
+feast of Epiphany, as a special treat, was given a poetic drama by
+D'Annunzio, _La Fiaccola sotto il Moggio_--_The Light under the Bushel_.
+
+It is a foolish romantic play of no real significance. There are several
+murders and a good deal of artificial horror. But it is all a very nice
+and romantic piece of make-believe, like a charade.
+
+So the audience loved it. After the performance of _Ghosts_ I saw the
+barber, and he had the curious grey clayey look of an Italian who is
+cold and depressed. The sterile cold inertia, which the so-called
+passionate nations know so well, had settled on him, and he went
+obliterating himself in the street, as if he were cold, dead.
+
+But after the D'Annunzio play he was like a man who has drunk sweet wine
+and is warm.
+
+'_Ah, bellissimo, bellissimo_!' he said, in tones of intoxicated
+reverence, when he saw me.
+
+'Better than _I Spettri_?' I said.
+
+He half-raised his hands, as if to imply the fatuity of the question.
+
+'Ah, but--' he said, 'it was D'Annunzio. The other....'
+
+'That was Ibsen--a great Norwegian,' I said, 'famous all over the
+world.'
+
+'But you know--D'Annunzio is a poet--oh, beautiful, beautiful!' There
+was no going beyond this '_bello--bellissimo_'.
+
+It was the language which did it. It was the Italian passion for
+rhetoric, for the speech which appeals to the senses and makes no demand
+on the mind. When an Englishman listens to a speech he wants at least to
+imagine that he understands thoroughly and impersonally what is meant.
+But an Italian only cares about the emotion. It is the movement, the
+physical effect of the language upon the blood which gives him supreme
+satisfaction. His mind is scarcely engaged at all. He is like a child,
+hearing and feeling without understanding. It is the sensuous
+gratification he asks for. Which is why D'Annunzio is a god in Italy. He
+can control the current of the blood with his words, and although much
+of what he says is bosh, yet his hearer is satisfied, fulfilled.
+
+Carnival ends on the 5th of February, so each Thursday there is a Serata
+d' Onore of one of the actors. The first, and the only one for which
+prices were raised--to a fourpence entrance fee instead of
+threepence--was for the leading lady. The play was _The Wife of the
+Doctor_, a modern piece, sufficiently uninteresting; the farce that
+followed made me laugh.
+
+Since it was her Evening of Honour, Adelaida was the person to see. She
+is very popular, though she is no longer young. In fact, she is the
+mother of the young pert person of _Ghosts_.
+
+Nevertheless, Adelaida, stout and blonde and soft and pathetic, is the
+real heroine of the theatre, the prima. She is very good at sobbing; and
+afterwards the men exclaim involuntarily, out of their strong emotion,
+'_bella, bella_!' The women say nothing. They sit stiffly and
+dangerously as ever. But, no doubt, they quite agree this is the true
+picture of ill-used, tear-stained woman, the bearer of many wrongs.
+Therefore they take unto themselves the homage of the men's '_bella,
+bella_!' that follows the sobs: it is due recognition of their hard
+wrongs: 'the woman pays.' Nevertheless, they despise in their souls the
+plump, soft Adelaida.
+
+Dear Adelaida, she is irreproachable. In every age, in every clime, she
+is dear, at any rate to the masculine soul, this soft, tear-blenched,
+blonde, ill-used thing. She must be ill-used and unfortunate. Dear
+Gretchen, dear Desdemona, dear Iphigenia, dear Dame aux Camelias, dear
+Lucy of Lammermoor, dear Mary Magdalene, dear, pathetic, unfortunate
+soul, in all ages and lands, how we love you. In the theatre she
+blossoms forth, she is the lily of the stage. Young and inexperienced as
+I am, I have broken my heart over her several times. I could write a
+sonnet-sequence to her, yes, the fair, pale, tear-stained thing,
+white-robed, with her hair down her back; I could call her by a hundred
+names, in a hundred languages, Melisande, Elizabeth, Juliet, Butterfly,
+Phedre, Minnehaha, etc. Each new time I hear her voice, with its faint
+clang of tears, my heart grows big and hot, and my bones melt. I detest
+her, but it is no good. My heart begins to swell like a bud under the
+plangent rain.
+
+The last time I saw her was here, on the Garda, at Salo. She was the
+chalked, thin-armed daughter of Rigoletto. I detested her, her voice had
+a chalky squeak in it. And yet, by the end, my heart was overripe in my
+breast, ready to burst with loving affection. I was ready to walk on to
+the stage, to wipe out the odious, miscreant lover, and to offer her all
+myself, saying, 'I can see it is real _love_ you want, and you shall
+have it: _I_ will give it to you.'
+
+Of course I know the secret of the Gretchen magic; it is all in the
+'Save me, Mr Hercules!' phrase. Her shyness, her timidity, her
+trustfulness, her tears foster my own strength and grandeur. I am the
+positive half of the universe. But so I am, if it comes to that, just as
+positive as the other half.
+
+Adelaida is plump, and her voice has just that moist, plangent strength
+which gives one a real voluptuous thrill. The moment she comes on the
+stage and looks round--a bit scared--she is _she_, Electra, Isolde,
+Sieglinde, Marguerite. She wears a dress of black voile, like the lady
+who weeps at the trial in the police-court. This is her modern uniform.
+Her antique garment is of trailing white, with a blonde pigtail and a
+flower. Realistically, it is black voile and a handkerchief.
+
+Adelaida always has a handkerchief. And still I cannot resist it. I say,
+'There's the hanky!' Nevertheless, in two minutes it has worked its way
+with me. She squeezes it in her poor, plump hand as the tears begin to
+rise; Fate, or man, is inexorable, so cruel. There is a sob, a cry; she
+presses the fist and the hanky to her eyes, one eye, then the other. She
+weeps real tears, tears shaken from the depths of her soft, vulnerable,
+victimized female self. I cannot stand it. There I sit in the padrone's
+little red box and stifle my emotion, whilst I repeat in my heart: 'What
+a shame, child, what a shame!' She is twice my age, but what is age in
+such circumstances? 'Your poor little hanky, it's sopping. There, then,
+don't cry. It'll be all right. _I'll_ see you're all right. _All_ men
+are not beasts, you know.' So I cover her protectively in my arms, and
+soon I shall be kissing her, for comfort, in the heat and prowess of my
+compassion, kissing her soft, plump cheek and neck closely, bringing my
+comfort nearer and nearer.
+
+It is a pleasant and exciting role for me to play. Robert Burns did the
+part to perfection:
+
+    O wert thou in the cauld blast
+    On yonder lea, on yonder lea.
+
+How many times does one recite that to all the Ophelias and Gretchens in
+the world:
+
+    Thy bield should be my bosom.
+
+How one admires one's bosom in that capacity! Looking down at one's
+shirt-front, one is filled with strength and pride.
+
+Why are the women so bad at playing this part in real life, this
+Ophelia-Gretchen role? Why are they so unwilling to go mad and die for
+our sakes? They do it regularly on the stage.
+
+But perhaps, after all, we write the plays. What a villain I am, what a
+black-browed, passionate, ruthless, masculine villain I am to the
+leading lady on the stage; and, on the other hand, dear heart, what a
+hero, what a fount of chivalrous generosity and faith! I am _anything_
+but a dull and law-abiding citizen. I am a Galahad, full of purity and
+spirituality, I am the Lancelot of valour and lust; I fold my hands, or
+I cock my hat in one side, as the case may be: I am _myself_. Only, I am
+not a respectable citizen, not that, in this hour of my glory and
+my escape.
+
+Dear Heaven, how Adelaida wept, her voice plashing like violin music, at
+my ruthless, masculine cruelty. Dear heart, how she sighed to rest on my
+sheltering bosom! And how I enjoyed my dual nature! How I
+admired myself!
+
+Adelaida chose _La Moglie del Dottore_ for her Evening of Honour. During
+the following week came a little storm of coloured bills: 'Great Evening
+of Honour of Enrico Persevalli.'
+
+This is the leader, the actor-manager. What should he choose for his
+great occasion, this broad, thick-set, ruddy descendant of the peasant
+proprietors of the plain? No one knew. The title of the play was
+not revealed.
+
+So we were staying at home, it was cold and wet. But the maestra came
+inflammably on that Thursday evening, and were we not going to the
+theatre, to see _Amleto_?
+
+Poor maestra, she is yellow and bitter-skinned, near fifty, but her dark
+eyes are still corrosively inflammable. She was engaged to a lieutenant
+in the cavalry, who got drowned when she was twenty-one. Since then she
+has hung on the tree unripe, growing yellow and bitter-skinned, never
+developing.
+
+'_Amleto!_' I say. '_Non lo conosco._'
+
+A certain fear comes into her eyes. She is schoolmistress, and has a
+mortal dread of being wrong.
+
+'_Si_,' she cries, wavering, appealing, '_una dramma inglese_.'
+
+'English!' I repeated.
+
+'Yes, an English drama.'
+
+'How do you write it?'
+
+Anxiously, she gets a pencil from her reticule, and, with black-gloved
+scrupulousness, writes _Amleto_.
+
+'_Hamlet_!' I exclaim wonderingly.
+
+'_Ecco, Amleto!_' cries the maestra, her eyes aflame with thankful
+justification.
+
+Then I knew that Signore Enrico Persevalli was looking to me for an
+audience. His Evening of Honour would be a bitter occasion to him if the
+English were not there to see his performance.
+
+I hurried to get ready, I ran through the rain. I knew he would take it
+badly that it rained on his Evening of Honour. He counted himself a man
+who had fate against him.
+
+'_Sono un disgraziato, io._'
+
+I was late. The First Act was nearly over. The play was not yet alive,
+neither in the bosoms of the actors nor in the audience. I closed the
+door of the box softly, and came forward. The rolling Italian eyes of
+Hamlet glanced up at me. There came a new impulse over the Court
+of Denmark.
+
+Enrico looked a sad fool in his melancholy black. The doublet sat close,
+making him stout and vulgar, the knee-breeches seemed to exaggerate the
+commonness of his thick, rather short, strutting legs. And he carried a
+long black rag, as a cloak, for histrionic purposes. And he had on his
+face a portentous grimace of melancholy and philosophic importance. His
+was the caricature of Hamlet's melancholy self-absorption.
+
+I stooped to arrange my footstool and compose my countenance. I was
+trying not to grin. For the first time, attired in philosophic
+melancholy of black silk, Enrico looked a boor and a fool. His
+close-cropped, rather animal head was common above the effeminate
+doublet, his sturdy, ordinary figure looked absurd in a
+melancholic droop.
+
+All the actors alike were out of their element. Their Majesties of
+Denmark were touching. The Queen, burly little peasant woman, was ill at
+ease in her pink satin. Enrico had had no mercy. He knew she loved to be
+the scolding servant or housekeeper, with her head tied up in a
+handkerchief, shrill and vulgar. Yet here she was pranked out in an
+expanse of satin, la Regina. Regina, indeed!
+
+She obediently did her best to be important. Indeed, she rather fancied
+herself; she looked sideways at the audience, self-consciously, quite
+ready to be accepted as an imposing and noble person, if they would
+esteem her such. Her voice sounded hoarse and common, but whether it was
+the pink satin in contrast, or a cold, I do not know. She was almost
+childishly afraid to move. Before she began a speech she looked down and
+kicked her skirt viciously, so that she was sure it was under control.
+Then she let go. She was a burly, downright little body of sixty, one
+rather expected her to box Hamlet on the ears.
+
+Only she liked being a queen when she sat on the throne. There she
+perched with great satisfaction, her train splendidly displayed down the
+steps. She was as proud as a child, and she looked like Queen Victoria
+of the Jubilee period.
+
+The King, her noble consort, also had new honours thrust upon him, as
+well as new garments. His body was real enough but it had nothing at all
+to do with his clothes. They established a separate identity by
+themselves. But wherever he went, they went with him, to the confusion
+of everybody.
+
+He was a thin, rather frail-looking peasant, pathetic, and very gentle.
+There was something pure and fine about him, he was so exceedingly
+gentle and by natural breeding courteous. But he did not feel kingly, he
+acted the part with beautiful, simple resignation.
+
+Enrico Persevalli had overshot himself in every direction, but worst of
+all in his own. He had become a hulking fellow, crawling about with his
+head ducked between his shoulders, pecking and poking, creeping about
+after other people, sniffing at them, setting traps for them, absorbed
+by his own self-important self-consciousness. His legs, in their black
+knee-breeches, had a crawling, slinking look; he always carried the
+black rag of a cloak, something for him to twist about as he twisted in
+his own soul, overwhelmed by a sort of inverted perversity.
+
+I had always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean thing he
+seems, on the stage, whether he is Forbes Robertson or anybody else. His
+nasty poking and sniffing at his mother, his setting traps for the King,
+his conceited perversion with Ophelia make him always intolerable. The
+character is repulsive in its conception, based on self-dislike and a
+spirit of disintegration.
+
+There is, I think, this strain of cold dislike, or self-dislike, through
+much of the Renaissance art, and through all the later Shakespeare. In
+Shakespeare it is a kind of corruption in the flesh and a conscious
+revolt from this. A sense of corruption in the flesh makes Hamlet
+frenzied, for he will never admit that it is his own flesh. Leonardo da
+Vinci is the same, but Leonardo loves the corruption maliciously.
+Michelangelo rejects any feeling of corruption, he stands by the flesh,
+the flesh only. It is the corresponding reaction, but in the opposite
+direction. But that is all four hundred years ago. Enrico Persevalli has
+just reached the position. He _is_ Hamlet, and evidently he has great
+satisfaction in the part. He is the modern Italian, suspicious,
+isolated, self-nauseated, labouring in a sense of physical corruption.
+But he will not admit it is in himself. He creeps about in self-conceit,
+transforming his own self-loathing. With what satisfaction did he reveal
+corruption--corruption in his neighbours he gloated in--letting his
+mother know he had discovered her incest, her uncleanness, gloated in
+torturing the incestuous King. Of all the unclean ones, Hamlet was the
+uncleanest. But he accused only the others.
+
+Except in the 'great' speeches, and there Enrico was betrayed, Hamlet
+suffered the extremity of physical self-loathing, loathing of his own
+flesh. The play is the statement of the most significant philosophic
+position of the Renaissance. Hamlet is far more even than Orestes, his
+prototype, a mental creature, anti-physical, anti-sensual. The whole
+drama is the tragedy of the convulsed reaction of the mind from the
+flesh, of the spirit from the self, the reaction from the great
+aristocratic to the great democratic principle.
+
+An ordinary instinctive man, in Hamlet's position, would either have set
+about murdering his uncle, by reflex action, or else would have gone
+right away. There would have been no need for Hamlet to murder his
+mother. It would have been sufficient blood-vengeance if he had killed
+his uncle. But that is the statement according to the aristocratic
+principle.
+
+Orestes was in the same position, but the same position two thousand
+years earlier, with two thousand years of experience wanting. So that
+the question was not so intricate in him as in Hamlet, he was not nearly
+so conscious. The whole Greek life was based on the idea of the
+supremacy of the self, and the self was always male. Orestes was his
+father's child, he would be the same whatever mother he had. The mother
+was but the vehicle, the soil in which the paternal seed was planted.
+When Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon, it was as if a common individual
+murdered God, to the Greek.
+
+But Agamemnon, King and Lord, was not infallible. He was fallible. He
+had sacrificed Iphigenia for the sake of glory in war, for the
+fulfilment of the superb idea of self, but on the other hand he had made
+cruel dissension for the sake of the concubines captured in war. The
+paternal flesh was fallible, ungodlike. It lusted after meaner pursuits
+than glory, war, and slaying, it was not faithful to the highest idea of
+the self. Orestes was driven mad by the furies of his mother, because of
+the justice that they represented. Nevertheless he was in the end
+exculpated. The third play of the trilogy is almost foolish, with its
+prating gods. But it means that, according to the Greek conviction,
+Orestes was right and Clytemnestra entirely wrong. But for all that, the
+infallible King, the infallible male Self, is dead in Orestes, killed by
+the furies of Clytemnestra. He gains his peace of mind after the
+revulsion from his own physical fallibility, but he will never be an
+unquestioned lord, as Agamemnon was. Orestes is left at peace,
+neutralized. He is the beginning of non-aristocratic Christianity.
+
+Hamlet's father, the King, is, like Agamemnon, a warrior-king. But,
+unlike Agamemnon, he is blameless with regard to Gertrude. Yet Gertrude,
+like Clytemnestra, is the potential murderer of her husband, as Lady
+Macbeth is murderess, as the daughters of Lear. The women murder the
+supreme male, the ideal Self, the King and Father.
+
+This is the tragic position Shakespeare must dwell upon. The woman
+rejects, repudiates the ideal Self which the male represents to her. The
+supreme representative, King and Father, is murdered by the Wife and the
+Daughters.
+
+What is the reason? Hamlet goes mad in a revulsion of rage and nausea.
+Yet the women-murderers only represent some ultimate judgement in his
+own soul. At the bottom of his own soul Hamlet has decided that the Self
+in its supremacy, Father and King, must die. It is a suicidal decision
+for his involuntary soul to have arrived at. Yet it is inevitable. The
+great religious, philosophic tide, which has been swelling all through
+the Middle Ages, had brought him there.
+
+The question, to be or not to be, which Hamlet puts himself, does not
+mean, to live or not to live. It is not the simple human being who puts
+himself the question, it is the supreme I, King and Father. To be or not
+to be King, Father, in the Self supreme? And the decision is, not to be.
+
+It is the inevitable philosophic conclusion of all the Renaissance. The
+deepest impulse in man, the religious impulse, is the desire to be
+immortal, or infinite, consummated. And this impulse is satisfied in
+fulfilment of an idea, a steady progression. In this progression man is
+satisfied, he seems to have reached his goal, this infinity, this
+immortality, this eternal being, with every step nearer which he takes.
+
+And so, according to his idea of fulfilment, man establishes the whole
+order of life. If my fulfilment is the fulfilment and establishment of
+the unknown divine Self which I am, then I shall proceed in the
+realizing of the greatest idea of the self, the highest conception of
+the I, my order of life will be kingly, imperial, aristocratic. The body
+politic also will culminate in this divinity of the flesh, this body
+imbued with glory, invested with divine power and might, the King, the
+Emperor. In the body politic also I shall desire a king, an emperor, a
+tyrant, glorious, mighty, in whom I see myself consummated and
+fulfilled. This is inevitable!
+
+But during the Middle Ages, struggling within this pagan, original
+transport, the transport of the Ego, was a small dissatisfaction, a
+small contrary desire. Amid the pomp of kings and popes was the Child
+Jesus and the Madonna. Jesus the King gradually dwindled down. There was
+Jesus the Child, helpless, at the mercy of all the world. And there was
+Jesus crucified.
+
+The old transport, the old fulfilment of the Ego, the Davidian ecstasy,
+the assuming of all power and glory unto the self, the becoming infinite
+through the absorption of all into the Ego, this gradually became
+unsatisfactory. This was not the infinite, this was not immortality.
+This was eternal death, this was damnation.
+
+The monk rose up with his opposite ecstasy, the Christian ecstasy. There
+was a death to die: the flesh, the self, must die, so that the spirit
+should rise again immortal, eternal, infinite. I am dead unto myself,
+but I live in the Infinite. The finite Me is no more, only the Infinite,
+the Eternal, is.
+
+At the Renaissance this great half-truth overcame the other great
+half-truth. The Christian Infinite, reached by a process of abnegation,
+a process of being absorbed, dissolved, diffused into the great
+Not-Self, supplanted the old pagan Infinite, wherein the self like a
+root threw out branches and radicles which embraced the whole universe,
+became the Whole.
+
+There is only one Infinite, the world now cried, there is the great
+Christian Infinite of renunciation and consummation in the not-self. The
+other, that old pride, is damnation. The sin of sins is Pride, it is the
+way to total damnation. Whereas the pagans based their life on pride.
+
+And according to this new Infinite, reached through renunciation and
+dissolving into the Others, the Neighbour, man must build up his actual
+form of life. With Savonarola and Martin Luther the living Church
+actually transformed itself, for the Roman Church was still pagan. Henry
+VIII simply said: 'There is no Church, there is only the State.' But
+with Shakespeare the transformation had reached the State also. The
+King, the Father, the representative of the Consummate Self, the maximum
+of all life, the symbol of the consummate being, the becoming Supreme,
+Godlike, Infinite, he must perish and pass away. This Infinite was not
+infinite, this consummation was not consummated, all this was fallible,
+false. It was rotten, corrupt. It must go. But Shakespeare was also the
+thing itself. Hence his horror, his frenzy, his self-loathing.
+
+The King, the Emperor is killed in the soul of man, the old order of
+life is over, the old tree is dead at the root. So said Shakespeare. It
+was finally enacted in Cromwell. Charles I took up the old position of
+kingship by divine right. Like Hamlet's father, he was blameless
+otherwise. But as representative of the old form of life, which mankind
+now hated with frenzy, he must be cut down, removed. It was a
+symbolic act.
+
+The world, our world of Europe, had now really turned, swung round to a
+new goal, a new idea, the Infinite reached through the omission of Self.
+God is all that which is Not-Me. I am consummate when my Self, the
+resistant solid, is reduced and diffused into all that which is Not-Me:
+my neighbour, my enemy, the great Otherness. Then I am perfect.
+
+And from this belief the world began gradually to form a new State, a
+new body politic, in which the Self should be removed. There should be
+no king, no lords, no aristocrats. The world continued in its religious
+belief, beyond the French Revolution, beyond the great movement of
+Shelley and Godwin. There should be no Self. That which was supreme was
+that which was Not-Me, the other. The governing factor in the State was
+the idea of the good of others; that is, the Common Good. And the
+_vital_ governing idea in the State has been this idea since Cromwell.
+
+Before Cromwell the idea was 'For the King', because every man saw
+himself consummated in the King. After Cromwell the idea was 'For the
+good of my neighbour', or 'For the good of the people', or 'For the good
+of the whole'. This has been our ruling idea, by which we have more or
+less lived.
+
+Now this has failed. Now we say that the Christian Infinite is not
+infinite. We are tempted, like Nietzsche, to return back to the old
+pagan Infinite, to say that is supreme. Or we are inclined, like the
+English and the Pragmatist, to say, 'There is no Infinite, there is no
+Absolute. The only Absolute is expediency, the only reality is sensation
+and momentariness.' But we may say this, even act on it, _a la Sanine_.
+But we never believe it.
+
+What is really Absolute is the mystic Reason which connects both
+Infinites, the Holy Ghost that relates both natures of God. If we now
+wish to make a living State, we must build it up to the idea of the Holy
+Spirit, the supreme Relationship. We must say, the pagan Infinite is
+infinite, the Christian Infinite is infinite: these are our two
+Consummations, in both of these we are consummated. But that which
+relates them alone is absolute.
+
+This Absolute of the Holy Ghost we may call Truth or Justice or Right.
+These are partial names, indefinite and unsatisfactory unless there be
+kept the knowledge of the two Infinites, pagan and Christian, which they
+go between. When both are there, they are like a superb bridge, on which
+one can stand and know the whole world, my world, the two halves of
+the universe.
+
+'_Essere, o non essere, e qui il punto._'
+
+To be or not to be was the question for Hamlet to settle. It is no
+longer our question, at least, not in the same sense. When it is a
+question of death, the fashionable young suicide declares that his
+self-destruction is the final proof of his own incontrovertible being.
+And as for not-being in our public life, we have achieved it as much as
+ever we want to, as much as is necessary. Whilst in private life there
+is a swing back to paltry selfishness as a creed. And in the war there
+is the position of neutralization and nothingness. It is a question of
+knowing how _to be_, and how _not to be_, for we must fulfil both.
+Enrico Persevalli was detestable with his '_Essere, o non essere_'. He
+whispered it in a hoarse whisper as if it were some melodramatic murder
+he was about to commit. As a matter of fact, he knows quite well, and
+has known all his life, that his pagan Infinite, his transport of the
+flesh and the supremacy of the male in fatherhood, is all
+unsatisfactory. All his life he has really cringed before the northern
+Infinite of the Not-Self, although he has continued in the Italian habit
+of Self. But it is mere habit, sham.
+
+How can he know anything about being and not-being when he is only a
+maudlin compromise between them, and all he wants is to be a maudlin
+compromise? He is neither one nor the other. He has neither being nor
+riot-being. He is as equivocal as the monks. He was detestable, mouthing
+Hamlet's sincere words. He has still to let go, to know what not-being
+is, before he can _be_. Till he has gone through the Christian negation
+of himself, and has known the Christian consummation, he is a mere
+amorphous heap.
+
+For the soliloquies of Hamlet are as deep as the soul of man can go, in
+one direction, and as sincere as the Holy Spirit itself in their
+essence. But thank heaven, the bog into which Hamlet struggled is almost
+surpassed.
+
+It is a strange thing, if a man covers his face, and speaks with his
+eyes blinded, how significant and poignant he becomes. The ghost of this
+Hamlet was very simple. He was wrapped down to the knees in a great
+white cloth, and over his face was an open-work woollen shawl. But the
+naive blind helplessness and verity of his voice was strangely
+convincing. He seemed the most real thing in the play. From the knees
+downward he was Laertes, because he had on Laertes' white trousers and
+patent leather slippers. Yet he was strangely real, a voice out of
+the dark.
+
+The Ghost is really one of the play's failures, it is so trivial and
+unspiritual and vulgar. And it was spoilt for me from the first. When I
+was a child I went to the twopenny travelling theatre to see _Hamlet_.
+The Ghost had on a helmet and a breastplate. I sat in pale transport.
+
+''Amblet, 'Amblet, I _am_ thy father's ghost.'
+
+Then came a voice from the dark, silent audience, like a cynical knife
+to my fond soul:
+
+'Why tha arena, I can tell thy voice.'
+
+The peasants loved Ophelia: she was in white with her hair down her
+back. Poor thing, she was pathetic, demented. And no wonder, after
+Hamlet's 'O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!' What then of
+her young breasts and her womb? Hamlet with her was a very disagreeable
+sight. The peasants loved her. There was a hoarse roar, half of
+indignation, half of roused passion, at the end of her scene.
+
+The graveyard scene, too, was a great success, but I could not bear
+Hamlet. And the grave-digger in Italian was a mere buffoon. The whole
+scene was farcical to me because of the Italian, '_Questo cranio,
+Signore_--'And Enrico, dainty fellow, took the skull in a corner of his
+black cloak. As an Italian, he would not willingly touch it. It was
+unclean. But he looked a fool, hulking himself in his lugubriousness. He
+was as self-important as D'Annunzio.
+
+The close fell flat. The peasants had applauded the whole graveyard
+scene wildly. But at the end of all they got up and crowded to the
+doors, as if to hurry away: this in spite of Enrico's final feat: he
+fell backwards, smack down three steps of the throne platform, on to the
+stage. But planks and braced muscle will bounce, and Signer Amleto
+bounced quite high again.
+
+It was the end of _Amleto_, and I was glad. But I loved the theatre, I
+loved to look down on the peasants, who were so absorbed. At the end of
+the scenes the men pushed back their black hats, and rubbed their hair
+across their brows with a pleased, excited movement. And the women
+stirred in their seats.
+
+Just one man was with his wife and child, and he was of the same race as
+my old woman at San Tommaso. He was fair, thin, and clear, abstract, of
+the mountains. He seemed to have gathered his wife and child together
+into another, finer atmosphere, like the air of the mountains, and to
+guard them in it. This is the real Joseph, father of the child. He has a
+fierce, abstract look, wild and untamed as a hawk, but like a hawk at
+its own nest, fierce with love. He goes out and buys a tiny bottle of
+lemonade for a penny, and the mother and child sip it in tiny sips,
+whilst he bends over, like a hawk arching its wings.
+
+It is the fierce spirit of the Ego come out of the primal infinite, but
+detached, isolated, an aristocrat. He is not an Italian, dark-blooded.
+He is fair, keen as steel, with the blood of the mountaineer in him. He
+is like my old spinning woman. It is curious how, with his wife and
+child, he makes a little separate world down there in the theatre, like
+a hawk's nest, high and arid under the gleaming sky.
+
+The Bersaglieri sit close together in groups, so that there is a
+strange, corporal connexion between them. They have close-cropped, dark,
+slightly bestial heads, and thick shoulders, and thick brown hands on
+each other's shoulders. When an act is over they pick up their cherished
+hats and fling on their cloaks and go into the hall. They are rather
+rich, the Bersaglieri.
+
+They are like young, half-wild oxen, such strong, sturdy, dark lads,
+thickly built and with strange hard heads, like young male caryatides.
+They keep close together, as if there were some physical instinct
+connecting them. And they are quite womanless. There is a curious
+inter-absorption among themselves, a sort of physical trance that holds
+them all, and puts their minds to sleep. There is a strange, hypnotic
+unanimity among them as they put on their plumed hats and go out
+together, always very close, as if their bodies must touch. Then they
+feel safe and content in this heavy, physical trance. They are in love
+with one another, the young men love the young men. They shrink from the
+world beyond, from the outsiders, from all who are not Bersaglieri of
+their barracks.
+
+One man is a sort of leader. He is very straight and solid, solid like a
+wall, with a dark, unblemished will. His cock-feathers slither in a
+profuse, heavy stream from his black oil-cloth hat, almost to his
+shoulder. He swings round. His feathers slip into a cascade. Then he
+goes out to the hall, his feather tossing and falling richly. He must be
+well off. The Bersaglieri buy their own black cock's-plumes, and some
+pay twenty or thirty francs for the bunch, so the maestra said. The poor
+ones have only poor, scraggy plumes.
+
+There is something very primitive about these men. They remind me really
+of Agamemnon's soldiers clustered oil the seashore, men, all men, a
+living, vigorous, physical host of men. But there is a pressure on these
+Italian soldiers, as if they were men caryatides, with a great weight on
+their heads, making their brain hard, asleep, stunned. They all look is
+if their real brain were stunned, as if there were another centre of
+physical consciousness from which they lived.
+
+Separate from them all is Pietro, the young man who lounges on the wharf
+to carry things from the steamer. He starts up from sleep like a
+wild-cat as somebody claps him on the shoulder. It is the start of a man
+who has many enemies. He is almost an outlaw. Will he ever find himself
+in prison? He is the _gamin_ of the village, well detested.
+
+He is twenty-four years old, thin, dark, handsome, with a cat-like
+lightness and grace, and a certain repulsive, _gamin_ evil in his face.
+Where everybody is so clean and tidy, he is almost ragged. His week's
+beard shows very black in his slightly hollow cheeks. He hates the man
+who has waked him by clapping him on the shoulder.
+
+Pietro is already married, yet he behaves as if he were not. He has been
+carrying on with a loose woman, the wife of the citron-coloured barber,
+the Siciliano. Then he seats himself on the women's side of the theatre,
+behind a young person from Bogliaco, who also has no reputation, and
+makes her talk to him. He leans forward, resting his arms on the seat
+before him, stretching his slender, cat-like, flexible loins. The
+padrona of the hotel hates him--'_ein frecher Kerl_,' she says with
+contempt, and she looks away. Her eyes hate to see him.
+
+In the village there is the clerical party, which is the majority;
+there is the anti-clerical party, and there are the ne'er-do-wells. The
+clerical people are dark and pious and cold; there is a curious
+stone-cold, ponderous darkness over them, moral and gloomy. Then the
+anti-clerical party, with the Syndaco at the head, is bourgeois and
+respectable as far as the middle-aged people are concerned, banal,
+respectable, shut off as by a wall from the clerical people. The young
+anti-clericals are the young bloods of the place, the men who gather
+every night in the more expensive and less-respectable cafe. These young
+men are all free-thinkers, great dancers, singers, players of the
+guitar. They are immoral and slightly cynical. Their leader is the young
+shopkeeper, who has lived in Vienna, who is a bit of a bounder, with a
+veneer of sneering irony on an original good nature. He is well-to-do,
+and gives dances to which only the looser women go, with these reckless
+young men. He also gets up parties of pleasure, and is chiefly
+responsible for the coming of the players to the theatre this carnival.
+These young men are disliked, but they belong to the important class,
+they are well-to-do, and they have the life of the village in their
+hands. The clerical peasants are priest-ridden and good, because they
+are poor and afraid and superstitious. There is, lastly, a sprinkling of
+loose women, one who keeps the inn where the soldiers drink. These women
+are a definite set. They know what they are, they pretend nothing else.
+They are not prostitutes, but just loose women. They keep to their own
+clique, among men and women, never wanting to compromise anybody else.
+
+And beyond all these there are the Franciscan friars in their brown
+robes, so shy, so silent, so obliterated, as they stand back in the
+shop, waiting to buy the bread for the monastery, waiting obscure and
+neutral, till no one shall be in the shop wanting to be served. The
+village women speak to them in a curious neutral, official, slightly
+contemptuous voice. They answer neutral and humble, though distinctly.
+
+At the theatre, now the play is over, the peasants in their black hats
+and cloaks crowd the hall. Only Pietro, the wharf-lounger, has no cloak,
+and a bit of a cap on the side of his head instead of a black felt hat.
+His clothes are thin and loose on his thin, vigorous, cat-like body, and
+he is cold, but he takes no notice. His hands are always in his pockets,
+his shoulders slightly raised.
+
+The few women slip away home. In the little theatre bar the well-to-do
+young atheists are having another drink. Not that they spend much. A
+tumbler of wine or a glass of vermouth costs a penny. And the wine is
+horrible new stuff. Yet the little baker, Agostino, sits on a bench with
+his pale baby on his knee, putting the wine to its lips. And the baby
+drinks, like a blind fledgeling.
+
+Upstairs, the quality has paid its visits and shaken hands: the Syndaco
+and the well-to-do half-Austrian owners of the woodyard, the Bertolini,
+have ostentatiously shown their mutual friendship; our padrone, the
+Signer Pietro Di Paoli, has visited his relatives the Graziani in the
+box next the stage and has spent two intervals with us in our box;
+meanwhile, his two peasants standing down below, pathetic, thin
+contadini of the old school, like worn stones, have looked up at us as
+if we are the angels in heaven, with a reverential, devotional eye, they
+themselves far away below, standing in the bay at the back, below all.
+
+The chemist and the grocer and the schoolmistress pay calls. They have
+all sat self-consciously posed in the front of their boxes, like framed
+photographs of themselves. The second grocer and the baker visit each
+other. The barber looks in on the carpenter, then drops downstairs among
+the crowd. Class distinctions are cut very fine. As we pass with the
+padrona of the hotel, who is a Bavarian, we stop to speak to our own
+padroni, the Di Paoli. They have a warm handshake and effusive polite
+conversation for us; for Maria Samuelli, a distant bow. We realize
+our mistake.
+
+The barber--not the Siciliano, but flashy little Luigi with the big
+tie-ring and the curls--knows all about the theatre. He says that Enrico
+Persevalli has for his mistress Carina, the servant in _Ghosts_: that
+the thin, gentle, old-looking king in _Hamlet_ is the husband of
+Adelaida, and Carina is their daughter: that the old, sharp, fat little
+body of a queen is Adelaida's mother: that they all like Enrico
+Persevalli, because he is a very clever man: but that the 'Comic', Il
+Brillante, Francesco, is unsatisfied.
+
+In three performances in Epiphany week, the company took two hundred and
+sixty-five francs, which was phenomenal. The manager, Enrico Persevalli,
+and Adelaida pay twenty-four francs for every performance, or every
+evening on which a performance is given, as rent for the theatre,
+including light. The company is completely satisfied with its reception
+on the Lago di Garda.
+
+So it is all over. The Bersaglieri go running all the way home, because
+it is already past half past ten. The night is very dark. About four
+miles up the lake the searchlights of the Austrian border are swinging,
+looking for smugglers. Otherwise the darkness is complete.
+
+
+
+_4_
+
+SAN GAUDENZIO
+
+
+In the autumn the little rosy cyclamens blossom in the shade of this
+west side of the lake. They are very cold and fragrant, and their scent
+seems to belong to Greece, to the Bacchae. They are real flowers of the
+past. They seem to be blossoming in the landscape of Phaedra and Helen.
+They bend down, they brood like little chill fires. They are little
+living myths that I cannot understand.
+
+After the cyclamens the Christmas roses are in bud. It is at this season
+that the cacchi are ripe on the trees in the garden, whole naked trees
+full of lustrous, orange-yellow, paradisal fruit, gleaming against the
+wintry blue sky. The monthly roses still blossom frail and pink, there
+are still crimson and yellow roses. But the vines are bare and the
+lemon-houses shut. And then, mid-winter, the lowest buds of the
+Christmas roses appear under the hedges and rocks and by the streams.
+They are very lovely, these first large, cold, pure buds, like violets,
+like magnolias, but cold, lit up with the light from the snow.
+
+The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine
+is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown,
+and water sounds hoarse in the ravines. It is so still and transcendent,
+the cypress trees poise like flames of forgotten darkness, that should
+have been blown out at the end of the summer. For as we have candles to
+light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the
+darkness aflame in the full sunshine.
+
+Meanwhile, the Christmas roses become many. They rise from their budded,
+intact humbleness near the ground, they rise up, they throw up their
+crystal, they become handsome, they are heaps of confident, mysterious
+whiteness in the shadow of a rocky stream. It is almost uncanny to see
+them. They are the flowers of darkness, white and wonderful
+beyond belief.
+
+Then their radiance becomes soiled and brown, they thaw, break, and
+scatter and vanish away. Already the primroses are coming out, and the
+almond is in bud. The winter is passing away. On the mountains the
+fierce snow gleams apricot gold as evening approaches, golden, apricot,
+but so bright that it is almost frightening. What can be so fiercely
+gleaming when all is shadowy? It is something inhuman and unmitigated
+between heaven and earth.
+
+The heavens are strange and proud all the winter, their progress goes on
+without reference to the dim earth. The dawns come white and
+translucent, the lake is a moonstone in the dark hills, then across the
+lake there stretches a vein of fire, then a whole, orange, flashing
+track over the whiteness. There is the exquisite silent passage of the
+day, and then at evening the afterglow, a huge incandescence of rose,
+hanging above and gleaming, as if it were the presence of a host of
+angels in rapture. It gleams like a rapturous chorus, then passes away,
+and the stars appear, large and flashing.
+
+Meanwhile, the primroses are dawning on the ground, their light is
+growing stronger, spreading over the banks and under the bushes. Between
+the olive roots the violets are out, large, white, grave violets, and
+less serious blue ones. And looking down the bill, among the grey smoke
+of olive leaves, pink puffs of smoke are rising up. It is the almond and
+the apricot trees, it is the Spring.
+
+Soon the primroses are strong on the ground. There is a bank of small,
+frail crocuses shooting the lavender into this spring. And then the
+tussocks and tussocks of primroses are fully out, there is full morning
+everywhere on the banks and roadsides and stream-sides, and around the
+olive roots, a morning of primroses underfoot, with an invisible
+threading of many violets, and then the lovely blue clusters of
+hepatica, really like pieces of blue sky showing through a clarity of
+primrose. The few birds are piping thinly and shyly, the streams sing
+again, there is a strange flowering shrub full of incense, overturned
+flowers of crimson and gold, like Bohemian glass. Between the olive
+roots new grass is coming, day is leaping all clear and coloured from
+the earth, it is full Spring, full first rapture.
+
+Does it pass away, or does it only lose its pristine quality? It deepens
+and intensifies, like experience. The days seem to be darker and richer,
+there is a sense of power in the strong air. On the banks by the lake
+the orchids are out, many, many pale bee-orchids standing clear from the
+short grass over the lake. And in the hollows are the grape hyacinths,
+purple as noon, with the heavy, sensual fragrance of noon. They are
+many-breasted, and full of milk, and ripe, and sun-darkened, like
+many-breasted Diana.
+
+We could not bear to live down in the village any more, now that the
+days opened large and spacious and the evenings drew out in sunshine. We
+could not bear the indoors, when above us the mountains shone in clear
+air. It was time to go up, to climb with the sun.
+
+So after Easter we went to San Gaudenzio. It was three miles away, up
+the winding mule-track that climbed higher and higher along the lake.
+Leaving the last house of the village, the path wound on the steep,
+cliff-like side of the lake, curving into the hollow where the landslip
+had tumbled the rocks in chaos, then out again on to the bluff of a
+headland that hung over the lake.
+
+Thus we came to the tall barred gate of San Gaudenzio, on which was the
+usual little fire-insurance tablet, and then the advertisements for
+beer, 'Birra, Verona', which is becoming a more and more popular drink.
+
+Through the gate, inside the high wall, is the little Garden of Eden, a
+property of three or four acres fairly level upon a headland over the
+lake. The high wall girds it on the land side, and makes it perfectly
+secluded. On the lake-side it is bounded by the sudden drops of the
+land, in sharp banks and terraces, overgrown with ilex and with laurel
+bushes, down to the brink of the cliff, so that the thicket of the first
+declivities seems to safeguard the property.
+
+The pink farm-house stands almost in the centre of the little territory,
+among the olive trees. It is a solid, six-roomed place, about fifty
+years old, having been rebuilt by Paolo's uncle. Here we came to live
+for a time with the Fiori, Maria and Paolo, and their three children,
+Giovanni and Marco and Felicina.
+
+Paolo had inherited, or partly inherited, San Gaudenzio, which had been
+in his family for generations. He was a peasant of fifty-three, very
+grey and wrinkled and worn-looking, but at the same time robust, with
+full strong limbs and a powerful chest. His face was old, but his body
+was solid and powerful. His eyes were blue like upper ice, beautiful. He
+had been a fair-haired man, now he was almost white.
+
+He, was strangely like the pictures of peasants in the northern Italian
+pictures, with the same curious nobility, the same aristocratic, eternal
+look of motionlessness, something statuesque. His head was hard and
+fine, the bone finely constructed, though the skin of his face was loose
+and furrowed with work. His temples had that fine, hard clarity which is
+seen in Mantegna, an almost jewel-like quality.
+
+We all loved Paolo, he was so finished in his being, detached, with an
+almost classic simplicity and gentleness, an eternal kind of sureness.
+There was also something concluded and unalterable about him, something
+inaccessible.
+
+Maria Fiori was different. She was from the plain, like Enrico
+Persevalli and the Bersaglier from the Venetian district. She reminded
+me again of oxen, broad-boned and massive in physique, dark-skinned,
+slow in her soul. But, like the oxen of the plain, she knew her work,
+she knew the other people engaged in the work. Her intelligence was
+attentive and purposive. She had been a housekeeper, a servant, in
+Venice and Verona, before her marriage. She had got the hang of this
+world of commerce and activity, she wanted to master it. But she was
+weighted down by her heavy animal blood.
+
+Paolo and she were the opposite sides of the universe, the light and the
+dark. Yet they lived together now without friction, detached, each
+subordinated in their common relationship. With regard to Maria, Paolo
+omitted himself; Maria omitted herself with regard to Paolo. Their souls
+were silent and detached, completely apart, and silent, quite silent.
+They shared the physical relationship of marriage as if it were
+something beyond them, a third thing.
+
+They had suffered very much in the earlier stages of their connexion.
+Now the storm had gone by, leaving them, as it were, spent. They were
+both by nature passionate, vehement. But the lines of their passion were
+opposite. Hers was the primitive, crude, violent flux of the blood,
+emotional and undiscriminating, but wanting to mix and mingle. His was
+the hard, clear, invulnerable passion of the bones, finely tempered and
+unchangeable. She was the flint and he the steel. But in continual
+striking together they only destroyed each other. The fire was a third
+thing, belonging to neither of them.
+
+She was still heavy and full of desire. She was much younger than he.
+
+'How long did you know your Signora before you were married?' she asked
+me.
+
+'Six weeks,' I said.
+
+'_Il Paolo e me, venti giorni, tre settimane_,' she cried vehemently.
+Three weeks they had known each other when they married. She still
+triumphed in the fact. So did Paolo. But it was past, strangely and
+rather terribly past.
+
+What did they want when they came together, Paolo and she? He was a man
+over thirty, she was a woman of twenty-three. They were both violent in
+desire and of strong will. They came together at once, like two
+wrestlers almost matched in strength. Their meetings must have been
+splendid. Giovanni, the eldest child, was a tall lad of sixteen, with
+soft brown hair and grey eyes, and a clarity of brow, and the same calm
+simplicity of bearing which made Paolo so complete; but the son had at
+the same time a certain brownness of skin, a heaviness of blood, which
+he had from his mother. Paolo was so clear and translucent.
+
+In Giovanni the fusion of the parents was perfect, he was a perfect
+spark from the flint and steel. There was in Paolo a subtle intelligence
+in feeling, a delicate appreciation of the other person. But the mind
+was unintelligent, he could not grasp a new order. Maria Fiori was much
+sharper and more adaptable to the ways of the world. Paolo had an almost
+glass-like quality, fine and clear and perfectly tempered; but he was
+also finished and brittle. Maria was much coarser, more vulgar, but also
+she was more human, more fertile, with crude potentiality. His passion
+was too fixed in its motion, hers too loose and overwhelming.
+
+But Giovanni was beautiful, gentle, and courtly like Paolo, but warm,
+like Maria, ready to flush like a girl with anger or confusion. He stood
+straight and tall, and seemed to look into the far distance with his
+clear grey eyes. Yet also he could look at one and touch one with his
+look, he could meet one. Paolo's blue eyes were like the eyes of the old
+spinning-woman, clear and blue and belonging to the mountains, their
+vision seemed to end in space, abstract. They reminded me of the eyes of
+the eagle, which looks into the sun, and which teaches its young to do
+the same, although they are unwilling.
+
+Marco, the second son, was thirteen years old. He was his mother's
+favourite, Giovanni loved his father best. But Marco was his mother's
+son, with the same brown-gold and red complexion, like a pomegranate,
+and coarse black hair, and brown eyes like pebble, like agate, like an
+animal's eyes. He had the same broad, bovine figure, though he was only
+a boy. But there was some discrepancy in him. He was not unified, he had
+no identity.
+
+He was strong and full of animal life, but always aimless, as though his
+wits scarcely controlled him. But he loved his mother with a
+fundamental, generous, undistinguishing love. Only he always forgot what
+he was going to do. He was much more sensitive than Maria, more shy and
+reluctant. But his shyness, his sensitiveness only made him more aimless
+and awkward, a tiresome clown, slack and uncontrolled, witless. All day
+long his mother shouted and shrilled and scolded at him, or hit him
+angrily. He did not mind, he came up like a cork, warm and roguish and
+curiously appealing. She loved him with a fierce protective love,
+grounded on pain. There was such a split, a contrariety in his soul, one
+part reacting against the other, which landed him always into trouble.
+
+It was when Marco was a baby that Paolo had gone to America. They were
+poor on San Gaudenzio. There were the few olive trees, the grapes, and
+the fruit; there was the one cow. But these scarcely made a living.
+Neither was Maria content with the real peasants' lot any more, polenta
+at midday and vegetable soup in the evening, and no way out, nothing to
+look forward to, no future, only this eternal present. She had been in
+service, and had eaten bread and drunk coffee, and known the flux and
+variable chance of life. She had departed from the old static
+conception. She knew what one might be, given a certain chance. The
+fixture was the thing she militated against. So Paolo went to America,
+to California, into the gold mines.
+
+Maria wanted the future, the endless possibility of life on earth. She
+wanted her sons to be freer, to achieve a new plane of living. The
+peasant's life was a slave's life, she said, railing against the poverty
+and the drudgery. And it was quite true, Paolo and Giovanni worked
+twelve and fourteen hours a day at heavy laborious work that would have
+broken an Englishman. And there was nothing at the end of it. Yet Paolo
+was even happy so. This was the truth to him.
+
+It was the mother who wanted things different. It was she who railed and
+railed against the miserable life of the peasants. When we were going to
+throw to the fowls a dry broken penny roll of white bread, Maria said,
+with anger and shame and resentment in her voice: 'Give it to Marco, he
+will eat it. It isn't too dry for him.'
+
+White bread was a treat for them even now, when everybody eats bread.
+And Maria Fiori hated it, that bread should be a treat to her children,
+when it was the meanest food of all the rest of the world. She was in
+opposition to this order. She did not want her sons to be peasants,
+fixed and static as posts driven in the earth. She wanted them to be in
+the great flux of life in the midst of all possibilities. So she at
+length sent Paolo to America to the gold-mines. Meanwhile, she covered
+the wall of her parlour with picture postcards, to bring the outer world
+of cities and industries into her house.
+
+Paolo was entirely remote from Maria's world. He had not yet even
+grasped the fact of money, not thoroughly. He reckoned in land and olive
+trees. So he had the old fatalistic attitude to his circumstances, even
+to his food. The earth was the Lord's and the fulness thereof; also the
+leanness thereof. Paolo could only do his part and leave the rest. If he
+ate in plenty, having oil and wine and sausage in the house, and plenty
+of maize-meal, he was glad with the Lord. If he ate meagrely, of poor
+polenta, that was fate, it was the skies that ruled these things, and no
+man ruled the skies. He took his fate as it fell from the skies.
+
+Maria was exorbitant about money. She would charge us all she could for
+what we had and for what was done for us.
+
+Yet she was not mean in her soul. In her soul she was in a state of
+anger because of her own closeness. It was a violation to her strong
+animal nature. Yet her mind had wakened to the value of money. She knew
+she could alter her position, the position of her children, by virtue of
+money. She knew it was only money that made the difference between
+master and servant. And this was all the difference she would
+acknowledge. So she ruled her life according to money. Her supreme
+passion was to be mistress rather than servant, her supreme aspiration
+for her children was that in the end they might be masters and
+not servants.
+
+Paolo was untouched by all this. For him there was some divinity about a
+master which even America had not destroyed. If we came in for supper
+whilst the family was still at table he would have the children at once
+take their plates to the wall, he would have Maria at once set the table
+for us, though their own meal were never finished. And this was not
+servility, it was the dignity of a religious conception. Paolo regarded
+us as belonging to the Signoria, those who are elect, near to God. And
+this was part of his religious service. His life was a ritual. It was
+very beautiful, but it made me unhappy, the purity of his spirit was so
+sacred and the actual facts seemed such a sacrilege to it. Maria was
+nearer to the actual truth when she said that money was the only
+distinction. But Paolo had hold of an eternal truth, where hers was
+temporal. Only Paolo misapplied this eternal truth. He should not have
+given Giovanni the inferior status and a fat, mean Italian tradesman the
+superior. That was false, a real falsity. Maria knew it and hated it.
+But Paolo could not distinguish between the accident of riches and the
+aristocracy of the spirit. So Maria rejected him altogether, and went to
+the other extreme. We were all human beings like herself; naked, there
+was no distinction between us, no higher nor lower. But we were
+possessed of more money than she. And she had to steer her course
+between these two conceptions. The money alone made the real
+distinction, the separation; the being, the life made the common level.
+
+Paolo had the curious peasant's avarice also, but it was not meanness.
+It was a sort of religious conservation of his own power, his own self.
+Fortunately he could leave all business transactions on our account to
+Maria, so that his relation with us was purely ritualistic. He would
+have given me anything, trusting implicitly that I would fulfil my own
+nature as Signore, one of those more godlike, nearer the light of
+perfection than himself, a peasant. It was pure bliss to him to bring us
+the first-fruit of the garden, it was like laying it on an altar.
+
+And his fulfilment was in a fine, subtle, exquisite relationship, not of
+manners, but subtle interappreciation. He worshipped a finer
+understanding and a subtler tact. A further fineness and dignity and
+freedom in bearing was to him an approach towards the divine, so he
+loved men best of all, they fulfilled his soul. A woman was always a
+woman, and sex was a low level whereon he did not esteem himself. But a
+man, a doer, the instrument of God, he was really godlike.
+
+Paolo was a Conservative. For him the world was established and divine
+in its establishment. His vision grasped a small circle. A finer nature,
+a higher understanding, took in a greater circle, comprehended the
+whole. So that when Paolo was in relation to a man of further vision, he
+himself was extended towards the whole. Thus he was fulfilled. And his
+initial assumption was that every signore, every gentleman, was a man of
+further, purer vision than himself. This assumption was false. But
+Maria's assumption, that no one had a further vision, no one was more
+elect than herself, that we are all one flesh and blood and being, was
+even more false. Paolo was mistaken in actual life, but Maria was
+ultimately mistaken.
+
+Paolo, conservative as he was, believing that a priest must be a priest
+of God, yet very rarely went to church. And he used the religious oaths
+that Maria hated, even _Porca-Maria_. He always used oaths, either
+Bacchus or God or Mary or the Sacrament. Maria was always offended. Yet
+it was she who, in her soul, jeered at the Church and at religion. She
+wanted the human society as the absolute, without religious
+abstractions. So Paolo's oaths enraged her, because of their profanity,
+she said. But it was really because of their subscribing to another
+superhuman order. She jeered at the clerical people. She made a loud
+clamour of derision when the parish priest of the village above went
+down to the big village on the lake, and across the piazza, the quay,
+with two pigs in a sack on his shoulder. This was a real picture of the
+sacred minister to her.
+
+One day, when a storm had blown down an olive tree in front of the
+house, and Paolo and Giovanni were beginning to cut it up, this same
+priest of Mugiano came to San Gaudenzio. He was an iron-grey, thin,
+disreputable-looking priest, very talkative and loud and queer. He
+seemed like an old ne'er-do-well in priests' black, and he talked
+loudly, almost to himself, as drunken people do. At once _he_ must show
+the Fiori how to cut up the tree, he must have the axe from Paolo. He
+shouted to Maria for a glass of wine. She brought it out to him with a
+sort of insolent deference, insolent contempt of the man and traditional
+deference to the cloth. The priest drained the tumblerful of wine at one
+drink, his thin throat with its Adam's apple working. And he did not pay
+the penny.
+
+Then he stripped off his cassock and put away his hat, and, a ludicrous
+figure in ill-fitting black knee-breeches and a not very clean shirt, a
+red handkerchief round his neck, he proceeded to give great extravagant
+blows at the tree. He was like a caricature. In the doorway Maria was
+encouraging him rather jeeringly, whilst she winked at me. Marco was
+stifling his hysterical amusement in his mother's apron, and prancing
+with glee. Paolo and Giovanni stood by the fallen tree, very grave and
+unmoved, inscrutable, abstract. Then the youth came away to the doorway,
+with a flush mounting on his face and a grimace distorting its
+youngness. Only Paolo, unmoved and detached, stood by the tree with
+unchanging, abstract face, very strange, his eyes fixed in the ageless
+stare which is so characteristic.
+
+Meanwhile the priest swung drunken blows at the tree, his thin buttocks
+bending in the green-black broadcloth, supported on thin shanks, and
+thin throat growing dull purple in the red-knotted kerchief.
+Nevertheless he was doing the job. His face was wet with sweat. He
+wanted another glass of wine.
+
+He took no notice of us. He was strangely a local, even a mountebank
+figure, but entirely local, an appurtenance of the district.
+
+It was Maria who jeeringly told us the story of the priest, who shrugged
+her shoulders to imply that he was a contemptible figure. Paolo sat with
+the abstract look on his face, as of one who hears and does not hear, is
+not really concerned. He never opposed or contradicted her, but stayed
+apart. It was she who was violent and brutal in her ways. But sometimes
+Paolo went into a rage, and then Maria, everybody, was afraid. It was a
+white heavy rage, when his blue eyes shone unearthly, and his mouth
+opened with a curious drawn blindness of the old Furies. There was
+something of the cruelty of a falling mass of snow, heavy, horrible.
+Maria drew away, there was a silence. Then the avalanche was finished.
+
+They must have had some cruel fights before they learned to withdraw
+from each other so completely. They must have begotten Marco in hatred,
+terrible disintegrated opposition and otherness. And it was after this,
+after the child of their opposition was born, that Paolo went away to
+California, leaving his San Gaudenzio, travelling with several
+companions, like blind beasts, to Havre, and thence to New York, then to
+California. He stayed five years in the gold-mines, in a wild valley,
+living with a gang of Italians in a town of corrugated iron.
+
+All the while he had never really left San Gaudenzio. I asked him, 'Used
+you to think of it, the lake, the Monte Baldo, the laurel trees down the
+slope?' He tried to see what I wanted to know. Yes, he said--but
+uncertainly. I could see that he had never been really homesick. It had
+been very wretched on the ship going from Havre to New York. That he
+told me about. And he told me about the gold-mines, the galleries, the
+valley, the huts in the valley. But he had never really fretted for San
+Gaudenzio whilst he was in California.
+
+In real truth he was at San Gaudenzio all the time, his fate was riveted
+there. His going away was an excursion from reality, a kind of
+sleep-walking. He left his own reality there in the soil above the lake
+of Garda. That his body was in California, what did it matter? It was
+merely for a time, and for the sake of his own earth, his land. He would
+pay off the mortgage. But the gate at home was his gate all the time,
+his hand was on the latch.
+
+As for Maria, he had felt his duty towards her. She was part of his
+little territory, the rooted centre of the world. He sent her home the
+money. But it did not occur to him, in his soul, to miss her. He wanted
+her to be safe with the children, that was all. In his flesh perhaps he
+missed the woman. But his spirit was even more completely isolated since
+marriage. Instead of having united with each other, they had made each
+other more terribly distinct and separate. He could live alone
+eternally. It was his condition. His sex was functional, like eating and
+drinking. To take a woman, a prostitute at the camp, or not to take her,
+was no more vitally important than to get drunk or not to get drunk of a
+Sunday. And fairly often on Sunday Paolo got drunk. His world remained
+unaltered.
+
+But Maria suffered more bitterly. She was a young, powerful, passionate
+woman, and she was unsatisfied body and soul. Her soul's satisfaction
+became a bodily unsatisfaction. Her blood was heavy, violent, anarchic,
+insisting on the equality of the blood in all, and therefore on her own
+absolute right to satisfaction.
+
+She took a wine licence for San Gaudenzio, and she sold wine. There were
+many scandals about her. Somehow it did not matter very much, outwardly.
+The authorities were too divided among themselves to enforce public
+opinion. Between the clerical party and the radicals and the socialists,
+what canons were left that were absolute? Besides, these wild villages
+had always been ungoverned.
+
+Yet Maria suffered. Even she, according to her conviction belonged to
+Paolo. And she felt betrayed, betrayed and deserted. The iron had gone
+deep into her soul. Paolo had deserted her, she had been betrayed to
+other men for five years. There was something cruel and implacable in
+life. She sat sullen and heavy, for all her quick activity. Her soul was
+sullen and heavy.
+
+I could never believe Felicina was Paolo's child. She was an
+unprepossessing little girl, affected, cold, selfish, foolish. Maria and
+Paolo, with real Italian greatness, were warm and natural towards the
+child in her. But they did not love her in their very souls, she was the
+fruit of ash to them. And this must have been the reason that she was so
+self-conscious and foolish and affected, small child that she was.
+
+Paolo had come back from America a year before she was born--a year
+before she was born, Maria insisted. The husband and wife lived together
+in a relationship of complete negation. In his soul he was sad for her,
+and in her soul she felt annulled. He sat at evening in the
+chimney-seat, smoking, always pleasant and cheerful, not for a moment
+thinking he was unhappy. It had all taken place in his subconsciousness.
+But his eyebrows and eyelids were lifted in a kind of vacancy, his blue
+eyes were round and somehow finished, though he was so gentle and
+vigorous in body. But the very quick of him was killed. He was like a
+ghost in the house, with his loose throat and powerful limbs, his open,
+blue extinct eyes, and his musical, slightly husky voice, that seemed to
+sound out of the past.
+
+And Maria, stout and strong and handsome like a peasant woman, went
+about as if there were a weight on her, and her voice was high and
+strident. She, too, was finished in her life. But she remained unbroken,
+her will was like a hammer that destroys the old form.
+
+Giovanni was patiently labouring to learn a little English. Paolo knew
+only four or five words, the chief of which were 'a'right', 'boss',
+'bread', and 'day'. The youth had these by heart, and was studying a
+little more. He was very graceful and lovable, but he found it difficult
+to learn. A confused light, like hot tears, would come into his eyes
+when he had again forgotten the phrase. But he carried the paper about
+with him, and he made steady progress.
+
+He would go to America, he also. Not for anything would he stay in San
+Gaudenzio. His dream was to be gone. He would come back. The world was
+not San Gaudenzio to Giovanni.
+
+The old order, the order of Paolo and of Pietro di Paoli, the
+aristocratic order of the supreme God, God the Father, the Lord, was
+passing away from the beautiful little territory. The household no
+longer receives its food, oil and wine and maize, from out of the earth
+in the motion of fate. The earth is annulled, and money takes its place.
+The landowner, who is the lieutenant of God and of Fate, like Abraham,
+he, too, is annulled. There is now the order of the rich, which
+supersedes the order of the Signoria.
+
+It is passing away from Italy as it has passed from England. The peasant
+is passing away, the workman is taking his place. The stability is gone.
+Paolo is a ghost, Maria is the living body. And the new order means
+sorrow for the Italian more even than it has meant for us. But he will
+have the new order.
+
+San Gaudenzio is already becoming a thing of the past. Below the house,
+where the land drops in sharp slips to the sheer cliff's edge, over
+which it is Maria's constant fear that Felicina will tumble, there are
+the deserted lemon gardens of the little territory, snug down below.
+They are invisible till one descends by tiny paths, sheer down into
+them. And there they stand, the pillars and walls erect, but a dead
+emptiness prevailing, lemon trees all dead, gone, a few vines in their
+place. It is only twenty years since the lemon trees finally perished of
+a disease and were not renewed. But the deserted terrace, shut between
+great walls, descending in their openness full to the south, to the lake
+and the mountain opposite, seem more terrible than Pompeii in their
+silence and utter seclusion. The grape hyacinths flower in the cracks,
+the lizards run, this strange place hangs suspended and forgotten,
+forgotten for ever, its erect pillars utterly meaningless.
+
+I used to sit and write in the great loft of the lemon-house, high up,
+far, far from the ground, the open front giving across the lake and the
+mountain snow opposite, flush with twilight. The old matting and boards,
+the old disused implements of lemon culture made shadows in the deserted
+place. Then there would come the call from the back, away above:
+'_Venga, venga mangiare_.'
+
+We ate in the kitchen, where the olive and laurel wood burned in the
+open fireplace. It was always soup in the evening. Then we played games
+or cards, all playing; or there was singing, with the accordion, and
+sometimes a rough mountain peasant with a guitar.
+
+But it is all passing away. Giovanni is in America, unless he has come
+back to the War. He will not want to live in San Gaudenzio when he is a
+man, he says. He and Marco will not spend their lives wringing a little
+oil and wine out of the rocky soil, even if they are not killed in the
+fighting which is going on at the end of the lake. In my loft by the
+lemon-houses now I should hear the guns. And Giovanni kissed me with a
+kind of supplication when I went on to the steamer, as if he were
+beseeching for a soul. His eyes were bright and clear and lit up with
+courage. He will make a good fight for the new soul he wants--that is,
+if they do not kill him in this War.
+
+
+
+_5_
+
+THE DANCE
+
+
+Maria had no real licence for San Gaudenzio, yet the peasants always
+called for wine. It is easy to arrange in Italy. The penny is paid
+another time.
+
+The wild old road that skirts the lake-side, scrambling always higher as
+the precipice becomes steeper, climbing and winding to the villages
+perched high up, passes under the high boundary-wall of San Gaudenzio,
+between that and the ruined church. But the road went just as much
+between the vines and past the house as outside, under the wall; for the
+high gates were always open, and men or women and mules come into the
+property to call at the door of the homestead. There was a loud shout,
+'Ah--a--a--ah--Mari--a. O--O--Oh Pa'o!' from outside, another wild,
+inarticulate cry from within, and one of the Fiori appeared in the
+doorway to hail the newcomer.
+
+It was usually a man, sometimes a peasant from Mugiano, high up,
+sometimes a peasant from the wilds of the mountain, a wood-cutter, or a
+charcoal-burner. He came in and sat in the house-place, his glass of
+wine in his hand between his knees, or on the floor between his feet,
+and he talked in a few wild phrases, very shy, like a hawk indoors, and
+unintelligible in his dialect.
+
+Sometimes we had a dance. Then, for the wine to drink, three men came
+with mandolines and guitars, and sat in a corner playing their rapid
+tunes, while all danced on the dusty brick floor of the little parlour.
+No strange women were invited, only men; the young bloods from the big
+village on the lake, the wild men from above. They danced the slow,
+trailing, lilting polka-waltz round and round the small room, the
+guitars and mandolines twanging rapidly, the dust rising from the soft
+bricks. There were only the two English women: so men danced with men,
+as the Italians love to do. They love even better to dance with men,
+with a dear blood-friend, than with women.
+
+'It's better like this, two men?' Giovanni says to me, his blue eyes
+hot, his face curiously tender.
+
+The wood-cutters and peasants take off their coats, their throats are
+bare. They dance with strange intentness, particularly if they have for
+partner an English Signora. Their feet in thick boots are curiously
+swift and significant. And it is strange to see the Englishwomen, as
+they dance with the peasants transfigured with a kind of brilliant
+surprise. All the while the peasants are very courteous, but quiet. They
+see the women dilate and flash, they think they have found a footing,
+they are certain. So the male dancers are quiet, but even grandiloquent,
+their feet nimble, their bodies wild and confident.
+
+They are at a loss when the two English Signoras move together and laugh
+excitedly at the end of the dance.
+
+'Isn't it fine?'
+
+'Fine! Their arms are like iron, carrying you round.'
+
+'Yes! Yes! And the muscles on their shoulders! I never knew there were
+such muscles! I'm almost frightened.'
+
+'But it's fine, isn't it? I'm getting into the dance.'
+
+'Yes--yes--you've only to let them take you.'
+
+Then the glasses are put down, the guitars give their strange, vibrant,
+almost painful summons, and the dance begins again.
+
+It is a strange dance, strange and lilting, and changing as the music
+changed. But it had always a kind of leisurely dignity, a trailing kind
+of polka-waltz, intimate, passionate, yet never hurried, never violent
+in its passion, always becoming more intense. The women's faces changed
+to a kind of transported wonder, they were in the very rhythm of
+delight. From the soft bricks of the floor the red ochre rose in a thin
+cloud of dust, making hazy the shadowy dancers; the three musicians, in
+their black hats and their cloaks, sat obscurely in the corner, making a
+music that came quicker and quicker, making a dance that grew swifter
+and more intense, more subtle, the men seeming to fly and to implicate
+other strange inter-rhythmic dance into the women, the women drifting
+and palpitating as if their souls shook and resounded to a breeze that
+was subtly rushing upon them, through them; the men worked their feet,
+their thighs swifter, more vividly, the music came to an almost
+intolerable climax, there was a moment when the dance passed into a
+possession, the men caught up the women and swung them from the earth,
+leapt with them for a second, and then the next phase of the dance had
+begun, slower again, more subtly interwoven, taking perfect, oh,
+exquisite delight in every interrelated movement, a rhythm within a
+rhythm, a subtle approaching and drawing nearer to a climax, nearer,
+till, oh, there was the surpassing lift and swing of the women, when the
+woman's body seemed like a boat lifted over the powerful, exquisite wave
+of the man's body, perfect, for a moment, and then once more the slow,
+intense, nearer movement of the dance began, always nearer, nearer,
+always to a more perfect climax.
+
+And the women waited as if in transport for the climax, when they would
+be flung into a movement surpassing all movement. They were flung, borne
+away, lifted like a boat on a supreme wave, into the zenith and nave of
+the heavens, consummate.
+
+Then suddenly the dance crashed to an end, and the dancers stood
+stranded, lost, bewildered, on a strange shore. The air was full of red
+dust, half-lit by the lamp on the wall; the players in the corner were
+putting down their instruments to take up their glasses.
+
+And the dancers sat round the wall, crowding in the little room, faint
+with the transport of repeated ecstasy. There was a subtle smile on the
+face of the men, subtle, knowing, so finely sensual that the conscious
+eyes could scarcely look at it. And the women were dazed, like creatures
+dazzled by too much light. The light was still on their faces, like a
+blindness, a reeling, like a transfiguration. The men were bringing
+wine, on a little tin tray, leaning with their proud, vivid loins, their
+faces flickering with the same subtle smile. Meanwhile, Maria Fiori was
+splashing water, much water, on the red floor. There was the smell of
+water among the glowing, transfigured men and women who sat gleaming in
+another world, round the walls.
+
+The peasants have chosen their women. For the dark, handsome
+Englishwoman, who looks like a slightly malignant Madonna, comes Il
+Duro; for the '_bella bionda_', the wood-cutter. But the peasants have
+always to take their turn after the young well-to-do men from the
+village below.
+
+Nevertheless, they are confident. They cannot understand the
+middle-class diffidence of the young men who wear collars and ties and
+finger-rings.
+
+The wood-cutter from the mountain is of medium height, dark, thin, and
+hard as a hatchet, with eyes that are black like the very flaming thrust
+of night. He is quite a savage. There is something strange about his
+dancing, the violent way he works one shoulder. He has a wooden leg,
+from the knee-joint. Yet he dances well, and is inordinately proud. He
+is fierce as a bird, and hard with energy as a thunderbolt. He will
+dance with the blonde signora. But he never speaks. He is like some
+violent natural phenomenon rather than a person. The woman begins to
+wilt a little in his possession.
+
+'_E bello--il ballo?_' he asked at length, one direct, flashing
+question.
+
+'_Si--molto bello_,' cries the woman, glad to have speech again.
+
+The eyes of the wood-cutter flash like actual possession. He seems now
+to have come into his own. With all his senses, he is dominant, sure.
+
+He is inconceivably vigorous in body, and his dancing is almost perfect,
+with a little catch in it, owing to his lameness, which brings almost a
+pure intoxication. Every muscle in his body is supple as steel, supple,
+as strong as thunder, and yet so quick, so delicately swift, it is
+almost unbearable. As he draws near to the swing, the climax, the
+ecstasy, he seems to lie in wait, there is a sense of a great strength
+crouching ready. Then it rushes forth, liquid, perfect, transcendent,
+the woman swoons over in the dance, and it goes on, enjoyment, infinite,
+incalculable enjoyment. He is like a god, a strange natural phenomenon,
+most intimate and compelling, wonderful.
+
+But he is not a human being. The woman, somewhere shocked in her
+independent soul, begins to fall away from him. She has another being,
+which he has not touched, and which she will fall back upon. The dance
+is over, she will fall back on herself. It is perfect, too perfect.
+
+During the next dance, while she is in the power of the educated Ettore,
+a perfect and calculated voluptuary, who knows how much he can get out
+of this Northern woman, and only how much, the wood-cutter stands on the
+edge of the darkness, in the open doorway, and watches. He is fixed upon
+her, established, perfect. And all the while she is aware of the
+insistent hawk-like poising of the face of the wood-cutter, poised on
+the edge of the darkness, in the doorway, in possession,
+unrelinquishing.
+
+And she is angry. There is something stupid, absurd, in the hard,
+talon-like eyes watching so fiercely and so confidently in the doorway,
+sure, unmitigated. Has the creature no sense?
+
+The woman reacts from him. For some time she will take no notice of him.
+But he waits, fixed. Then she comes near to him, and his will seems to
+take hold of her. He looks at her with a strange, proud, inhuman
+confidence, as if his influence with her was already accomplished.
+
+'_Venga--venga un po'_,' he says, jerking his head strangely to the
+darkness.
+
+'What?' she replies, and passes shaken and dilated and brilliant,
+consciously ignoring him, passes away among the others, among those
+who are safe.
+
+There is food in the kitchen, great hunks of bread, sliced sausage that
+Maria has made, wine, and a little coffee. But only the quality come to
+eat. The peasants may not come in. There is eating and drinking in the
+little house, the guitars are silent. It is eleven o'clock.
+
+Then there is singing, the strange bestial singing of these hills.
+Sometimes the guitars can play an accompaniment, but usually not. Then
+the men lift up their heads and send out the high, half-howling music,
+astounding. The words are in dialect. They argue among themselves for a
+moment: will the Signoria understand? They sing. The Signoria does not
+understand in the least. So with a strange, slightly malignant triumph,
+the men sing all the verses of their song, sitting round the walls of
+the little parlour. Their throats move, their faces have a slight
+mocking smile. The boy capers in the doorway like a faun, with glee, his
+straight black hair falling over his forehead. The elder brother sits
+straight and flushed, but even his eyes glitter with a kind of yellow
+light of laughter. Paolo also sits quiet, with the invisible smile on
+his face.' Only Maria, large and active, prospering now, keeps
+collected, ready to order a shrill silence in the same way as she orders
+the peasants, violently, to keep their places.
+
+The boy comes to me and says:
+
+'Do you know, Signore, what they are singing?'
+
+'No,' I say.
+
+So he capers with furious glee. The men with the watchful eyes, all
+roused, sit round the wall and sing more distinctly:
+
+    _Si verra la primavera
+    Fiorann' le mandoline,
+    Vienn' di basso le Trentine
+    Coi 'taliani far' l'amor._
+
+But the next verses are so improper that I pretend not to understand.
+The women, with wakened, dilated faces, are listening, listening hard,
+their two faces beautiful in their attention, as if listening to
+something magical, a long way off. And the men sitting round the wall
+sing more plainly, coming nearer to the correct Italian. The song comes
+loud and vibrating and maliciously from their reedy throats, it
+penetrates everybody. The foreign women can understand the sound, they
+can feel the malicious, suggestive mockery. But they cannot catch the
+words. The smile becomes more dangerous on the faces of the men.
+
+Then Maria Fiori sees that I have understood, and she cries, in her
+loud, overriding voice:
+
+'_Basta--basta._
+
+The men get up, straighten their bodies with a curious, offering
+movement. The guitars and mandolines strike the vibrating strings. But
+the vague Northern reserve has come over the Englishwomen. They dance
+again, but without the fusion in the dance. They have had enough.
+
+The musicians are thanked, they rise and go into the night. The men pass
+off in pairs. But the wood-cutter, whose name and whose nickname I could
+never hear, still hovered on the edge of the darkness.
+
+Then Maria sent him also away, complaining that he was too wild,
+_proprio selvatico_, and only the 'quality' remained, the well-to-do
+youths from below. There was a little more coffee, and a talking, a
+story of a man who had fallen over a declivity in a lonely part going
+home drunk in the evening, and had lain unfound for eighteen hours. Then
+a story of a donkey who had kicked a youth in the chest and killed him.
+
+But the women were tired, they would go to bed. Still the two young men
+would not go away. We all went out to look at the night.
+
+The stars were very bright overhead, the mountain opposite and the
+mountains behind us faintly outlined themselves on the sky. Below, the
+lake was a black gulf. A little wind blew cold from the Adige.
+
+In the morning the visitors had gone. They had insisted on staying the
+night. They had eaten eight eggs each and much bread at one o'clock in
+the morning. Then they had gone to sleep, lying on the floor in the
+sitting-room.
+
+In the early sunshine they had drunk coffee and gone down to the village
+on the lake. Maria was very pleased. She would have made a good deal of
+money. The young men were rich. Her cupidity seemed like her
+very blossom.
+
+
+
+_6_
+
+IL DURO
+
+
+The first time I saw Il Duro was on a sunny day when there came up a
+party of pleasure-makers to San Gaudenzio. They were three women and
+three men. The women were in cotton frocks, one a large, dark, florid
+woman in pink, the other two rather insignificant. The men I scarcely
+noticed at first, except that two were young and one elderly.
+
+They were a queer party, even on a feast day, coming up purely for
+pleasure, in the morning, strange, and slightly uncertain, advancing
+between the vines. They greeted Maria and Paolo in loud, coarse voices.
+There was something blowsy and uncertain and hesitating about the women
+in particular, which made one at once notice them.
+
+Then a picnic was arranged for them out of doors, on the grass. They sat
+just in front of the house, under the olive tree, beyond the well. It
+should have been pretty, the women in their cotton frocks, and their
+friends, sitting with wine and food in the spring sunshine. But somehow
+it was not: it was hard and slightly ugly.
+
+But since they were picnicking out of doors, we must do so too. We were
+at once envious. But Maria was a little unwilling, and then she set a
+table for us.
+
+The strange party did not speak to us, they seemed slightly uneasy and
+angry at our presence. I asked Maria who they were. She lifted her
+shoulders, and, after a second's cold pause, said they were people from
+down below, and then, in her rather strident, shrill, slightly bitter,
+slightly derogatory voice, she added:
+
+'They are not people for you, signore. You don't know them.'
+
+She spoke slightly angrily and contemptuously of them, rather
+protectively of me. So that vaguely I gathered that they were not quite
+'respectable'.
+
+Only one man came into the house. He was very handsome, beautiful
+rather, a man of thirty-two or-three, with a clear golden skin, and
+perfectly turned face, something godlike. But the expression was
+strange. His hair was jet black and fine and smooth, glossy as a bird's
+wing, his brows were beautifully drawn, calm above his grey eyes, that
+had long dark lashes.
+
+His eyes, however, had a sinister light in them, a pale, slightly
+repelling gleam, very much like a god's pale-gleaming eyes, with the
+same vivid pallor. And all his face had the slightly malignant,
+suffering look of a satyr. Yet he was very beautiful.
+
+He walked quickly and surely, with his head rather down, passing from
+his desire to his object, absorbed, yet curiously indifferent, as if the
+transit were in a strange world, as if none of what he was doing were
+worth the while. Yet he did it for his own pleasure, and the light on
+his face, a pale, strange gleam through his clear skin, remained like a
+translucent smile, unchanging as time.
+
+He seemed familiar with the household, he came and fetched wine at his
+will. Maria was angry with him. She railed loudly and violently. He was
+unchanged. He went out with the wine to the party on the grass. Maria
+regarded them all with some hostility.
+
+They drank a good deal out there in the sunshine. The women and the
+older man talked floridly. Il Duro crouched at the feast in his curious
+fashion--he had strangely flexible loins, upon which he seemed to crouch
+forward. But he was separate, like an animal that remains quite single,
+no matter where it is.
+
+The party remained until about two o'clock. Then, slightly flushed, it
+moved on in a ragged group up to the village beyond. I do not know if
+they went to one of the inns of the stony village, or to the large
+strange house which belonged to the rich young grocer of the village
+below, a house kept only for feasts and riots, uninhabited for the most
+part. Maria would tell me nothing about them. Only the young well-to-do
+grocer, who had lived in Vienna, the Bertolotti, came later in the
+afternoon inquiring for the party.
+
+And towards sunset I saw the elderly man of the group stumbling home
+very drunk down the path, after the two women, who had gone on in front.
+Then Paolo sent Giovanni to see the drunken one safely past the
+landslip, which was dangerous. Altogether it was an unsatisfactory
+business, very much like any other such party in any other country.
+
+Then in the evening Il Duro came in. His name is Faustino, but everybody
+in the village has a nickname, which is almost invariably used. He came
+in and asked for supper. We had all eaten. So he ate a little food alone
+at the table, whilst we sat round the fire.
+
+Afterwards we played 'Up, Jenkins'. That was the one game we played with
+the peasants, except that exciting one of theirs, which consists in
+shouting in rapid succession your guesses at the number of fingers
+rapidly spread out and shut into the hands again upon the table.
+
+Il Duro joined in the game. And that was because he had been in America,
+and now was rich. He felt he could come near to the strange signori. But
+he was always inscrutable.
+
+It was queer to look at the hands spread on the table: the Englishwomen,
+having rings on their soft fingers; the large fresh hands of the elder
+boy, the brown paws of the younger; Paolo's distorted great hard hands
+of a peasant; and the big, dark brown, animal, shapely hands
+of Faustino.
+
+He had been in America first for two years and then for five
+years--seven years altogether--but he only spoke a very little English.
+He was always with Italians. He had served chiefly in a flag factory,
+and had had very little to do save to push a trolley with flags from the
+dyeing-room to the drying-room I believe it was this.
+
+Then he had come home from America with a fair amount of money, he had
+taken his uncle's garden, had inherited his uncle's little house, and he
+lived quite alone.
+
+He was rich, Maria said, shouting in her strident voice. He at once
+disclaimed it, peasant-wise. But before the signori he was glad also to
+appear rich. He was mean, that was more, Maria cried, half-teasing, half
+getting at him.
+
+He attended to his garden, grew vegetables all the year round, lived in
+his little house, and in spring made good money as a vine-grafter: he
+was an expert vine-grafter.
+
+After the boys had gone to bed he sat and talked to me. He was curiously
+attractive and curiously beautiful, but somehow like stone in his clear
+colouring and his clear-cut face. His temples, with the black hair, were
+distinct and fine as a work of art.
+
+But always his eyes had this strange, half-diabolic, half-tortured pale
+gleam, like a goat's, and his mouth was shut almost uglily, his cheeks
+stern. His moustache was brown, his teeth strong and spaced. The women
+said it was a pity his moustache was brown.
+
+'_Peccato!--sa, per bellezza, i baffi neri--ah-h!_'
+
+Then a long-drawn exclamation of voluptuous appreciation.
+
+'You live quite alone?' I said to him.
+
+He did. And even when he had been ill he was alone. He had been ill two
+years before. His cheeks seemed to harden like marble and to become pale
+at the thought. He was afraid, like marble with fear.
+
+'But why,' I said, 'why do you live alone? You are sad--_e triste_.'
+
+He looked at me with his queer, pale eyes. I felt a great static misery
+in him, something very strange.
+
+'_Triste!_' he repeated, stiffening up, hostile. I could not understand.
+
+'_Vuol' dire che hai l'aria dolorosa_,' cried Maria, like a chorus
+interpreting. And there was always a sort of loud ring of challenge
+somewhere in her voice.
+
+'Sad,' I said in English.
+
+'Sad I' he repeated, also in English. And he did not smile or change,
+only his face seemed to become more stone-like. And he only looked at
+me, into my eyes, with the long, pale, steady, inscrutable look of a
+goat, I can only repeat, something stone-like.
+
+'Why,' I said, 'don't you marry? Man doesn't live alone.'
+
+'I don't marry,' he said to me, in his emphatic, deliberate, cold
+fashion, 'because I've seen too much. _Ho visto troppo._'
+
+'I don't understand,' I said.
+
+Yet I could feel that Paolo, sitting silent, like a monolith also, in
+the chimney opening, he understood: Maria also understood.
+
+Il Duro looked again steadily into my eyes.
+
+'_Ho visto troppo_,' he repeated, and the words seemed engraved on
+stone. 'I've seen too much.'
+
+'But you can marry,' I said, 'however much you have seen, if you have
+seen all the world.'
+
+He watched me steadily, like a strange creature looking at me.
+
+'What woman?' he said to me.
+
+'You can find a woman--there are plenty of women,' I said.
+
+'Not for me,' he said. 'I have known too many. I've known too much, I
+can marry nobody.'
+
+'Do you dislike women?' I said.
+
+'No--quite otherwise. I don't think ill of them.'
+
+'Then why can't you marry? Why must you live alone?'
+
+'Why live with a woman?' he said to me, and he looked mockingly. 'Which
+woman is it to be?'
+
+'You can find her,' I said. 'There are many women.'
+
+Again he shook his head in the stony, final fashion.
+
+'Not for me. I have known too much.'
+
+'But does that prevent you from marrying?'
+
+He looked at me steadily, finally. And I could see it was impossible for
+us to understand each other, or for me to understand him. I could not
+understand the strange white gleam of his eyes, where it came from.
+
+Also I knew he liked me very much, almost loved me, which again was
+strange and puzzling. It was as if he were a fairy, a faun, and had no
+soul. But he gave me a feeling of vivid sadness, a sadness that gleamed
+like phosphorescence. He himself was not sad. There was a completeness
+about him, about the pallid otherworld he inhabited, which excluded
+sadness. It was too complete, too final, too defined. There was no
+yearning, no vague merging off into mistiness.... He was clear and fine
+as semi-transparent rock, as a substance in moonlight. He seemed like a
+crystal that has achieved its final shape and has nothing more
+to achieve.
+
+That night he slept on the floor of the sitting-room. In the morning he
+was gone. But a week after he came again, to graft the vines.
+
+All the morning and the afternoon he was among the vines, crouching
+before them, cutting them back with his sharp, bright knife, amazingly
+swift and sure, like a god. It filled me with a sort of panic to see him
+crouched flexibly, like some strange animal god, doubled on his
+haunches, before the young vines, and swiftly, vividly, without thought,
+cut, cut, cut at the young budding shoots, which fell unheeded on to the
+earth. Then again he strode with his curious half-goatlike movement
+across the garden, to prepare the lime.
+
+He mixed the messy stuff, cow-dung and lime and water and earth,
+carefully with his hands, as if he understood that too. He was not a
+worker. He was a creature in intimate communion with the sensible world,
+knowing purely by touch the limey mess he mixed amongst, knowing as if
+by relation between that soft matter and the matter of himself.
+
+Then again he strode over the earth, a gleaming piece of earth himself,
+moving to the young vines. Quickly, with a few clean cuts of the knife,
+he prepared the new shoot, which he had picked out of a handful which
+lay beside him on the ground; he went finely to the quick of the plant,
+inserted the graft, then bound it up, fast, hard.
+
+It was like God grafting the life of man upon the body of the earth,
+intimately conjuring with his own flesh.
+
+All the while Paolo stood by, somehow excluded from the mystery, talking
+to me, to Faustino. And Il Duro answered easily, as if his mind were
+disengaged. It was his senses that were absorbed in the sensible life of
+the plant, and the lime and the cow-dung he handled.
+
+Watching him, watching his absorbed, bestial, and yet godlike crouching
+before the plant, as if he were the god of lower life, I somehow
+understood his isolation, why he did not marry. Pan and the ministers of
+Pan do not marry, the sylvan gods. They are single and isolated in
+their being.
+
+It is in the spirit that marriage takes place. In the flesh there is
+connexion, but only in the spirit is there a new thing created out of
+two different antithetic things. In the body I am conjoined with the
+woman. But in the spirit my conjunction with her creates a third thing,
+an absolute, a Word, which is neither me nor her, nor of me nor of her,
+but which is absolute.
+
+And Faustino had none of this spirit. In him sensation itself was
+absolute--not spiritual consummation, but physical sensation. So he
+could not marry, it was not for him. He belonged to the god Pan, to the
+absolute of the senses.
+
+All the while his beauty, so perfect and so defined, fascinated me, a
+strange static perfection about him. But his movements, whilst they
+fascinated, also repelled. I can always see him crouched before the
+vines on his haunches, his haunches doubled together in a complete
+animal unconsciousness, his face seeming in its strange golden pallor
+and its hardness of line, with the gleaming black of the fine hair on
+the brow and temples, like something reflective, like the reflecting
+surface of a stone that gleams out of the depths of night. It was like
+darkness revealed in its steady, unchanging pallor.
+
+Again he stayed through the evening, having quarrelled once more with
+the Maria about money. He quarrelled violently, yet coldly. There was
+something terrifying in it. And as soon as the matter of dispute was
+settled, all trace of interest or feeling vanished from him.
+
+Yet he liked, above all things, to be near the English signori. They
+seemed to exercise a sort of magnetic attraction over him. It was
+something of the purely physical world, as a magnetized needle swings
+towards soft iron. He was quite helpless in the relation. Only by
+mechanical attraction he gravitated into line with us.
+
+But there was nothing between us except our complete difference. It was
+like night and day flowing together.
+
+
+
+_7_
+
+JOHN
+
+
+Besides Il Duro, we found another Italian who could speak English, this
+time quite well. We had walked about four or five miles up the lake,
+getting higher and higher. Then quite suddenly, on the shoulder of a
+bluff far up, we came on a village, icy cold, and as if forgotten.
+
+We went into the inn to drink something hot. The fire of olive sticks
+was burning in the open chimney, one or two men were talking at a table,
+a young woman with a baby stood by the fire watching something boil in a
+large pot. Another woman was seen in the house-place beyond.
+
+In the chimney-seats sat a young mule-driver, who had left his two mules
+at the door of the inn, and opposite him an elderly stout man. They got
+down and offered us the seats of honour, which we accepted with
+due courtesy.
+
+The chimneys are like the wide, open chimney-places of old English
+cottages, but the hearth is raised about a foot and a half or two feet
+from the floor, so that the fire is almost level with the hands; and
+those who sit in the chimney-seats are raised above the audience in the
+room, something like two gods flanking the fire, looking out of the cave
+of ruddy darkness into the open, lower world of the room.
+
+We asked for coffee with milk and rum. The stout landlord took a seat
+near us below. The comely young woman with the baby took the tin
+coffee-pot that stood among the grey ashes, put in fresh coffee among
+the old bottoms, filled it with water, then pushed it more into
+the fire.
+
+The landlord turned to us with the usual naive, curious deference, and
+the usual question:
+
+'You are Germans?'
+
+'English.'
+
+'Ah--_Inglesi_.'
+
+Then there is a new note of cordiality--or so I always imagine--and the
+rather rough, cattle-like men who are sitting with their wine round the
+table look up more amicably. They do not like being intruded upon. Only
+the landlord is always affable.
+
+'I have a son who speaks English,' he says: he is a handsome, courtly
+old man, of the Falstaff sort.
+
+'Oh!'
+
+'He has been in America.'
+
+'And where is he now?'
+
+'He is at home. O--Nicoletta, where is the Giovann'?'
+
+The comely young woman with the baby came in.
+
+'He is with the band,' she said.
+
+The old landlord looked at her with pride.
+
+'This is my daughter-in-law,' he said.
+
+She smiled readily to the Signora.
+
+'And the baby?' we asked.
+
+'_Mio figlio_,' cried the young woman, in the strong, penetrating voice
+of these women. And she came forward to show the child to the Signora.
+
+It was a bonny baby: the whole company was united in adoration and
+service of the bambino. There was a moment of suspension, when religious
+submission seemed to come over the inn-room.
+
+Then the Signora began to talk, and it broke upon the Italian
+child-reverence.
+
+'What is he called?'
+
+'Oscare,' came the ringing note of pride. And the mother talked to the
+baby in dialect. All, men and women alike, felt themselves glorified by
+the presence of the child.
+
+At last the coffee in the tin coffee-pot was boiling and frothing out of
+spout and lid. The milk in the little copper pan was also hot, among the
+ashes. So we had our drink at last.
+
+The landlord was anxious for us to see Giovanni, his son. There was a
+village band performing up the street, in front of the house of a
+colonel who had come home wounded from Tripoli. Everybody in the village
+was wildly proud about the colonel and about the brass band, the music
+of which was execrable.
+
+We just looked into the street. The band of uncouth fellows was playing
+the same tune over and over again before a desolate, newish house. A
+crowd of desolate, forgotten villagers stood round in the cold upper
+air. It seemed altogether that the place was forgotten by God and man.
+
+But the landlord, burly, courteous, handsome, pointed out with a
+flourish the Giovanni, standing in the band playing a cornet. The band
+itself consisted only of five men, rather like beggars in the street.
+But Giovanni was the strangest! He was tall and thin and somewhat
+German-looking, wearing shabby American clothes and a very high double
+collar and a small American crush hat. He looked entirely like a
+ne'er-do-well who plays a violin in the street, dressed in the most
+down-at-heel, sordid respectability.
+
+'That is he--you see, Signore--the young one under the balcony.'
+
+The father spoke with love and pride, and the father was a gentleman,
+like Falstaff, a pure gentleman. The daughter-in-law also peered out to
+look at Il Giovann', who was evidently a figure of repute, in his
+sordid, degenerate American respectability. Meanwhile, this figure of
+repute blew himself red in the face, producing staccato strains on his
+cornet. And the crowd stood desolate and forsaken in the cold, upper
+afternoon.
+
+Then there was a sudden rugged '_Evviva, Evviva_!' from the people, the
+band stopped playing, somebody valiantly broke into a line of the song:
+
+    _Tripoli, sara italiana,
+    Sara italiana al rombo del cannon'._
+
+The colonel had appeared on the balcony, a smallish man, very yellow in
+the face, with grizzled black hair and very shabby legs. They all seemed
+so sordidly, hopelessly shabby.
+
+He suddenly began to speak, leaning forward, hot and feverish and
+yellow, upon the iron rail of the balcony. There was something hot and
+marshy and sick about him, slightly repulsive, less than human. He told
+his fellow-villagers how he loved them, how, when he lay uncovered on
+the sands of Tripoli, week after week, he had known they were watching
+him from the Alpine height of the village, he could feel that where he
+was they were all looking. When the Arabs came rushing like things gone
+mad, and he had received his wound, he had known that in his own
+village, among his own dear ones, there was recovery. Love would heal
+the wounds, the home country was a lover who would heal all her sons'
+wounds with love.
+
+Among the grey desolate crowd were sharp, rending 'Bravos!'--the people
+were in tears--the landlord at my side was repeating softly,
+abstractedly: '_Caro--caro--Ettore, caro colonello_--' and when it was
+finished, and the little colonel with shabby, humiliated legs was gone
+in, he turned to me and said, with challenge that almost frightened me:
+
+'_Un brav' uomo_.'
+
+'_Bravissimo_,' I said.
+
+Then we, too, went indoors.
+
+It was all, somehow, grey and hopeless and acrid, unendurable.
+
+The colonel, poor devil--we knew him afterwards--is now dead. It is
+strange that he is dead. There is something repulsive to me in the
+thought of his lying dead: such a humiliating, somehow degraded corpse.
+Death has no beauty in Italy, unless it be violent. The death of man or
+woman through sickness is an occasion of horror, repulsive. They belong
+entirely to life, they are so limited to life, these people.
+
+Soon the Giovanni came home, and took his cornet upstairs. Then he came
+to see us. He was an ingenuous youth, sordidly shabby and dirty. His
+fair hair was long and uneven, his very high starched collar made one
+aware that his neck and his ears were not clean, his American crimson
+tie was ugly, his clothes looked as if they had been kicking about on
+the floor for a year.
+
+Yet his blue eyes were warm and his manner and speech very gentle.
+
+'You will speak English with us,' I said.
+
+'Oh,' he said, smiling and shaking his head, 'I could speak English very
+well. But it is two years that I don't speak it now, over two years now,
+so I don't speak it.'
+
+'But you speak it very well.'
+
+'No. It is two years that I have not spoke, not a word--so, you see, I
+have--'
+
+'You have forgotten it? No, you haven't. It will quickly come back.'
+
+'If I hear it--when I go to America--then I shall--I shall--'
+
+'You will soon pick it up.'
+
+'Yes--I shall pick it up.'
+
+The landlord, who had been watching with pride, now went away. The wife
+also went away, and we were left with the shy, gentle, dirty, and
+frowsily-dressed Giovanni.
+
+He laughed in his sensitive, quick fashion.
+
+'The women in America, when they came into the store, they said, "Where
+is John, where is John?" Yes, they liked me.'
+
+And he laughed again, glancing with vague, warm blue eyes, very shy,
+very coiled upon himself with sensitiveness.
+
+He had managed a store in America, in a smallish town. I glanced at his
+reddish, smooth, rather knuckly hands, and thin wrists in the frayed
+cuff. They were real shopman's hands.
+
+The landlord brought some special feast-day cake, so overjoyed he was to
+have his Giovanni speaking English with the Signoria.
+
+When we went away, we asked 'John' to come down to our villa to see us.
+We scarcely expected him to turn up.
+
+Yet one morning he appeared, at about half past nine, just as we were
+finishing breakfast. It was sunny and warm and beautiful, so we asked
+him please to come with us picnicking.
+
+He was a queer shoot, again, in his unkempt longish hair and slovenly
+clothes, a sort of very vulgar down-at-heel American in appearance. And
+he was transported with shyness. Yet ours was the world he had chosen as
+his own, so he took his place bravely and simply, a hanger-on.
+
+We climbed up the water-course in the mountain-side, up to a smooth
+little lawn under the olive trees, where daisies were flowering and
+gladioli were in bud. It was a tiny little lawn of grass in a level
+crevice, and sitting there we had the world below us--the lake, the
+distant island, the far-off low Verona shore.
+
+Then 'John' began to talk, and he talked continuously, like a foreigner,
+not saying the things he would have said in Italian, but following the
+suggestion and scope of his limited English.
+
+In the first place, he loved his father--it was 'my father, my father'
+always. His father had a little shop as well as the inn in the village
+above. So John had had some education. He had been sent to Brescia and
+then to Verona to school, and there had taken his examinations to become
+a civil engineer. He was clever, and could pass his examinations. But he
+never finished his course. His mother died, and his father,
+disconsolate, had wanted him at home. Then he had gone back, when he was
+sixteen or seventeen, to the village beyond the lake, to be with his
+father and to look after the shop.
+
+'But didn't you mind giving up all your work?' I said.
+
+He did not quite understand.
+
+'My father wanted me to come back,' he said.
+
+It was evident that Giovanni had had no definite conception of what he
+was doing or what he wanted to do. His father, wishing to make a
+gentleman of him, had sent him to school in Verona. By accident he had
+been moved on into the engineering course. When it all fizzled to an
+end, and he returned half-baked to the remote, desolate village of the
+mountain-side, he was not disappointed or chagrined. He had never
+conceived of a coherent purposive life. Either one stayed in the
+village, like a lodged stone, or one made random excursions into the
+world, across the world. It was all aimless and purposeless.
+
+So he had stayed a while with his father, then he had gone, just as
+aimlessly, with a party of men who were emigrating to America. He had
+taken some money, had drifted about, living in the most comfortless,
+wretched fashion, then he had found a place somewhere in Pennsylvania,
+in a dry goods store. This was when he was seventeen or eighteen
+years old.
+
+All this seemed to have happened to him without his being very much
+affected, at least consciously. His nature was simple and self-complete.
+Yet not so self-complete as that of Il Duro or Paolo. They had passed
+through the foreign world and been quite untouched. Their souls were
+static, it was the world that had flowed unstable by.
+
+But John was more sensitive, he had come more into contact with his new
+surroundings. He had attended night classes almost every evening, and
+had been taught English like a child. He had loved the American free
+school, the teachers, the work.
+
+But he had suffered very much in America. With his curious,
+over-sensitive, wincing laugh, he told us how the boys had followed him
+and jeered at him, calling after him, 'You damn Dago, you damn Dago.'
+They had stopped him and his friend in the street and taken away their
+hats, and spat into them. So that at last he had gone mad. They were
+youths and men who always tortured him, using bad language which
+startled us very much as he repeated it, there on the little lawn under
+the olive trees, above the perfect lake: English obscenities and abuse
+so coarse and startling that we bit our lips, shocked almost into
+laughter, whilst John, simple and natural, and somehow, for all his long
+hair and dirty appearance, flower-like in soul, repeated to us these
+things which may never be repeated in decent company.
+
+'Oh,' he said, 'at last, I get mad. When they come one day, shouting,
+"You damn Dago, dirty dog," and will take my hat again, oh, I get mad,
+and I would kill them, I would kill them, I am so mad. I run to them,
+and throw one to the floor, and I tread on him while I go upon another,
+the biggest. Though they hit me and kick me all over, I feel nothing, I
+am mad. I throw the biggest to the floor, a man; he is older than I am,
+and I hit him so hard I would kill him. When the others see it they are
+afraid, they throw stones and hit me on the face. But I don't feel it--I
+don't know nothing. I hit the man on the floor, I almost kill him. I
+forget everything except I will kill him--'
+
+'But you didn't?'
+
+'No--I don't know--' and he laughed his queer, shaken laugh. 'The other
+man that was with me, my friend, he came to me and we went away. Oh, I
+was mad. I was completely mad. I would have killed them.'
+
+He was trembling slightly, and his eyes were dilated with a strange
+greyish-blue fire that was very painful and elemental. He looked beside
+himself. But he was by no means mad.
+
+We were shaken by the vivid, lambent excitement of the youth, we wished
+him to forget. We were shocked, too, in our souls to see the pure
+elemental flame shaken out of his gentle, sensitive nature. By his
+slight, crinkled laugh we could see how much he had suffered. He had
+gone out and faced the world, and he had kept his place, stranger and
+Dago though he was.
+
+'They never came after me no more, not all the while I was there.'
+
+Then he said he became the foreman in the store--at first he was only
+assistant. It was the best store in the town, and many English ladies
+came, and some Germans. He liked the English ladies very much: they
+always wanted him to be in the store. He wore white clothes there, and
+they would say:
+
+'You look very nice in the white coat, John'; or else:
+
+'Let John come, he can find it'; or else they said:
+
+'John speaks like a born American.'
+
+This pleased him very much.
+
+In the end, he said, he earned a hundred dollars a month. He lived with
+the extraordinary frugality of the Italians, and had quite a lot
+of money.
+
+He was not like Il Duro. Faustino had lived in a state of miserliness
+almost in America, but then he had had his debauches of shows and wine
+and carousals. John went chiefly to the schools, in one of which he was
+even asked to teach Italian. His knowledge of his own language was
+remarkable and most unusual!
+
+'But what,' I asked, 'brought you back?'
+
+'It was my father. You see, if I did not come to have my military
+service, I must stay till I am forty. So I think perhaps my father will
+be dead, I shall never see him. So I came.'
+
+He had come home when he was twenty to fulfil his military duties. At
+home he had married. He was very fond of his wife, but he had no
+conception of love in the old sense. His wife was like the past, to
+which he was wedded. Out of her he begot his child, as out of the past.
+But the future was all beyond her, apart from her. He was going away
+again, now, to America. He had been some nine months at home after his
+military service was over. He had no more to do. Now he was leaving his
+wife and child and his father to go to America.
+
+'But why,' I said, 'why? You are not poor, you can manage the shop in
+your village.'
+
+'Yes,' he said. 'But I will go to America. Perhaps I shall go into the
+store again, the same.'
+
+'But is it not just the same as managing the shop at home?'
+
+'No--no--it is quite different.'
+
+Then he told us how he bought goods in Brescia and in Said for the shop
+at home, how he had rigged up a funicular with the assistance of the
+village, an overhead wire by which you could haul the goods up the face
+of the cliffs right high up, to within a mile of the village. He was
+very proud of this. And sometimes he himself went down the funicular to
+the water's edge, to the boat, when he was in a hurry. This also
+pleased him.
+
+But he was going to Brescia this day to see about going again to
+America. Perhaps in another month he would be gone.
+
+It was a great puzzle to me why he would go. He could not say himself.
+He would stay four or five years, then he would come home again to see
+his father--and his wife and child.
+
+There was a strange, almost frightening destiny upon him, which seemed
+to take him away, always away from home, from the past, to that great,
+raw America. He seemed scarcely like a person with individual choice,
+more like a creature under the influence of fate which was
+disintegrating the old life and precipitating him, a fragment
+inconclusive, into the new chaos.
+
+He submitted to it all with a perfect unquestioning simplicity, never
+even knowing that he suffered, that he must suffer disintegration from
+the old life. He was moved entirely from within, he never questioned his
+inevitable impulse.
+
+'They say to me, "Don't go--don't go"--' he shook his head. 'But I say I
+will go.'
+
+And at that it was finished.
+
+So we saw him off at the little quay, going down the lake. He would
+return at evening, and be pulled up in his funicular basket. And in a
+month's time he would be standing on the same lake steamer going
+to America.
+
+Nothing was more painful than to see him standing there in his degraded,
+sordid American clothes, on the deck of the steamer, waving us good-bye,
+belonging in his final desire to our world, the world of consciousness
+and deliberate action. With his candid, open, unquestioning face, he
+seemed like a prisoner being conveyed from one form of life to another,
+or like a soul in trajectory, that has not yet found a resting-place.
+
+What were wife and child to him?--they were the last steps of the past.
+His father was the continent behind him; his wife and child the
+foreshore of the past; but his face was set outwards, away from it
+all--whither, neither he nor anybody knew, but he called it America.
+
+
+
+
+_Italians in Exile_
+
+
+When I was in Constance the weather was misty and enervating and
+depressing, it was no pleasure to travel on the big flat desolate lake.
+
+When I went from Constance, it was on a small steamer down the Rhine to
+Schaffhausen. That was beautiful. Still, the mist hung over the waters,
+over the wide shallows of the river, and the sun, coming through the
+morning, made lovely yellow lights beneath the bluish haze, so that it
+seemed like the beginning of the world. And there was a hawk in the
+upper air fighting with two crows, or two rooks. Ever they rose higher
+and higher, the crow flickering above the attacking hawk, the fight
+going on like some strange symbol in the sky, the Germans on deck
+watching with pleasure.
+
+Then we passed out of sight between wooded banks and under bridges where
+quaint villages of old romance piled their red and coloured pointed
+roofs beside the water, very still, remote, lost in the vagueness of the
+past. It could not be that they were real. Even when the boat put in to
+shore, and the customs officials came to look, the village remained
+remote in the romantic past of High Germany, the Germany of fairy tales
+and minstrels and craftsmen. The poignancy of the past was almost
+unbearable, floating there in colour upon the haze of the river.
+
+We went by some swimmers, whose white shadowy bodies trembled near the
+side of the steamer under water. One man with a round, fair head lifted
+his face and one arm from the water and shouted a greeting to us, as if
+he were a Niebelung, saluting with bright arm lifted from the water, his
+face laughing, the fair moustache hanging over his mouth. Then his white
+body swirled in the water, and he was gone, swimming with the
+side stroke.
+
+Schaffhausen the town, half old and bygone, half modern, with breweries
+and industries, that is not very real. Schaffhausen Falls, with their
+factory in the midst and their hotel at the bottom, and the general
+cinematograph effect, they are ugly.
+
+It was afternoon when I set out to walk from the Falls to Italy, across
+Switzerland. I remember the big, fat, rather gloomy fields of this part
+of Baden, damp and unliving. I remember I found some apples under a tree
+in a field near a railway embankment, then some mushrooms, and I ate
+both. Then I came on to a long, desolate high-road, with dreary,
+withered trees on either side, and flanked by great fields where groups
+of men and women were working. They looked at me as I went by down the
+long, long road, alone and exposed and out of the world.
+
+I remember nobody came at the border village to examine my pack, I
+passed through unchallenged. All was quiet and lifeless and hopeless,
+with big stretches of heavy land.
+
+Till sunset came, very red and purple, and suddenly, from the heavy
+spacious open land I dropped sharply into the Rhine valley again,
+suddenly, as if into another glamorous world.
+
+There was the river rushing along between its high, mysterious, romantic
+banks, which were high as hills, and covered with vine. And there was
+the village of tall, quaint houses flickering its lights on to the
+deep-flowing river, and quite silent, save for the rushing of water.
+
+There was a fine covered bridge, very dark. I went to the middle and
+looked through the opening at the dark water below, at the facade of
+square lights, the tall village-front towering remote and silent above
+the river. The hill rose on either side the flood; down here was a
+small, forgotten, wonderful world that belonged to the date of isolated
+village communities and wandering minstrels.
+
+So I went back to the inn of The Golden Stag, and, climbing some steps,
+I made a loud noise. A woman came, and I asked for food. She led me
+through a room where were enormous barrels, ten feet in diameter, lying
+fatly on their sides; then through a large stone-clean kitchen, with
+bright pans, ancient as the Meistersinger; then up some steps and into
+the long guest-room, where a few tables were laid for supper.
+
+A few people were eating. I asked for Abendessen, and sat by the window
+looking at the darkness of the river below, the covered bridge, the dark
+hill opposite, crested with its few lights.
+
+Then I ate a very large quantity of knoedel soup and bread, and drank
+beer, and was very sleepy. Only one or two village men came in, and
+these soon went again; the place was dead still. Only at a long table on
+the opposite side of the room were seated seven or eight men, ragged,
+disreputable, some impudent--another came in late; the landlady gave
+them all thick soup with dumplings and bread and meat, serving them in a
+sort of brief disapprobation. They sat at the long table, eight or nine
+tramps and beggars and wanderers out of work and they ate with a sort of
+cheerful callousness and brutality for the most part, and as if
+ravenously, looking round and grinning sometimes, subdued, cowed, like
+prisoners, and yet impudent. At the end one shouted to know where he was
+to sleep. The landlady called to the young serving-woman, and in a
+classic German severity of disapprobation they were led up the stone
+stairs to their room. They tramped off in threes and twos, making a bad,
+mean, humiliated exit. It was not yet eight o'clock. The landlady sat
+talking to one bearded man, staid and severe, whilst, with her work on
+the table, she sewed steadily.
+
+As the beggars and wanderers went slinking out of the room, some called
+impudently, cheerfully:
+
+'_Nacht, Frau Wirtin--G'Nacht, Wirtin--'te Nacht, Frau_,' to all of
+which the hostess answered a stereotyped '_Gute Nacht_,' never turning
+her head from her sewing, or indicating by the faintest movement that
+she was addressing the men who were filing raggedly to the doorway.
+
+So the room was empty, save for the landlady and her sewing, the staid,
+elderly villager to whom she was talking in the unbeautiful dialect, and
+the young serving-woman who was clearing away the plates and basins of
+the tramps and beggars.
+
+Then the villager also went.
+
+'_Gute Nacht, Frau Seidl_,' to the landlady; '_Gute Nacht_,' at random,
+to me.
+
+So I looked at the newspaper. Then I asked the landlady for a cigarette,
+not knowing how else to begin. So she came to my table, and we talked.
+
+It pleased me to take upon myself a sort of romantic, wandering
+character; she said my German was '_schoen_'; a little goes a long way.
+
+So I asked her who were the men who had sat at the long table. She
+became rather stiff and curt.
+
+'They are the men looking for work,' she said, as if the subject were
+disagreeable.
+
+'But why do they come here, so many?' I asked.
+
+Then she told me that they were going out of the country: this was
+almost the last village of the border: that the relieving officer in
+each village was empowered to give to every vagrant a ticket entitling
+the holder to an evening meal, bed, and bread in the morning, at a
+certain inn. This was the inn for the vagrants coming to this village.
+The landlady received fourpence per head, I believe it was, for each of
+these wanderers.
+
+'Little enough,' I said.
+
+'Nothing,' she replied.
+
+She did not like the subject at all. Only her respect for me made her
+answer.
+
+'_Bettler, Lumpen, und Taugenichtse!_' I said cheerfully.
+
+'And men who are out of work, and are going back to their own parish,'
+she said stiffly.
+
+So we talked a little, and I too went to bed.
+
+'_Gute Nacht, Frau Wirtin._'
+
+'_Gute Nacht, mein Herr._'
+
+So I went up more and more stone stairs, attended by the young woman. It
+was a great, lofty, old deserted house, with many drab doors.
+
+At last, in the distant topmost floor, I had my bedroom, with two beds
+and bare floor and scant furniture. I looked down at the river far
+below, at the covered bridge, at the far lights on the hill above,
+opposite. Strange to be here in this lost, forgotten place, sleeping
+under the roof with tramps and beggars. I debated whether they would
+steal my boots if I put them out. But I risked it. The door-latch made a
+loud noise on the deserted landing, everywhere felt abandoned,
+forgotten. I wondered where the eight tramps and beggars were asleep.
+There was no way of securing the door. But somehow I felt that, if I
+were destined to be robbed or murdered, it would not be by tramps and
+beggars. So I blew out the candle and lay under the big feather bed,
+listening to the running and whispering of the medieval Rhine.
+
+And when I waked up again it was sunny, it was morning on the hill
+opposite, though the river deep below ran in shadow.
+
+The tramps and beggars were all gone: they must be cleared out by seven
+o'clock in the morning. So I had the inn to myself, I, and the landlady,
+and the serving-woman. Everywhere was very clean, full of the German
+morning energy and brightness, which is so different from the Latin
+morning. The Italians are dead and torpid first thing, the Germans are
+energetic and cheerful.
+
+It was cheerful in the sunny morning, looking down on the swift river,
+the covered, picturesque bridge, the bank and the hill opposite. Then
+down the curving road of the facing hill the Swiss cavalry came riding,
+men in blue uniforms. I went out to watch them. They came thundering
+romantically through the dark cavern of the roofed-in bridge, and they
+dismounted at the entrance to the village. There was a fresh
+morning-cheerful newness everywhere, in the arrival of the troops, in
+the welcome of the villagers.
+
+The Swiss do not look very military, neither in accoutrement nor
+bearing. This little squad of cavalry seemed more like a party of common
+men riding out in some business of their own than like an army. They
+were very republican and very free. The officer who commanded them was
+one of themselves, his authority was by consent.
+
+It was all very pleasant and genuine; there was a sense of ease and
+peacefulness, quite different from the mechanical, slightly sullen
+manoeuvring of the Germans.
+
+The village baker and his assistant came hot and floury from the
+bakehouse, bearing between them a great basket of fresh bread. The
+cavalry were all dismounted by the bridge-head, eating and drinking like
+business men. Villagers came to greet their friends: one soldier kissed
+his father, who came wearing a leathern apron. The school bell
+tang-tang-tanged from above, school children merged timidly through the
+grouped horses, up the narrow street, passing unwillingly with their
+books. The river ran swiftly, the soldiers, very haphazard and slack in
+uniform, real shack-bags, chewed their bread in large mouthfuls; the
+young lieutenant, who seemed to be an officer only by consent of the
+men, stood apart by the bridge-head, gravely. They were all serious and
+self-contented, very unglamorous. It was like a business excursion on
+horseback, harmless and uninspiring. The uniforms were almost ludicrous,
+so ill-fitting and casual.
+
+So I shouldered my own pack and set off, through the bridge over the
+Rhine, and up the hill opposite.
+
+There is something very dead about this country. I remember I picked
+apples from the grass by the roadside, and some were very sweet. But for
+the rest, there was mile after mile of dead, uninspired
+country--uninspired, so neutral and ordinary that it was almost
+destructive.
+
+One gets this feeling always in Switzerland, except high up: this
+feeling of average, of utter soulless ordinariness, something
+intolerable. Mile after mile, to Zurich, it was just the same. It was
+just the same in the tram-car going into Zurich; it was just the same in
+the town, in the shops, in the restaurant. All was the utmost level of
+ordinariness and well-being, but so ordinary that it was like a blight.
+All the picturesqueness of the town is nothing, it is like a most
+ordinary, average, usual person in an old costume. The place was
+soul-killing.
+
+So after two hours' rest, eating in a restaurant, wandering by the quay
+and through the market, and sitting on a seat by the lake, I found a
+steamer that would take me away. That is how I always feel in
+Switzerland: the only possible living sensation is the sensation of
+relief in going away, always going away. The horrible average
+ordinariness of it all, something utterly without flower or soul or
+transcendence, the horrible vigorous ordinariness, is too much.
+
+So I went on a steamer down the long lake, surrounded by low grey hills.
+It was Saturday afternoon. A thin rain came on. I thought I would rather
+be in fiery Hell than in this dead level of average life.
+
+I landed somewhere on the right bank, about three-quarters of the way
+down the lake. It was almost dark. Yet I must walk away. I climbed a
+long hill from the lake, came to the crest, looked down the darkness of
+the valley, and descended into the deep gloom, down into a
+soulless village.
+
+But it was eight o'clock, and I had had enough. One might as well sleep.
+I found the Gasthaus zur Post.
+
+It was a small, very rough inn, having only one common room, with bare
+tables, and a short, stout, grim, rather surly landlady, and a landlord
+whose hair stood up on end, and who was trembling on the edge of
+delirium tremens.
+
+They could only give me boiled ham: so I ate boiled ham and drank beer,
+and tried to digest the utter cold materialism of Switzerland.
+
+As I sat with my back to the wall, staring blankly at the trembling
+landlord, who was ready at any moment to foam at the mouth, and at the
+dour landlady, who was quite capable of keeping him in order, there came
+in one of those dark, showy Italian girls with a man. She wore a blouse
+and skirt, and no hat. Her hair was perfectly dressed. It was really
+Italy. The man was soft, dark, he would get stout later, _trapu_, he
+would have somewhat the figure of Caruso. But as yet he was soft,
+sensuous, young, handsome.
+
+They sat at the long side-table with their beer, and created another
+country at once within the room. Another Italian came, fair and fat and
+slow, one from the Venetian province; then another, a little thin young
+man, who might have been a Swiss save for his vivid movement.
+
+This last was the first to speak to the Germans. The others had just
+said '_Bier._' But the little newcomer entered into a conversation with
+the landlady.
+
+At last there were six Italians sitting talking loudly and warmly at the
+side-table. The slow, cold German-Swiss at the other tables looked at
+them occasionally. The landlord, with his crazed, stretched eyes, glared
+at them with hatred. But they fetched their beer from the bar with easy
+familiarity, and sat at their table, creating a bonfire of life in the
+callousness of the inn.
+
+At last they finished their beer and trooped off down the passage. The
+room was painfully empty. I did not know what to do.
+
+Then I heard the landlord yelling and screeching and snarling from the
+kitchen at the back, for all the world like a mad dog. But the Swiss
+Saturday evening customers at the other tables smoked on and talked in
+their ugly dialect, without trouble. Then the landlady came in, and soon
+after the landlord, he collarless, with his waistcoat unbuttoned,
+showing his loose throat, and accentuating his round pot-belly. His
+limbs were thin and feverish, the skin of his face hung loose, his eyes
+glaring, his hands trembled. Then he sat down to talk to a crony. His
+terrible appearance was a fiasco; nobody heeded him at all, only the
+landlady was surly.
+
+From the back came loud noises of pleasure and excitement and banging
+about. When the room door was opened I could see down the dark passage
+opposite another lighted door. Then the fat, fair Italian came in for
+more beer.
+
+'What is all the noise?' I asked the landlady at last.
+
+'It is the Italians,' she said.
+
+'What are they doing?'
+
+'They are doing a play.'
+
+'Where?'
+
+She jerked her head: 'In the room at the back.'
+
+'Can I go and look at them?'
+
+'I should think so.'
+
+The landlord glaringly watched me go out. I went down the stone passage
+and found a great, half-lighted room that might be used to hold
+meetings, with forms piled at the side. At one end was raised platform
+or stage. And on this stage was a table and a lamp, and the Italians
+grouped round the light, gesticulating and laughing. Their beer mugs
+were on the table and on the floor of the stage; the little sharp youth
+was intently looking over some papers, the others were bending over the
+table with him.
+
+They looked up as I entered from the distance, looked at me in the
+distant twilight of the dusky room, as if I were an intruder, as if I
+should go away when I had seen them. But I said in German:
+
+'May I look?'
+
+They were still unwilling to see or to hear me.
+
+'What do you say?' the small one asked in reply.
+
+The others stood and watched, slightly at bay, like suspicious animals.
+
+'If I might come and look,' I said in German; then, feeling very
+uncomfortable, in Italian: 'You are doing a drama, the landlady
+told me.'
+
+The big empty room was behind me, dark, the little company of Italians
+stood above me in the light of the lamp which was on the table. They all
+watched with unseeing, unwilling looks: I was merely an intrusion.
+
+'We are only learning it,' said the small youth.
+
+They wanted me to go away. But I wanted to stay.
+
+'May I listen?' I said. 'I don't want to stay in there.' And I
+indicated, with a movement of the head, the inn-room beyond.
+
+'Yes,' said the young intelligent man. 'But we are only reading our
+parts.'
+
+They had all become more friendly to me, they accepted me.
+
+'You are a German?' asked one youth.
+
+'No--English.'
+
+'English? But do you live in Switzerland?'
+
+'No--I am walking to Italy.'
+
+'On foot?'
+
+They looked with wakened eyes.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+So I told them about my journey. They were puzzled. They did not quite
+understand why I wanted to walk. But they were delighted with the idea
+of going to Lugano and Como and then to Milan.
+
+'Where do you come from?' I asked them.
+
+They were all from the villages between Verona and Venice. They had seen
+the Garda. I told them of my living there.
+
+'Those peasants of the mountains,' they said at once, 'they are people
+of little education. Rather wild folk.'
+
+And they spoke with good-humoured contempt.
+
+I thought of Paolo, and Il Duro, and the Signor Pietro, our padrone, and
+I resented these factory-hands for criticizing them.
+
+So I sat on the edge of the stage whilst they rehearsed their parts. The
+little thin intelligent fellow, Giuseppino, was the leader. The others
+read their parts in the laborious, disjointed fashion of the peasant,
+who can only see one word at a time, and has then to put the words
+together, afterwards, to make sense. The play was an amateur melodrama,
+printed in little penny booklets, for carnival production. This was only
+the second reading they had given it, and the handsome, dark fellow, who
+was roused and displaying himself before the girl, a hard, erect piece
+of callousness, laughed and flushed and stumbled, and understood nothing
+till it was transferred into him direct through Giuseppino. The fat,
+fair, slow man was more conscientious. He laboured through his part. The
+other two men were in the background more or less.
+
+The most confidential was the fat, fair, slow man, who was called
+Alberto. His part was not very important, so he could sit by me and
+talk to me.
+
+He said they were all workers in the factory--silk, I think it was--in
+the village. They were a whole colony of Italians, thirty or more
+families. They had all come at different times.
+
+Giuseppino had been longest in the village. He had come when he was
+eleven, with his parents, and had attended the Swiss school. So he spoke
+perfect German. He was a clever man, was married, and had two children.
+
+He himself, Alberto, had been seven years in the valley; the girl, la
+Maddelena, had been here ten years; the dark man, Alfredo, who was
+flushed with excitement of her, had been in the village about nine
+years--he alone of all men was not married.
+
+The others had all married Italian wives, and they lived in the great
+dwelling whose windows shone yellow by the rattling factory. They lived
+entirely among themselves; none of them could speak German, more than a
+few words, except the Giuseppino, who was like a native here.
+
+It was very strange being among these Italians exiled in Switzerland.
+Alfredo, the dark one, the unmarried, was in the old tradition. Yet even
+he was curiously subject to a new purpose, as if there were some greater
+new will that included him, sensuous, mindless as he was. He seemed to
+give his consent to something beyond himself. In this he was different
+from Il Duro, in that he had put himself under the control of the
+outside conception.
+
+It was strange to watch them on the stage, the Italians all lambent,
+soft, warm, sensuous, yet moving subject round Giuseppino, who was
+always quiet, always ready, always impersonal. There was a look of
+purpose, almost of devotion on his face, that singled him out and made
+him seem the one stable, eternal being among them. They quarrelled, and
+he let them quarrel up to a certain point; then he called them back. He
+let them do as they liked so long as they adhered more or less to the
+central purpose, so long as they got on in some measure with the play.
+
+All the while they were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The
+Alberto was barman: he went out continually with the glasses. The
+Maddelena had a small glass. In the lamplight of the stage the little
+party read and smoked and practised, exposed to the empty darkness of
+the big room. Queer and isolated it seemed, a tiny, pathetic magicland
+far away from the barrenness of Switzerland. I could believe in the old
+fairy-tales where, when the rock was opened, a magic underworld
+was revealed.
+
+The Alfredo, flushed, roused, handsome, but very soft and enveloping in
+his heat, laughed and threw himself into his pose, laughed foolishly,
+and then gave himself up to his part. The Alberto, slow and laborious,
+yet with a spark of vividness and natural intensity flashing through,
+replied and gesticulated; the Maddelena laid her head on the bosom of
+Alfredo, the other men started into action, and the play proceeded
+intently for half an hour.
+
+Quick, vivid, and sharp, the little Giuseppino was always central. But
+he seemed almost invisible. When I think back, I can scarcely see him, I
+can only see the others, the lamplight on their faces and on their full
+gesticulating limbs. I can see--the Maddelena, rather coarse and hard
+and repellent, declaiming her words in a loud, half-cynical voice,
+falling on the breast of the Alfredo, who was soft and sensuous, more
+like a female, flushing, with his mouth getting wet, his eyes moist, as
+he was roused. I can see the Alberto, slow, laboured, yet with a kind of
+pristine simplicity in all his movements, that touched his fat
+commonplaceness with beauty. Then there were the two other men, shy,
+inflammable, unintelligent, with their sudden Italian rushes of hot
+feeling. All their faces are distinct in the lamplight, all their bodies
+ate palpable and dramatic.
+
+But the face of the Giuseppino is like a pale luminousness, a sort of
+gleam among all the ruddy glow, his body is evanescent, like a shadow.
+And his being seemed to cast its influence over all the others, except
+perhaps the woman, who was hard and resistant. The other men seemed all
+overcast, mitigated, in part transfigured by the will of the little
+leader. But they were very soft stuff, if inflammable.
+
+The young woman of the inn, niece of the landlady, came down and called
+out across the room.
+
+'We will go away from here now,' said the Giuseppino to me. 'They close
+at eleven. But we have another inn in the next parish that is open all
+night. Come with us and drink some wine.'
+
+'But,' I said, 'you would rather be alone.'
+
+No; they pressed me to go, they wanted me to go with them, they were
+eager, they wanted to entertain me. Alfredo, flushed, wet-mouthed, warm,
+protested I must drink wine, the real Italian red wine, from their own
+village at home. They would have no nay.
+
+So I told the landlady. She said I must be back by twelve o'clock.
+
+The night was very dark. Below the road the stream was rushing; there
+was a great factory on the other side of the water, making faint
+quivering lights of reflection, and one could see the working of
+machinery shadowy through the lighted windows. Near by was the tall
+tenement where the Italians lived.
+
+We went on through the straggling, raw village, deep beside the stream,
+then over the small bridge, and up the steep hill down which I had come
+earlier in the evening.
+
+So we arrived at the cafe. It was so different inside from the German
+inn, yet it was not like an Italian cafe either. It was brilliantly
+lighted, clean, new, and there were red-and-white cloths on the tables.
+The host was in the room, and his daughter, a beautiful red-haired girl.
+
+Greetings were exchanged with the quick, intimate directness of Italy.
+But there was another note also, a faint echo of reserve, as though they
+reserved themselves from the outer world, making a special inner
+community.
+
+Alfredo was hot: he took off his coat. We all sat freely at a long
+table, whilst the red-haired girl brought a quart of red wine. At other
+tables men were playing cards, with the odd Neapolitan cards. They too
+were talking Italian. It was a warm, ruddy bit of Italy within the cold
+darkness of Switzerland.
+
+'When you come to Italy,' they said to me, 'salute it from us, salute
+the sun, and the earth, _l'Italia_.'
+
+So we drank in salute of Italy. They sent their greeting by me.
+
+'You know in Italy there is the sun, the sun,' said Alfredo to me,
+profoundly moved, wet-mouthed, tipsy.
+
+I was reminded of Enrico Persevalli and his terrifying cry at the end of
+_Ghosts_:
+
+'_Il sole, il sole!_'
+
+So we talked for a while of Italy. They had a pained tenderness for it,
+sad, reserved.
+
+'Don't you want to go back?' I said, pressing them to tell me
+definitely. 'Won't you go back some time?'
+
+'Yes,' they said, 'we will go back.'
+
+But they spoke reservedly, without freedom. We talked about Italy, about
+songs, and Carnival; about the food, polenta, and salt. They laughed at
+my pretending to cut the slabs of polenta with a string: that rejoiced
+them all: it took them back to the Italian mezzo-giorno, the bells
+jangling in the campanile, the eating after the heavy work on the land.
+
+But they laughed with the slight pain and contempt and fondness which
+every man feels towards his past, when he has struggled away from that
+past, from the conditions which made it.
+
+They loved Italy passionately; but they would not go back. All their
+blood, all their senses were Italian, needed the Italian sky, the
+speech, the sensuous life. They could hardly live except through the
+senses. Their minds were not developed, mentally they were children,
+lovable, naive, almost fragile children. But sensually they were men:
+sensually they were accomplished.
+
+Yet a new tiny flower was struggling to open in them, the flower of a
+new spirit. The substratum of Italy has always been pagan, sensuous, the
+most potent symbol the sexual symbol. The child is really a
+non-Christian symbol: it is the symbol of mans's triumph of eternal life
+in procreation. The worship of the Cross never really held good in
+Italy. The Christianity of Northern Europe has never had any
+place there.
+
+And now, when Northern Europe is turning back on its own Christianity,
+denying it all, the Italians are struggling with might and main against
+the sensuous spirit which still dominates them. When Northern Europe,
+whether it hates Nietzsche or not, is crying out for the Dionysic
+ecstasy, practising on itself the Dionysic ecstasy, Southern Europe is
+breaking free from Dionysus, from the triumphal affirmation of life over
+death, immortality through procreation.
+
+I could see these sons of Italy would never go back. Men like Paolo and
+Il Duro broke away only to return. The dominance of the old form was too
+strong for them. Call it love of country or love of the village,
+campanilismo, or what not, it was the dominance of the old pagan form,
+the old affirmation of immortality through procreation, as opposed to
+the Christian affirmation of immortality through self-death and
+social love.
+
+But 'John' and these Italians in Switzerland were a generation younger,
+and they would not go back, at least not to the old Italy. Suffer as
+they might, and they did suffer, wincing in every nerve and fibre from
+the cold material insentience of the northern countries and of America,
+still they would endure this for the sake of something else they wanted.
+They would suffer a death in the flesh, as 'John' had suffered in
+fighting the street crowd, as these men suffered year after year cramped
+in their black gloomy cold Swiss valley, working in the factory. But
+there would come a new spirit out of it.
+
+Even Alfredo was submitted to the new process; though he belonged
+entirely by nature to the sort of Il Duro, he was purely sensuous and
+mindless. But under the influence of Giuseppino he was thrown down, as
+fallow to the new spirit that would come.
+
+And then, when the others were all partially tipsy, the Giuseppino began
+to talk to me. In him was a steady flame burning, burning, burning, a
+flame of the mind, of the spirit, something new and clear, something
+that held even the soft, sensuous Alfredo in submission, besides all the
+others, who had some little development of mind.
+
+'_Sa signore_,' said the Giuseppino to me, quiet, almost invisible or
+inaudible, as it seemed, like a spirit addressing me, '_l'uomo non ha
+patria_--a man has no country. What has the Italian Government to do
+with us. What does a Government mean? It makes us work, it takes part of
+our wages away from us, it makes us soldiers--and what for? What is
+government for?'
+
+'Have you been a soldier?' I interrupted him.
+
+He had not, none of them had: that was why they could not really go back
+to Italy. Now this was out; this explained partly their curious
+reservation in speaking about their beloved country. They had forfeited
+parents as well as homeland.
+
+'What does the Government do? It takes taxes; it has an army and police,
+and it makes roads. But we could do without an army, and we could be our
+own police, and we could make our own roads. What is this Government?
+Who wants it? Only those who are unjust, and want to have advantage over
+somebody else. It is an instrument of injustice and of wrong.
+
+'Why should we have a Government? Here, in this village, there are
+thirty families of Italians. There is no government for them, no Italian
+Government. And we live together better than in Italy. We are richer and
+freer, we have no policemen, no poor laws. We help each other, and there
+are no poor.
+
+'Why are these Governments always doing what we don't want them to do?
+We should not be fighting in the Cirenaica if we were all Italians. It
+is the Government that does it. They talk and talk and do things with
+us: but we don't want them.'
+
+The others, tipsy, sat round the table with the terrified gravity of
+children who are somehow responsible for things they do not understand.
+They stirred in their seats, turning aside, with gestures almost of
+pain, of imprisonment. Only Alfredo, laying his hand on mine, was
+laughing, loosely, floridly. He would upset all the Government with a
+jerk of his well-built shoulder, and then he would have a spree--such a
+spree. He laughed wetly to me.
+
+The Giuseppino waited patiently during this tipsy confidence, but his
+pale clarity and beauty was something constant star-like in comparison
+with the flushed, soft handsomeness of the other. He waited patiently,
+looking at me.
+
+But I did not want him to go on: I did not want to answer. I could feel
+a new spirit in him, something strange and pure and slightly
+frightening. He wanted something which was beyond me. And my soul was
+somewhere in tears, crying helplessly like an infant in the night. I
+could not respond: I could not answer. He seemed to look at me, me, an
+Englishman, an educated man, for corroboration. But I could not
+corroborate him. I knew the purity and new struggling towards birth of a
+true star-like spirit. But I could not confirm him in his utterance: my
+soul could not respond. I did not believe in the perfectibility of man.
+I did not believe in infinite harmony among men. And this was his star,
+this belief.
+
+It was nearly midnight. A Swiss came in and asked for beer. The Italians
+gathered round them a curious darkness of reserve. And then I must go.
+
+They shook hands with me warmly, truthfully, putting a sort of implicit
+belief in me, as representative of some further knowledge. But there was
+a fixed, calm resolve over the face of the Giuseppino, a sort of steady
+faith, even in disappointment. He gave me a copy of a little Anarchist
+paper published in Geneva. _L'Anarchista_, I believe it was called. I
+glanced at it. It was in Italian, naive, simple, rather rhetorical. So
+they were all Anarchists, these Italians.
+
+I ran down the hill in the thick Swiss darkness to the little bridge,
+and along the uneven cobbled street. I did not want to think, I did not
+want to know. I wanted to arrest my activity, to keep it confined to the
+moment, to the adventure.
+
+When I came to the flight of stone steps which led up to the door of the
+inn, at the side I saw in the darkness two figures. They said a low good
+night and parted; the girl began to knock at the door, the man
+disappeared. It was the niece of the landlady parting from her lover.
+
+We waited outside the locked door, at the top of the stone steps, in the
+darkness of midnight. The stream rustled below. Then came a shouting and
+an insane snarling within the passage; the bolts were not withdrawn.
+
+'It is the gentleman, it is the strange gentleman,' called the girl.
+
+Then came again the furious shouting snarls, and the landlord's mad
+voice:
+
+'Stop out, stop out there. The door won't be opened again.'
+
+'The strange gentleman is here,' repeated the girl.
+
+Then more movement was heard, and the door was suddenly opened, and the
+landlord rushed out upon us, wielding a broom. It was a strange sight,
+in the half-lighted passage. I stared blankly in the doorway. The
+landlord dropped the broom he was waving and collapsed as if by magic,
+looking at me, though he continued to mutter madly, unintelligibly. The
+girl slipped past me, and the landlord snarled. Then he picked up the
+brush, at the same time crying:
+
+'You are late, the door was shut, it will not be opened. We shall have
+the police in the house. We said twelve o'clock; at twelve o'clock the
+door must be shut, and must not be opened again. If you are late you
+stay out--'
+
+So he went snarling, his voice rising higher and higher, away into the
+kitchen.
+
+'You are coming to your room?' the landlady said to me coldly. And she
+led me upstairs.
+
+The room was over the road, clean, but rather ugly, with a large tin,
+that had once contained lard or Swiss-milk, to wash in. But the bed was
+good enough, which was all that mattered.
+
+I heard the landlord yelling, and there was a long and systematic
+thumping somewhere, thump, thump, thump, and banging. I wondered where
+it was. I could not locate it at all, because my room lay beyond another
+large room: I had to go through a large room, by the foot of two beds,
+to get to my door; so I could not quite tell where anything was.
+
+But I went to sleep whilst I was wondering.
+
+I woke in the morning and washed in the tin. I could see a few people in
+the street, walking in the Sunday morning leisure. It felt like Sunday
+in England, and I shrank from it. I could see none of the Italians. The
+factory stood there, raw and large and sombre, by the stream, and the
+drab-coloured stone tenements were close by. Otherwise the village was a
+straggling Swiss street, almost untouched.
+
+The landlord was quiet and reasonable, even friendly, in the morning. He
+wanted to talk to me: where had I bought my boots, was his first
+question. I told him in Munich. And how much had they cost? I told him
+twenty-eight marks. He was much impressed by them: such good boots, of
+such soft, strong, beautiful leather; he had not seen such boots for a
+long time.
+
+Then I knew it was he who had cleaned my boots. I could see him
+fingering them and wondering over them. I rather liked him. I could see
+he had had imagination once, and a certain fineness of nature. Now he
+was corrupted with drink, too far gone to be even a human being. I hated
+the village.
+
+They set bread and butter and a piece of cheese weighing about five
+pounds, and large, fresh, sweet cakes for breakfast. I ate and was
+thankful: the food was good.
+
+A couple of village youths came in, in their Sunday clothes. They had
+the Sunday stiffness. It reminded me of the stiffness and curious
+self-consciousness that comes over life in England on a Sunday. But the
+Landlord sat with his waistcoat hanging open over his shirt,
+pot-bellied, his ruined face leaning forward, talking, always talking,
+wanting to know.
+
+So in a few minutes I was out on the road again, thanking God for the
+blessing of a road that belongs to no man, and travels away from
+all men.
+
+I did not want to see the Italians. Something had got tied up in me, and
+I could not bear to see them again. I liked them so much; but, for some
+reason or other, my mind stopped like clockwork if I wanted to think of
+them and of what their lives would be, their future. It was as if some
+curious negative magnetism arrested my mind, prevented it from working,
+the moment I turned it towards these Italians.
+
+I do not know why it was. But I could never write to them, or think of
+them, or even read the paper they gave me though it lay in my drawer for
+months, in Italy, and I often glanced over six lines of it. And often,
+often my mind went back to the group, the play they were rehearsing, the
+wine in the pleasant cafe, and the night. But the moment my memory
+touched them, my whole soul stopped and was null; I could not go on.
+Even now I cannot really consider them in thought.
+
+I shrink involuntarily away. I do not know why this is.
+
+
+
+
+_The Return Journey_
+
+
+When one walks, one must travel west or south. If one turns northward or
+eastward it is like walking down a cul-de-sac, to the blind end.
+
+So it has been since the Crusaders came home satiated, and the
+Renaissance saw the western sky as an archway into the future. So it is
+still. We must go westwards and southwards.
+
+It is a sad and gloomy thing to travel even from Italy into France. But
+it is a joyful thing to walk south to Italy, south and west. It is so.
+And there is a certain exaltation in the thought of going west, even to
+Cornwall, to Ireland. It is as if the magnetic poles were south-west and
+north-east, for our spirits, with the south-west, under the sunset, as
+the positive pole. So whilst I walk through Switzerland, though it is a
+valley of gloom and depression, a light seems to flash out under every
+footstep, with the joy of progression.
+
+It was Sunday morning when I left the valley where the Italians lived. I
+went quickly over the stream, heading for Lucerne. It was a good thing
+to be out of doors, with one's pack on one's back, climbing uphill. But
+the trees were thick by the roadside; I was not yet free. It was Sunday
+morning, very still.
+
+In two hours I was at the top of the hill, looking out over the
+intervening valley at the long lake of Zurich, spread there beyond with
+its girdle of low hills, like a relief-map. I could not bear to look at
+it, it was so small and unreal. I had a feeling as if it were false, a
+large relief-map that I was looking down upon, and which I wanted to
+smash. It seemed to intervene between me and some reality. I could not
+believe that that was the real world. It was a figment, a fabrication,
+like a dull landscape painted on a wall, to hide the real landscape.
+
+So I went on, over to the other side of the hill, and I looked out
+again. Again there were the smoky-looking hills and the lake like a
+piece of looking-glass. But the hills were higher: that big one was the
+Rigi. I set off down the hill.
+
+There was fat agricultural land and several villages. And church was
+over. The churchgoers were all coming home: men in black broadcloth and
+old chimney-pot silk hats, carrying their umbrellas; women in ugly
+dresses, carrying books and umbrellas. The streets were dotted with
+these black-clothed men and stiff women, all reduced to a Sunday
+nullity. I hated it. It reminded me of that which I knew in my boyhood,
+that stiff, null 'propriety' which used to come over us, like a sort of
+deliberate and self-inflicted cramp, on Sundays. I hated these elders in
+black broadcloth, with their neutral faces, going home piously to their
+Sunday dinners. I hated the feeling of these villages, comfortable,
+well-to-do, clean, and proper.
+
+And my boot was chafing two of my toes. That always happens. I had come
+down to a wide, shallow valley-bed, marshy. So about a mile out of the
+village I sat down by a stone bridge, by a stream, and tore up my
+handkerchief, and bound up the toes. And as I sat binding my toes, two
+of the elders in black, with umbrellas under their arms, approached from
+the direction of the village.
+
+They made me so furious, I had to hasten to fasten my boot, to hurry on
+again, before they should come near me. I could not bear the way they
+walked and talked, so crambling and material and mealy-mouthed.
+
+Then it did actually begin to rain. I was just going down a short hill.
+So I sat under a bush and watched the trees drip. I was so glad to be
+there, homeless, without place or belonging, crouching under the leaves
+in the copse by the road, that I felt I had, like the meek, inherited
+the earth. Some men went by, with their coat-collars turned up, and the
+rain making still blacker their black broadcloth shoulders. They did not
+see me. I was as safe and separate as a ghost. So I ate the remains of
+my food that I had bought in Zurich, and waited for the rain.
+
+Later, in the wet Sunday afternoon, I went on to the little lake, past
+many inert, neutral, material people, down an ugly road where trams ran.
+The blight of Sunday was almost intolerable near the town.
+
+So on I went, by the side of the steamy, reedy lake, walking the length
+of it. Then suddenly I went in to a little villa by the water for tea.
+In Switzerland every house is a villa.
+
+But this villa, was kept by two old ladies and a delicate dog, who must
+not get his feet wet. I was very happy there. I had good jam and strange
+honey-cakes for tea, that I liked, and the little old ladies pattered
+round in a great stir, always whirling like two dry leaves after the
+restless dog.
+
+'Why must he not go out?' I said.
+
+'Because it is wet,' they answered, 'and he coughs and sneezes.'
+
+'Without a handkerchief, that is not _angenehm_' I said.
+
+So we became bosom friends.
+
+'You are Austrian?' they said to me.
+
+I said I was from Graz; that my father was a doctor in Graz, and that I
+was walking for my pleasure through the countries of Europe.
+
+I said this because I knew a doctor from Graz who was always wandering
+about, and because I did not want to be myself, an Englishman, to these
+two old ladies. I wanted to be something else. So we exchanged
+confidences.
+
+They told me, in their queer, old, toothless fashion, about their
+visitors, a man who used to fish all day, every day for three weeks,
+fish every hour of the day, though many a day he caught nothing--nothing
+at all--still he fished from the boat; and so on, such trivialities.
+Then they told me of a third sister who had died, a third little old
+lady. One could feel the gap in the house. They cried; and I, being an
+Austrian from Graz, to my astonishment felt my tears slip over on to the
+table. I also _was_ sorry, and I would have kissed the little old ladies
+to comfort them.
+
+'Only in heaven it is warm, and it doesn't rain, and no one dies,' I
+said, looking at the wet leaves.
+
+Then I went away. I would have stayed the night at this house: I wanted
+to. But I had developed my Austrian character too far.
+
+So I went on to a detestable brutal inn in the town. And the next day I
+climbed over the back of the detestable Rigi, with its vile hotel, to
+come to Lucerne. There, on the Rigi, I met a lost young Frenchman who
+could speak no German, and who said he could not find people to speak
+French. So we sat on a stone and became close friends, and I promised
+faithfully to go and visit him in his barracks in Algiers: I was to sail
+from Naples to Algiers. He wrote me the address on his card, and told me
+he had friends in the regiment, to whom I should be introduced, and we
+could have a good time, if I would stay a week or two, down there
+in Algiers.
+
+How much more real Algiers was than the rock on the Rigi where we sat,
+or the lake beneath, or the mountains beyond. Algiers is very real,
+though I have never seen it, and my friend is my friend for ever, though
+I have lost his card and forgotten his name. He was a Government clerk
+from Lyons, making this his first foreign tour before he began his
+military service. He showed me his 'circular excursion ticket'. Then at
+last we parted, for he must get to the top of the Rigi, and I must get
+to the bottom.
+
+Lucerne and its lake were as irritating as ever--like the wrapper round
+milk chocolate. I could not sleep even one night there: I took the
+steamer down the lake, to the very last station. There I found a good
+German inn, and was happy.
+
+There was a tall thin young man, whose face was red and inflamed from
+the sun. I thought he was a German tourist. He had just come in; and he
+was eating bread and milk. He and I were alone in the eating-room. He
+was looking at an illustrated paper.
+
+'Does the steamer stop here all night?' I asked him in German, hearing
+the boat bustling and blowing her steam on the water outside, and
+glancing round at her lights, red and white, in the pitch darkness.
+
+He only shook his head over his bread and milk, and did not lift his
+face.
+
+'Are you English, then?' I said.
+
+No one but an Englishman would have hidden his face in a bowl of milk,
+and have shaken his red ears in such painful confusion.
+
+'Yes,' he said, 'I am.'
+
+And I started almost out of my skin at the unexpected London accent. It
+was as if one suddenly found oneself in the Tube.
+
+'So am I,' I said. 'Where have you come from?'
+
+Then he began, like a general explaining his plans, to tell me. He had
+walked round over the Furka Pass, had been on foot four or five days. He
+had walked tremendously. Knowing no German, and nothing of the
+mountains, he had set off alone on this tour: he had a fortnight's
+holiday. So he had come over the Rhone Glacier across the Furka and down
+from Andermatt to the Lake. On this last day he had walked about thirty
+mountain miles.
+
+'But weren't you tired?' I said, aghast.
+
+He was. Under the inflamed redness of his sun- and wind- and snow-burned
+face he was sick with fatigue. He had done over a hundred miles in the
+last four days.
+
+'Did you enjoy it?' I asked.
+
+'Oh yes. I wanted to do it all.' He wanted to do it, and he _had_ done
+it. But God knows what he wanted to do it for. He had now one day at
+Lucerne, one day at Interlaken and Berne, then London.
+
+I was sorry for him in my soul, he was so cruelly tired, so perishingly
+victorious.
+
+'Why did you do so much?' I said. 'Why did you come on foot all down the
+valley when you could have taken the train? Was it worth it?'
+
+'I think so,' he said.
+
+Yet he was sick with fatigue and over-exhaustion. His eyes were quite
+dark, sightless: he seemed to have lost the power of seeing, to be
+virtually blind. He hung his head forward when he had to write a post
+card, as if he felt his way. But he turned his post card so that I
+should not see to whom it was addressed; not that I was interested; only
+I noticed his little, cautious, English movement of privacy.
+
+'What time will you be going on?' I asked.
+
+'When is the first steamer?' he said, and he turned out a guide-book
+with a time-table. He would leave at about seven.
+
+'But why so early?' I said to him.
+
+He must be in Lucerne at a certain hour, and at Interlaken in the
+evening.
+
+'I suppose you will rest when you get to London?' I said.
+
+He looked at me quickly, reservedly.
+
+I was drinking beer: I asked him wouldn't he have something. He thought
+a moment, then said he would have another glass of hot milk. The
+landlord came--'And bread?' he asked.
+
+The Englishman refused. He could not eat, really. Also he was poor; he
+had to husband his money. The landlord brought the milk and asked me,
+when would the gentleman want to go away. So I made arrangements between
+the landlord and the stranger. But the Englishman was slightly
+uncomfortable at my intervention. He did not like me to know what he
+would have for breakfast.
+
+I could feel so well the machine that had him in its grip. He slaved for
+a year, mechanically, in London, riding in the Tube, working in the
+office. Then for a fortnight he was let free. So he rushed to
+Switzerland, with a tour planned out, and with just enough money to see
+him through, and to buy presents at Interlaken: bits of the edelweiss
+pottery: I could see him going home with them.
+
+So he arrived, and with amazing, pathetic courage set forth on foot in a
+strange land, to face strange landlords, with no language but English at
+his command, and his purse definitely limited. Yet he wanted to go among
+the mountains, to cross a glacier. So he had walked on and on, like one
+possessed, ever forward. His name might have been Excelsior, indeed.
+
+But then, when he reached his Furka, only to walk along the ridge and to
+descend on the same side! My God, it was killing to the soul. And here
+he was, down again from the mountains, beginning his journey home again:
+steamer and train and steamer and train and Tube, till he was back in
+the machine.
+
+It hadn't let him go, and he knew it. Hence his cruel self-torture of
+fatigue, his cruel exercise of courage. He who hung his head in his milk
+in torment when I asked him a question in German, what courage had he
+not needed to take this his very first trip out of England, alone,
+on foot!
+
+His eyes were dark and deep with unfathomable courage. Yet he was going
+back in the morning. He was going back. All he had courage for was to go
+back. He would go back, though he died by inches. Why not? It was
+killing him, it was like living loaded with irons. But he had the
+courage to submit, to die that way, since it was the way allotted
+to him.
+
+The way he sank on the table in exhaustion, drinking his milk, his will,
+nevertheless, so perfect and unblemished, triumphant, though his body
+was broken and in anguish, was almost too much to bear. My heart was
+wrung for my countryman, wrung till it bled.
+
+I could not bear to understand my countryman, a man who worked for his
+living, as I had worked, as nearly all my countrymen work. He would not
+give in. On his holiday he would walk, to fulfil his purpose, walk on;
+no matter how cruel the effort were, he would not rest, he would not
+relinquish his purpose nor abate his will, not by one jot or tittle. His
+body must pay whatever his will demanded, though it were torture.
+
+It all seemed to me so foolish. I was almost in tears. He went to bed. I
+walked by the dark lake, and talked to the girl in the inn. She was a
+pleasant girl: it was a pleasant inn, a homely place. One could be
+happy there.
+
+In the morning it was sunny, the lake was blue. By night I should be
+nearly at the crest of my journey. I was glad.
+
+The Englishman had gone. I looked for his name in the book. It was
+written in a fair, clerkly hand. He lived at Streatham. Suddenly I hated
+him. The dogged fool, to keep his nose on the grindstone like that. What
+was all his courage but the very tip-top of cowardice? What a vile
+nature--almost Sadish, proud, like the infamous Red Indians, of being
+able to stand torture.
+
+The landlord came to talk to me. He was fat and comfortable and too
+respectful. But I had to tell him all the Englishman had done, in the
+way of a holiday, just to shame his own fat, ponderous, inn-keeper's
+luxuriousness that was too gross. Then all I got out of his enormous
+comfortableness was:
+
+'Yes, that's a _very_ long step to take.'
+
+So I set off myself, up the valley between the close, snow-topped
+mountains, whose white gleamed above me as I crawled, small as an
+insect, along the dark, cold valley below.
+
+There had been a cattle fair earlier in the morning, so troops of cattle
+were roving down the road, some with bells tang-tanging, all with soft
+faces and startled eyes and a sudden swerving of horns. The grass was
+very green by the roads and by the streams; the shadows of the mountain
+slopes were very dark on either hand overhead, and the sky with snowy
+flanks and tips was high up.
+
+Here, away from the world, the villages were quiet and obscure--left
+behind. They had the same fascinating atmosphere of being forgotten,
+left out of the world, that old English villages have. And buying apples
+and cheese and bread in a little shop that sold everything and smelled
+of everything, I felt at home again.
+
+But climbing gradually higher, mile after mile, always between the
+shadows of the high mountains, I was glad I did not live in the Alps.
+The villages on the slopes, the people there, seemed, as if they _must_
+gradually, bit by bit, slide down and tumble to the water-course, and be
+rolled on away, away to the sea. Straggling, haphazard little villages
+ledged on the slope, high up, beside their wet, green, hanging meadows,
+with pine trees behind and the valley bottom far below, and rocks right
+above, on both sides, seemed like little temporary squattings of outcast
+people. It seemed impossible that they should persist there, with great
+shadows wielded over them, like a menace, and gleams of brief sunshine,
+like a window. There was a sense of momentariness and expectation. It
+seemed as though some dramatic upheaval must take place, the mountains
+fall down into their own shadows. The valley beds were like deep graves,
+the sides of the mountains like the collapsing walls of a grave. The
+very mountain-tops above, bright with transcendent snow, seemed like
+death, eternal death.
+
+There, it seemed, in the glamorous snow, was the source of death, which
+fell down in great waves of shadow and rock, rushing to the level earth.
+And all the people of the mountains, on the slopes, in the valleys,
+seemed to live upon this great, rushing wave of death, of breaking-down,
+of destruction.
+
+The very pure source of breaking-down, decomposition, the very quick of
+cold death, is the snowy mountain-peak above. There, eternally, goes on
+the white foregathering of the crystals, out of the deathly cold of the
+heavens; this is the static nucleus where death meets life in its
+elementality. And thence, from their white, radiant nucleus of death in
+life, flows the great flux downwards, towards life and warmth. And we
+below, we cannot think of the flux upwards, that flows from the
+needle-point of snow to the unutterable cold and death.
+
+The people under the mountains, they seem to live in the flux of death,
+the last, strange, overshadowed units of life. Big shadows wave over
+them, there is the eternal noise of water falling icily downwards from
+the source of death overhead.
+
+And the people under the shadows, dwelling in the tang of snow and the
+noise of icy water, seem dark, almost sordid, brutal. There is no
+flowering or coming to flower, only this persistence, in the ice-touched
+air, of reproductive life.
+
+But it is difficult to get a sense of a native population. Everywhere
+are the hotels and the foreigners, the parasitism. Yet there is, unseen,
+this overshadowed, overhung, sordid mountain population, ledged on the
+slopes and in the crevices. In the wider valleys there is still a sense
+of cowering among the people. But they catch a new tone from their
+contact with the foreigners. And in the towns are nothing but
+tradespeople.
+
+So I climbed slowly up, for a whole day, first along the highroad,
+sometimes above and sometimes below the twisting, serpentine railway,
+then afterwards along a path on the side of the hill--a path that went
+through the crew-yards of isolated farms and even through the garden of
+a village priest. The priest was decorating an archway. He stood on a
+chair in the sunshine, reaching up with a garland, whilst the
+serving-woman stood below, talking loudly.
+
+The valley here seemed wider, the great flanks of the mountains gave
+place, the peaks above were further back. So one was happier. I was
+pleased as I sat by the thin track of single flat stones that dropped
+swiftly downhill.
+
+At the bottom was a little town with a factory or quarry, or a foundry,
+some place with long, smoking chimneys; which made me feel quite at home
+among the mountains.
+
+It is the hideous rawness of the world of men, the horrible, desolating
+harshness of the advance of the industrial world upon the world of
+nature, that is so painful. It looks as though the industrial spread of
+mankind were a sort of dry disintegration advancing and advancing, a
+process of dry disintegration. If only we could learn to take thought
+for the whole world instead of for merely tiny bits of it.
+
+I went through the little, hideous, crude factory-settlement in the high
+valley, where the eternal snows gleamed, past the enormous
+advertisements for chocolate and hotels, up the last steep slope of the
+pass to where the tunnel begins. Goeschenen, the village at the mouth of
+the tunnel, is all railway sidings and haphazard villas for tourists,
+post cards, and touts and weedy carriages; disorder and sterile chaos,
+high up. How should any one stay there!
+
+I went on up the pass itself. There were various parties of visitors on
+the roads and tracks, people from towns incongruously walking and
+driving. It was drawing on to evening. I climbed slowly, between the
+great cleft in the rock where are the big iron gates, through which the
+road winds, winds half-way down the narrow gulley of solid, living rock,
+the very throat of the path, where hangs a tablet in memory of many
+Russians killed.
+
+Emerging through the dark rocky throat of the pass I came to the upper
+world, the level upper world. It was evening, livid, cold. On either
+side spread the sort of moorland of the wide pass-head. I drew near
+along the high-road, to Andermatt.
+
+Everywhere were soldiers moving about the livid, desolate waste of this
+upper world. I passed the barracks and the first villas for visitors.
+Darkness was coming on; the straggling, inconclusive street of Andermatt
+looked as if it were some accident--houses, hotels, barracks,
+lodging-places tumbled at random as the caravan of civilization crossed
+this high, cold, arid bridge of the European world.
+
+I bought two post cards and wrote them out of doors in the cold, livid
+twilight. Then I asked a soldier where was the post-office. He directed
+me. It was something like sending post cards from Skegness or Bognor,
+there in the post-office.
+
+I was trying to make myself agree to stay in Andermatt for the night.
+But I could not. The whole place was so terribly raw and flat and
+accidental, as if great pieces of furniture had tumbled out of a
+pantechnicon and lay discarded by the road. I hovered in the street, in
+the twilight, trying to make myself stay. I looked at the announcements
+of lodgings and boarding for visitors. It was no good. I could not go
+into one of these houses.
+
+So I passed on, through the old, low, broad-eaved houses that cringe
+down to the very street, out into the open again. The air was fierce and
+savage. On one side was a moorland, level; on the other a sweep of naked
+hill, curved concave, and sprinkled with snow. I could see how wonderful
+it would all be, under five or six feet of winter snow, skiing and
+tobogganing at Christmas. But it needed the snow. In the summer there is
+to be seen nothing but the winter's broken detritus.
+
+The twilight deepened, though there was still the strange, glassy
+translucency of the snow-lit air. A fragment of moon was in the sky. A
+carriage-load of French tourists passed me. There was the loud noise of
+water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the
+sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a
+second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity,
+this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that
+mocks and destroys our warm being.
+
+So I came, in the early darkness, to the little village with the broken
+castle that stands for ever frozen at the point where the track parts,
+one way continuing along the ridge, to the Furka Pass, the other
+swerving over the hill to the left, over the Gotthardt.
+
+In this village I must stay. I saw a woman looking hastily, furtively
+from a doorway. I knew she was looking for visitors. I went on up the
+hilly street. There were only a few wooden houses and a gaily lighted
+wooden inn, where men were laughing, and strangers, men, standing
+talking loudly in the doorway.
+
+It was very difficult to go to a house this night. I did not want to
+approach any of them. I turned back to the house of the peering woman.
+She had looked hen-like and anxious. She would be glad of a visitor to
+help her pay her rent.
+
+It was a clean, pleasant wooden house, made to keep out the cold. That
+seemed its one function: to defend the inmates from the cold. It was
+furnished like a hut, just tables and chairs and bare wooden walls. One
+felt very close and secure in the room, as in a hut, shut away from the
+outer world.
+
+The hen-like woman came.
+
+'Can I have a bed,' I said, 'for the night?'
+
+'_Abendessen, ja!_' she replied. 'Will you have soup and boiled beef and
+vegetables?'
+
+I said I would, so I sat down to wait, in the utter silence. I could
+scarcely hear the ice-stream, the silence seemed frozen, the house
+empty. The woman seemed to be flitting aimlessly, scurriedly, in reflex
+against the silence. One could almost touch the stillness as one could
+touch the walls, or the stove, or the table with white American
+oil-cloth.
+
+Suddenly she appeared again.
+
+'What will you drink?'
+
+She watched my face anxiously, and her voice was pathetic, slightly
+pleading in its quickness.
+
+'Wine or beer?' she said.
+
+I would not trust the coldness of beer.
+
+'A half of red wine,' I said.
+
+I knew she was going to keep me an indefinite time.
+
+She appeared with the wine and bread.
+
+'Would you like omelette after the beef?' she asked. 'Omelette with
+cognac--I can make it _very_ good.'
+
+I knew I should be spending too much, but I said yes. After all, why
+should I not eat, after the long walk?
+
+So she left me again, whilst I sat in the utter isolation and stillness,
+eating bread and drinking the wine, which was good. And I listened for
+any sound: only the faint noise of the stream. And I wondered, Why am I
+here, on this ridge of the Alps, in the lamp-lit, wooden, close-shut
+room, alone? Why am I here?
+
+Yet somehow I was glad, I was happy even: such splendid silence and
+coldness and clean isolation. It was something eternal, unbroachable: I
+was free, in this heavy, ice-cold air, this upper world, alone. London,
+far away below, beyond, England, Germany, France--they were all so
+unreal in the night. It was a sort of grief that this continent all
+beneath was so unreal, false, non-existent in its activity. Out of the
+silence one looked down on it, and it seemed to have lost all
+importance, all significance. It was so big, yet it had no significance.
+The kingdom of the world had no significance: what could one do but
+wander about?
+
+The woman came with my soup. I asked her, did not many people come in
+the summer. But she was scared away, she did not answer, she went like a
+leaf in the wind. However, the soup was good and plentiful.
+
+She was a long time before she came with the next course. Then she put
+the tray on the table, and looking at me, then looking away,
+shrinking, she said:
+
+'You must excuse me if I don't answer you--I don't hear well--I am
+rather deaf.'
+
+I looked at her, and I winced also. She shrank in such simple pain from
+the fact of her defect. I wondered if she were bullied because of it, or
+only afraid lest visitors would dislike it.
+
+She put the dishes in order, set me my plate, quickly, nervously, and
+was gone again, like a scared chicken. Being tired, I wanted to weep
+over her, the nervous, timid hen, so frightened by her own deafness. The
+house was silent of her, empty. It was perhaps her deafness which
+created this empty soundlessness.
+
+When she came with the omelette, I said to her loudly:
+
+'That was very good, the soup and meat.' So she quivered nervously, and
+said, 'Thank you,' and I managed to talk to her. She was like most deaf
+people, in that her terror of not hearing made her six times worse than
+she actually was.
+
+She spoke with a soft, strange accent, so I thought she was perhaps a
+foreigner. But when I asked her she misunderstood, and I had not the
+heart to correct her. I can only remember she said her house was always
+full in the winter, about Christmas-time. People came for the winter
+sport. There were two young English ladies who always came to her.
+
+She spoke of them warmly. Then, suddenly afraid, she drifted off again.
+I ate the omelette with cognac, which was very good, then I looked in
+the street. It was very dark, with bright stars, and smelled of snow.
+Two village men went by. I was tired, I did not want to go to the inn.
+
+So I went to bed, in the silent, wooden house. I had a small bedroom,
+clean and wooden and very cold. Outside, the stream was rushing. I
+covered myself with a great depth of featherbed, and looked at the
+stars, and the shadowy upper world, and went to sleep.
+
+In the morning I washed in the ice-cold water, and was glad to set out.
+An icy mist was over the noisy stream, there were a few meagre, shredded
+pine-trees. I had breakfast and paid my bill: it was seven francs--more
+than I could afford; but that did not matter, once I was out in the air.
+
+The sky was blue and perfect, it was a ringing morning, the village was
+very still. I went up the hill till I came to the signpost. I looked
+down the direction of the Furka, and thought of my tired Englishman from
+Streatham, who would be on his way home. Thank God I need not go home:
+never, perhaps. I turned up the track to the left, to the Gothard.
+
+Standing looking round at the mountain-tops, at the village and the
+broken castle below me, at the scattered debris of Andermatt on the moor
+in the distance, I was jumping in my soul with delight. Should one ever
+go down to the lower world?
+
+Then I saw another figure striding along, a youth with knee-breeches and
+Alpine hat and braces over his shirt, walking manfully, his coat slung
+in his rucksack behind. I laughed, and waited. He came my way.
+
+'Are you going over the Gothard?' I said.
+
+'Yes,' he replied. 'Are you also?'
+
+'Yes' I said. 'We will go together.'
+
+So we set off, climbing a track up the heathy rocks.
+
+He was a pale, freckled town youth from Basel, seventeen years old. He
+was a clerk in a baggage-transport firm--Gondrand Freres, I believe. He
+had a week's holiday, in which time he was going to make a big circular
+walk, something like the Englishman's. But he was accustomed to this
+mountain walking: he belonged to a Sportverein. Manfully he marched in
+his thick hob-nailed boots, earnestly he scrambled up the rocks.
+
+We were in the crest of the pass. Broad snow-patched slopes came down
+from the pure sky; the defile was full of stones, all bare stones,
+enormous ones as big as a house, and small ones, pebbles. Through these
+the road wound in silence, through this upper, transcendent desolation,
+wherein was only the sound of the stream. Sky and snow-patched slopes,
+then the stony, rocky bed of the defile, full of morning sunshine: this
+was all. We were crossing in silence from the northern world to
+the southern.
+
+But he, Emil, was going to take the train back, through the tunnel, in
+the evening, to resume his circular walk at Goeschenen.
+
+I, however, was going on, over the ridge of the world, from the north
+into the south. So I was glad.
+
+We climbed up the gradual incline for a long time. The slopes above
+became lower, they began to recede. The sky was very near, we were
+walking under the sky.
+
+Then the defile widened out, there was an open place before us, the very
+top of the pass. Also there were low barracks, and soldiers. We heard
+firing. Standing still, we saw on the slopes of snow, under the radiant
+blue heaven, tiny puffs of smoke, then some small black figures crossing
+the snow patch, then another rattle of rifle-fire, rattling dry and
+unnatural in the upper, skyey air, between the rocks.
+
+'_Das ist schoen_,' said my companion, in his simple admiration.
+
+'_Huebsch_,' I said.
+
+'But that would be splendid, to be firing up there, manoeuvring up in
+the snow.'
+
+And he began to tell me how hard a soldier's life was, how hard the
+soldier was drilled.
+
+'You don't look forward to it?' I said.
+
+'Oh yes, I do. I want to be a soldier, I want to serve my time.'
+
+'Why?'I said.
+
+'For the exercise, the life, the drilling. One becomes strong.'
+
+'Do all the Swiss want to serve their time in the army?' I asked.
+
+'Yes--they all want to. It is good for every man, and it keeps us all
+together. Besides, it is only for a year. For a year it is very good.
+The Germans have three years--that is too long, that is bad.'
+
+I told him how the soldiers in Bavaria hated the military service.
+
+'Yes,' he said, 'that is true of Germans. The system is different. Ours
+is much better; in Switzerland a man enjoys his time as a soldier. I
+want to go.'
+
+So we watched the black dots of soldiers crawling over the high snow,
+listened to the unnatural dry rattle of guns, up there.
+
+Then we were aware of somebody whistling, of soldiers yelling down the
+road. We were to come on, along the level, over the bridge. So we
+marched quickly forward, away from the slopes, towards the hotel, once a
+monastery, that stood in the distance. The light was blue and clear on
+the reedy lakes of this upper place; it was a strange desolation of
+water and bog and rocks and road, hedged by the snowy slopes round the
+rim, under the very sky.
+
+The soldier was yelling again. I could not tell what he said.
+
+'He says if we don't run we can't come at all,' said Emil.
+
+'I won't run,' I said.
+
+So we hurried forwards, over the bridge, where the soldier on guard was
+standing.
+
+'Do you want to be shot?' he said angrily, as we came up.
+
+'No, thanks,' I said.
+
+Emil was very serious.
+
+'How long should we have had to wait if we hadn't got through now?' he
+asked the soldier, when we were safely out of danger.
+
+'Till one o'clock,' was the reply.
+
+'Two hours!' said Emil, strangely elated. 'We should have had to wait
+two hours before we could come on. He was riled that we didn't run,' and
+he laughed with glee.
+
+So we marched over the level to the hotel. We called in for a glass of
+hot milk. I asked in German. But the maid, a pert hussy, elegant and
+superior, was French. She served us with great contempt, as two
+worthless creatures, poverty-stricken. It abashed poor Emil, but we
+managed to laugh at her. This made her very angry. In the smoking-room
+she raised up her voice in French:
+
+'_Du lait chaud pour les chameaux._'
+
+'Some hot milk for the camels, she says,' I translated for Emil. He was
+covered with confusion and youthful anger.
+
+But I called to her, tapped the table and called:
+
+'_Mademoiselle!_'
+
+She appeared flouncingly in the doorway.
+
+'_Encore du lait pour les chameaux_,' I said.
+
+And she whisked our glasses off the table, and flounced out without a
+word.
+
+But she would not come in again with the milk. A German girl brought it.
+We laughed, and she smiled primly.
+
+When we set forth again, Emil rolled up his sleeves and turned back his
+shirt from his neck and breast, to do the thing thoroughly. Besides, it
+was midday, and the sun was hot; and, with his bulky pack on his back,
+he suggested the camel of the French maid more than ever.
+
+We were on the downward slope. Only a short way from the hotel, and
+there was the drop, the great cleft in the mountains running down from
+this shallow pot among the peaks.
+
+The descent on the south side is much more precipitous and wonderful
+than the ascent from the north. On the south, the rocks are craggy and
+stupendous; the little river falls headlong down; it is not a stream, it
+is one broken, panting cascade far away in the gulley below, in
+the darkness.
+
+But on the slopes the sun pours in, the road winds down with its tail in
+its mouth, always in endless loops returning on itself. The mules that
+travel upward seem to be treading in a mill.
+
+Emil took the narrow tracks, and, like the water, we cascaded down,
+leaping from level to level, leaping, running, leaping, descending
+headlong, only resting now and again when we came down on to another
+level of the high-road.
+
+Having begun, we could not help ourselves, we were like two stones
+bouncing down. Emil was highly elated. He waved his thin, bare, white
+arms as he leapt, his chest grew pink with the exercise. Now he felt he
+was doing something that became a member of his Sportverein. Down we
+went, jumping, running, britching.
+
+It was wonderful on this south side, so sunny, with feathery trees and
+deep black shadows. It reminded me of Goethe, of the romantic period:
+
+    _Kennst du das Land, wo die Citronen bluehen?_
+
+So we went tumbling down into the south, very swiftly, along with the
+tumbling stream. But it was very tiring. We went at a great pace down
+the gully, between the sheer rocks. Trees grew in the ledges high over
+our heads, trees grew down below. And ever we descended.
+
+Till gradually the gully opened, then opened into a wide valley-head,
+and we saw Airolo away below us, the railway emerging from its hole, the
+whole valley like a cornucopia full of sunshine.
+
+Poor Emil was tired, more tired than I was. And his big boots had hurt
+his feet in the descent. So, having come to the open valley-head, we
+went more gently. He had become rather quiet.
+
+The head of the valley had that half-tamed, ancient aspect that reminded
+me of the Romans. I could only expect the Roman legions to be encamped
+down there; and the white goats feeding on the bushes belonged to a
+Roman camp.
+
+But no, we saw again the barracks of the Swiss soldiery, and again we
+were in the midst of rifle-fire and manoeuvres. But we went evenly,
+tired now, and hungry. We had nothing to eat.
+
+It is strange how different the sun-dried, ancient, southern slopes of
+the world are, from the northern slopes. It is as if the god Pan really
+had his home among these sun-bleached stones and tough, sun-dark trees.
+And one knows it all in one's blood, it is pure, sun-dried memory. So I
+was content, coming down into Airolo.
+
+We found the streets were Italian, the houses sunny outside and dark
+within, like Italy, there were laurels in the road. Poor Emil was a
+foreigner all at once. He rolled down his shirt sleeves and fastened his
+shirt-neck, put on his coat and collar, and became a foreigner in his
+soul, pale and strange.
+
+I saw a shop with vegetables and grapes, a real Italian shop, a dark
+cave.
+
+'_Quanto costa l'uva?_' were my first words in the south.
+
+'_Sessanta al chilo_,' said the girl.
+
+And it was as pleasant as a drink of wine, the Italian.
+
+So Emil and I ate the sweet black grapes as we went to the station.
+
+He was very poor. We went into the third-class restaurant at the
+station. He ordered beer and bread and sausage; I ordered soup and
+boiled beef and vegetables.
+
+They brought me a great quantity, so, whilst the girl was serving
+coffee-with-rum to the men at the bar, I took another spoon and knife
+and fork and plates for Emil, and we had two dinners from my one. When
+the girl--she was a woman of thirty-five--came back, she looked at us
+sharply. I smiled at her coaxingly; so she gave a small, kindly smile
+in reply.
+
+'_Ja, dies ist reizend_,' said Emil, _sotto voce_, exulting. He was very
+shy. But we were curiously happy, in that railway restaurant.
+
+Then we sat very still, on the platform, and waited for the train. It
+was like Italy, pleasant and social to wait in the railway station, all
+the world easy and warm in its activity, with the sun shining.
+
+I decided to take a franc's worth of train-journey. So I chose my
+station. It was one franc twenty, third class. Then my train came, and
+Emil and I parted, he waving to me till I was out of sight. I was sorry
+he had to go back, he did so want to venture forth.
+
+So I slid for a dozen miles or more, sleepily, down the Ticino valley,
+sitting opposite two fat priests in their feminine black.
+
+When I got out at my station I felt for the first time ill at ease. Why
+was I getting out at this wayside place, on to the great, raw high-road?
+I did not know. But I set off walking. It was nearly tea-time.
+
+Nothing in the world is more ghastly than these Italian roads, new,
+mechanical, belonging to a machine life. The old roads are wonderful,
+skilfully aiming their way. But these new great roads are desolating,
+more desolating than all the ruins in the world.
+
+I walked on and on, down the Ticino valley, towards Bellinzona. The
+valley was perhaps beautiful: I don't know. I can only remember the
+road. It was broad and new, and it ran very often beside the railway. It
+ran also by quarries and by occasional factories, also through villages.
+And the quality of its sordidness is something that does not bear
+thinking of, a quality that has entered Italian life now, if it was not
+there before.
+
+Here and there, where there were quarries or industries, great
+lodging-houses stood naked by the road, great, grey, desolate places;
+and squalid children were playing round the steps, and dirty men
+slouched in. Everything seemed under a weight.
+
+Down the road of the Ticino valley I felt again my terror of this new
+world which is coming into being on top of us. One always feels it in a
+suburb, on the edge of a town, where the land is being broken under the
+advance of houses. But this is nothing, in England, to the terror one
+feels on the new Italian roads, where these great blind cubes of
+dwellings rise stark from the destroyed earth, swarming with a sort of
+verminous life, really verminous, purely destructive.
+
+It seems to happen when the peasant suddenly leaves his home and becomes
+a workman. Then an entire change comes over everywhere. Life is now a
+matter of selling oneself to slave-work, building roads or labouring in
+quarries or mines or on the railways, purposeless, meaningless, really
+slave-work, each integer doing his mere labour, and all for no purpose,
+except to have money, and to get away from the old system.
+
+These Italian navvies work all day long, their whole life is engaged in
+the mere brute labour. And they are the navvies of the world. And whilst
+they are navvying, they are almost shockingly indifferent to their
+circumstances, merely callous to the dirt and foulness.
+
+It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human
+element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The
+roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but
+the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and
+caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. So
+that it seems as though we should be left at last with a great system of
+roads and railways and industries, and a world of utter chaos seething
+upon these fabrications: as if we had created a steel framework, and the
+whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between. It is most
+terrifying to realize; and I have always felt this terror upon a new
+Italian high-road--more there than anywhere.
+
+The remembrance of the Ticino valley is a sort of nightmare to me. But
+it was better when at last, in the darkness of night, I got into
+Bellinzona. In the midst of the town one felt the old organism still
+living. It is only at its extremities that it is falling to pieces, as
+in dry rot.
+
+In the morning, leaving Bellinzona, again I went in terror of the new,
+evil high-road, with its skirting of huge cubical houses and its
+seething navvy population. Only the peasants driving in with fruit were
+consoling. But I was afraid of them: the same spirit had set in in them.
+
+I was no longer happy in Switzerland, not even when I was eating great
+blackberries and looking down at the Lago Maggiore, at Locarno, lying by
+the lake; the terror of the callous, disintegrating process was too
+strong in me.
+
+At a little inn a man was very good to me. He went into his garden and
+fetched me the first grapes and apples and peaches, bringing them in
+amongst leaves, and heaping them before me. He was Italian-Swiss; he had
+been in a bank in Bern; now he had retired, had bought his paternal
+home, and was a free man. He was about fifty years old; he spent all his
+time in his garden; his daughter attended to the inn.
+
+He talked to me, as long as I stayed, about Italy and Switzerland and
+work and life. He was retired, he was free. But he was only nominally
+free. He had only achieved freedom from labour. He knew that the system
+he had escaped at last, persisted, and would consume his sons and his
+grandchildren. He himself had more or less escaped back to the old form;
+but as he came with me on to the hillside, looking down the high-road at
+Lugano in the distance, he knew that his old order was collapsing by a
+slow process of disintegration.
+
+Why did he talk to me as if I had any hope, as if I represented any
+positive truth as against this great negative truth that was advancing
+up the hill-side. Again I was afraid. I hastened down the high-road,
+past the houses, the grey, raw crystals of corruption.
+
+I saw a girl with handsome bare legs, ankles shining like brass in the
+sun. She was working in a field, on the edge of a vineyard. I stopped to
+look at her, suddenly fascinated by her handsome naked flesh that shone
+like brass.
+
+Then she called out to me, in a jargon I could not understand, something
+mocking and challenging. And her voice was raucous and challenging; I
+went on, afraid.
+
+In Lugano I stayed at a German hotel. I remember sitting on a seat in
+the darkness by the lake, watching the stream of promenaders patrolling
+the edge of the water, under the trees and the lamps. I can still see
+many of their faces: English, German, Italian, French. And it seemed
+here, here in this holiday-place, was the quick of the disintegration,
+the dry-rot, in this dry, friable flux of people backwards and forwards
+on the edge of the lake, men and women from the big hotels, in evening
+dress, curiously sinister, and ordinary visitors, and tourists, and
+workmen, youths, men of the town, laughing, jeering. It was curiously
+and painfully sinister, almost obscene.
+
+I sat a long time among them, thinking of the girl with her limbs of
+glowing brass. Then at last I went up to the hotel, and sat in the
+lounge looking at the papers. It was the same here as down below, though
+not so intense, the feeling of horror.
+
+So I went to bed. The hotel was on the edge of a steep declivity. I
+wondered why the whole hills did not slide down, in some great natural
+catastrophe.
+
+In the morning I walked along the side of the Lake of Lugano, to where I
+could take a steamer to ferry me down to the end. The lake is not
+beautiful, only picturesque. I liked most to think of the Romans
+coming to it.
+
+So I steamed down to the lower end of the water. When I landed and went
+along by a sort of railway I saw a group of men. Suddenly they began to
+whoop and shout. They were hanging on to an immense pale bullock, which
+was slung up to be shod; and it was lunging and kicking with terrible
+energy. It was strange to see that mass of pale, soft-looking flesh
+working with such violent frenzy, convulsed with violent, active frenzy,
+whilst men and women hung on to it with ropes, hung on and weighed it
+down. But again it scattered some of them in its terrible convulsion.
+Human beings scattered into the road, the whole place was covered with
+hot dung. And when the bullock began to lunge again, the men set up a
+howl, half of triumph, half of derision.
+
+I went on, not wanting to see. I went along a very dusty road. But it
+was not so terrifying, this road. Perhaps it was older.
+
+In dreary little Chiasso I drank coffee, and watched the come and go
+through the Customs. The Swiss and the Italian Customs officials had
+their offices within a few yards of each other, and everybody must stop.
+I went in and showed my rucksack to the Italian, then I mounted a tram,
+and went to the Lake of Como.
+
+In the tram were dressed-up women, fashionable, but business-like. They
+had come by train to Chiasso, or else had been shopping in the town.
+
+When we came to the terminus a young miss, dismounting before me, left
+behind her parasol. I had been conscious of my dusty, grimy appearance
+as I sat in the tram, I knew they thought me a workman on the roads.
+However, I forgot that when it was time to dismount.
+
+'_Pardon, Mademoiselle_,' I said to the young miss. She turned and
+withered me with a rather overdone contempt--'_bourgeoise_,' I said to
+myself, as I looked at her--'_Vous avez laisse votre parasol_.'
+
+She turned, and with a rapacious movement darted upon her parasol. How
+her soul was in her possessions! I stood and watched her. Then she went
+into the road and under the trees, haughty, a demoiselle. She had on
+white kid boots.
+
+I thought of the Lake of Como what I had thought of Lugano: it must have
+been wonderful when the Romans came there. Now it is all villas. I think
+only the sunrise is still wonderful, sometimes.
+
+I took the steamer down to Como, and slept in a vast old stone cavern of
+an inn, a remarkable place, with rather nice people. In the morning I
+went out. The peace and the bygone beauty of the cathedral created the
+glow of the great past. And in the market-place they were selling
+chestnuts wholesale, great heaps of bright, brown chestnuts, and sacks
+of chestnuts, and peasants very eager selling and buying. I thought of
+Como, it must have been wonderful even a hundred years ago. Now it is
+cosmopolitan, the cathedral is like a relic, a museum object, everywhere
+stinks of mechanical money-pleasure. I dared not risk walking to Milan:
+I took a train. And there, in Milan, sitting in the Cathedral Square, on
+Saturday afternoon, drinking Bitter Campari and watching the swarm of
+Italian city-men drink and talk vivaciously, I saw that here the life
+was still vivid, here the process of disintegration was vigorous, and
+centred in a multiplicity of mechanical activities that engage the human
+mind as well as the body. But always there was the same purpose stinking
+in it all, the mechanizing, the perfect mechanizing of human life.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Twilight in Italy, by D.H. Lawrence
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Twilight in Italy, by D.H. Lawrence
+#7 in our series by D.H. Lawrence
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+Title: Twilight in Italy
+
+Author: D.H. Lawrence
+
+Release Date: December, 2005 [EBook #9497]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 6, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWILIGHT IN ITALY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+TWILIGHT IN ITALY
+
+
+By D. H. Lawrence
+
+1916
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE CRUCIFIX ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS
+
+ON THE LAGO DI GARDA
+  1 _The Spinner and the Monks_
+  2 _The Lemon Gardens_
+  3 _The Theatre_
+  4 _San Gaudenzio_
+  5 _The Dance_
+  6 _Il Duro_
+  7 _John_
+
+ITALIANS IN EXILE
+
+THE RETURN JOURNEY
+
+
+
+
+_The Crucifix Across the Mountains_
+
+
+The imperial road to Italy goes from Munich across the Tyrol, through
+Innsbruck and Bozen to Verona, over the mountains. Here the great
+processions passed as the emperors went South, or came home again from
+rosy Italy to their own Germany.
+
+And how much has that old imperial vanity clung to the German soul? Did
+not the German kings inherit the empire of bygone Rome? It was not a
+very real empire, perhaps, but the sound was high and splendid.
+
+Maybe a certain Grössenwahn is inherent in the German nature. If only
+nations would realize that they have certain natural characteristics, if
+only they could understand and agree to each other's particular nature,
+how much simpler it would all be.
+
+The imperial procession no longer crosses the mountains, going South.
+That is almost forgotten, the road has almost passed out of mind. But
+still it is there, and its signs are standing.
+
+The crucifixes are there, not mere attributes of the road, yet still
+having something to do with it. The imperial processions, blessed by the
+Pope and accompanied by the great bishops, must have planted the holy
+idol like a new plant among the mountains, there where it multiplied and
+grew according to the soil, and the race that received it.
+
+As one goes among the Bavarian uplands and foothills, soon one realizes
+here is another land, a strange religion. It is a strange country,
+remote, out of contact. Perhaps it belongs to the forgotten, imperial
+processions.
+
+Coming along the clear, open roads that lead to the mountains, one
+scarcely notices the crucifixes and the shrines. Perhaps one's interest
+is dead. The crucifix itself is nothing, a factory-made piece of
+sentimentalism. The soul ignores it.
+
+But gradually, one after another looming shadowily under their hoods,
+the crucifixes seem to create a new atmosphere over the whole of the
+countryside, a darkness, a weight in the air that is so unnaturally
+bright and rare with the reflection from the snows above, a darkness
+hovering just over the earth. So rare and unearthly the light is, from
+the mountains, full of strange radiance. Then every now and again recurs
+the crucifix, at the turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow
+and a mystery under its pointed hood.
+
+I was startled into consciousness one evening, going alone over a marshy
+place at the foot of the mountains, when the sky was pale and unearthly,
+invisible, and the hills were nearly black. At a meeting of the tracks
+was a crucifix, and between the feet of the Christ a handful of withered
+poppies. It was the poppies I saw, then the Christ.
+
+It was an old shrine, the wood-sculpture of a Bavarian peasant. The
+Christ was a peasant of the foot of the Alps. He had broad cheekbones
+and sturdy limbs. His plain, rudimentary face stared fixedly at the
+hills, his neck was stiffened, as if in resistance to the fact of the
+nails and the cross, which he could not escape. It was a man nailed down
+in spirit, but set stubbornly against the bondage and the disgrace. He
+was a man of middle age, plain, crude, with some of the meanness of the
+peasant, but also with a kind of dogged nobility that does not yield its
+soul to the circumstance. Plain, almost blank in his soul, the
+middle-aged peasant of the crucifix resisted unmoving the misery of his
+position. He did not yield. His soul was set, his will was fixed. He was
+himself, let his circumstances be what they would, his life fixed down.
+
+Across the marsh was a tiny square of orange-coloured light, from the
+farm-house with the low, spreading roof. I remembered how the man and
+his wife and the children worked on till dark, silent and intent,
+carrying the hay in their arms out of the streaming thunder-rain into
+the shed, working silent in the soaking rain.
+
+The body bent forward towards the earth, closing round on itself; the
+arms clasped full of hay, clasped round the hay that presses soft and
+close to the breast and the body, that pricks heat into the arms and the
+skin of the breast, and fills the lungs with the sleepy scent of dried
+herbs: the rain that falls heavily and wets the shoulders, so that the
+shirt clings to the hot, firm skin and the rain comes with heavy,
+pleasant coldness on the active flesh, running in a trickle down towards
+the loins, secretly; this is the peasant, this hot welter of physical
+sensation. And it is all intoxicating. It is intoxicating almost like a
+soporific, like a sensuous drug, to gather the burden to one's body in
+the rain, to stumble across the living grass to the shed, to relieve
+one's arms of the weight, to throw down the hay on to the heap, to feel
+light and free in the dry shed, then to return again into the chill,
+hard rain, to stoop again under the rain, and rise to return again with
+the burden.
+
+It is this, this endless heat and rousedness of physical sensation which
+keeps the body full and potent, and flushes the mind with a blood heat,
+a blood sleep. And this sleep, this heat of physical experience, becomes
+at length a bondage, at last a crucifixion. It is the life and the
+fulfilment of the peasant, this flow of sensuous experience. But at last
+it drives him almost mad, because he cannot escape.
+
+For overhead there is always the strange radiance of the mountains,
+there is the mystery of the icy river rushing through its pink shoals
+into the darkness of the pine-woods, there is always the faint tang of
+ice on the air, and the rush of hoarse-sounding water.
+
+And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless
+immunity from the flux and the warmth of life. Overhead they transcend
+all life, all the soft, moist fire of the blood. So that a man must
+needs live under the radiance of his own negation.
+
+There is a strange, clear beauty of form about the men of the Bavarian
+highlands, about both men and women. They are large and clear and
+handsome in form, with blue eyes very keen, the pupil small, tightened,
+the iris keen, like sharp light shining on blue ice. Their large,
+full-moulded limbs and erect bodies are distinct, separate, as if they
+were perfectly chiselled out of the stuff of life, static, cut off.
+Where they are everything is set back, as in a clear frosty air.
+
+Their beauty is almost this, this strange, clean-cut isolation, as if
+each one of them would isolate himself still further and for ever from
+the rest of his fellows.
+
+Yet they are convivial, they are almost the only race with the souls of
+artists. Still they act the mystery plays with instinctive fullness of
+interpretation, they sing strangely in the mountain fields, they love
+make-belief and mummery, their processions and religious festivals are
+profoundly impressive, solemn, and rapt.
+
+It is a race that moves on the poles of mystic sensual delight. Every
+gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression is a symbolic
+utterance.
+
+For learning there is sensuous experience, for thought there is myth and
+drama and dancing and singing. Everything is of the blood, of the
+senses. There is no mind. The mind is a suffusion of physical heat, it
+is not separated, it is kept submerged.
+
+At the same time, always, overhead, there is the eternal, negative
+radiance of the snows. Beneath is life, the hot jet of the blood playing
+elaborately. But above is the radiance of changeless not-being. And life
+passes away into this changeless radiance. Summer and the prolific
+blue-and-white flowering of the earth goes by, with the labour and the
+ecstasy of man, disappears, and is gone into brilliance that hovers
+overhead, the radiant cold which waits to receive back again all that
+which has passed for the moment into being.
+
+The issue is too much revealed. It leaves the peasant no choice. The
+fate gleams transcendent above him, the brightness of eternal,
+unthinkable not-being. And this our life, this admixture of labour and
+of warm experience in the flesh, all the time it is steaming up to the
+changeless brilliance above, the light of the everlasting snows. This is
+the eternal issue.
+
+Whether it is singing or dancing or play-acting or physical transport of
+love, or vengeance or cruelty, or whether it is work or sorrow or
+religion, the issue is always the same at last, into the radiant
+negation of eternity. Hence the beauty and completeness, the finality of
+the highland peasant. His figure, his limbs, his face, his motion, it is
+all formed in beauty, and it is all completed. There is no flux nor hope
+nor becoming, all is, once and for all. The issue is eternal, timeless,
+and changeless. All being and all passing away is part of the issue,
+which is eternal and changeless. Therefore there is no becoming and no
+passing away. Everything is, now and for ever. Hence the strange beauty
+and finality and isolation of the Bavarian peasant.
+
+It is plain in the crucifixes. Here is the essence rendered in sculpture
+of wood. The face is blank and stiff, almost expressionless. One
+realizes with a start how unchanging and conventionalized is the face of
+the living man and woman of these parts, handsome, but motionless as
+pure form. There is also an underlying meanness, secretive, cruel. It is
+all part of the beauty, the pure, plastic beauty. The body also of the
+Christus is stiff and conventionalized, yet curiously beautiful in
+proportion, and in the static tension which makes it unified into one
+clear thing. There is no movement, no possible movement. The being is
+fixed, finally. The whole body is locked in one knowledge, beautiful,
+complete. It is one with the nails. Not that it is languishing or dead.
+It is stubborn, knowing its own undeniable being, sure of the absolute
+reality of the sensuous experience. Though he is nailed down upon an
+irrevocable fate, yet, within that fate he has the power and the delight
+of all sensuous experience. So he accepts the fate and the mystic
+delight of the senses with one will, he is complete and final. His
+sensuous experience is supreme, a consummation of life and death
+at once.
+
+It is the same at all times, whether it is moving with the scythe on the
+hill-slopes, or hewing the timber, or steering the raft down the river
+which is all effervescent with ice; whether it is drinking in the
+Gasthaus, or making love, or playing some mummer's part, or hating
+steadily and cruelly, or whether it is kneeling in spellbound subjection
+in the incense-filled church, or walking in the strange, dark,
+subject-procession to bless the fields, or cutting the young birch-trees
+for the feast of Frohenleichnam, it is always the same, the dark,
+powerful mystic, sensuous experience is the whole of him, he is mindless
+and bound within the absoluteness of the issue, the unchangeability of
+the great icy not-being which holds good for ever, and is supreme.
+
+Passing further away, towards Austria, travelling up the Isar, till the
+stream becomes smaller and whiter and the air is colder, the full
+glamour of the northern hills, which are so marvellously luminous and
+gleaming with flowers, wanes and gives way to a darkness, a sense of
+ominousness. Up there I saw another little Christ, who seemed the very
+soul of the place. The road went beside the river, that was seething
+with snowy ice-bubbles, under the rocks and the high, wolf-like
+pine-trees, between the pinkish shoals. The air was cold and hard and
+high, everything was cold and separate. And in a little glass case
+beside the road sat a small, hewn Christ, the head resting on the hand;
+and he meditates, half-wearily, doggedly, the eyebrows lifted in strange
+abstraction, the elbow resting on the knee. Detached, he sits and dreams
+and broods, wearing his little golden crown of thorns, and his little
+cloak of red flannel that some peasant woman has stitched for him.
+
+No doubt he still sits there, the small, blank-faced Christ in the cloak
+of red flannel, dreaming, brooding, enduring, persisting. There is a
+wistfulness about him, as if he knew that the whole of things was too
+much for him. There was no solution, either, in death. Death did not
+give the answer to the soul's anxiety. That which is, is. It does not
+cease to be when it is cut. Death cannot create nor destroy. What
+is, is.
+
+The little brooding Christ knows this. What is he brooding, then? His
+static patience and endurance is wistful. What is it that he secretly
+yearns for, amid all the placidity of fate? 'To be, or not to be,' this
+may be the question, but is it not a question for death to answer. It is
+not a question of living or not-living. It is a question of being--to be
+or not to be. To persist or not to persist, that is not the question;
+neither is it to endure or not to endure. The issue, is it eternal
+not-being? If not, what, then, is being? For overhead the eternal
+radiance of the snow gleams unfailing, it receives the efflorescence of
+all life and is unchanged, the issue is bright and immortal, the snowy
+not-being. What, then, is being?
+
+As one draws nearer to the turning-point of the Alps, towards the
+culmination and the southern slope, the influence of the educated world
+is felt once more. Bavaria is remote in spirit, as yet unattached. Its
+crucifixes are old and grey and abstract, small like the kernel of the
+truth. Further into Austria they become new, they are painted white,
+they are larger, more obtrusive. They are the expressions of a later,
+newer phase, more introspective and self-conscious. But still they are
+genuine expressions of the people's soul.
+
+Often one can distinguish the work of a particular artist here and there
+in a district. In the Zemm valley, in the heart of the Tyrol, behind
+Innsbruck, there are five or six crucifixes by one sculptor. He is no
+longer a peasant working out an idea, conveying a dogma. He is an
+artist, trained and conscious, probably working in Vienna. He is
+consciously trying to convey a _feeling_, he is no longer striving
+awkwardly to render a truth, a religious fact.
+
+The chief of his crucifixes stands deep in the Klamm, in the dank gorge
+where it is always half-night. The road runs under the rock and the
+trees, half-way up the one side of the pass. Below, the stream rushes
+ceaselessly, embroiled among great stones, making an endless loud noise.
+The rock face opposite rises high overhead, with the sky far up. So that
+one is walking in a half-night, an underworld. And just below the path,
+where the pack-horses go climbing to the remote, infolded villages, in
+the cold gloom of the pass hangs the large, pale Christ. He is larger
+than life-size. He has fallen forward, just dead, and the weight of the
+full-grown, mature body hangs on the nails of the hands. So the dead,
+heavy body drops forward, sags, as if it would tear away and fall under
+its own weight.
+
+It is the end. The face is barren with a dead expression of weariness,
+and brutalized with pain and bitterness. The rather ugly, passionate
+mouth is set for ever in the disillusionment of death. Death is the
+complete disillusionment, set like a seal over the whole body and being,
+over the suffering and weariness and the bodily passion.
+
+The pass is gloomy and damp, the water roars unceasingly, till it is
+almost like a constant pain. The driver of the pack-horses, as he comes
+up the narrow path in the side of the gorge, cringes his sturdy
+cheerfulness as if to obliterate himself, drawing near to the large,
+pale Christ, and he takes his hat off as he passes, though he does not
+look up, but keeps his face averted from the crucifix. He hurries by in
+the gloom, climbing the steep path after his horses, and the large white
+Christ hangs extended above.
+
+The driver of the pack-horses is afraid. The fear is always there in
+him, in spite of his sturdy, healthy robustness. His soul is not sturdy.
+It is blenched and whitened with fear. The mountains are dark overhead,
+the water roars in the gloom below. His heart is ground between the
+mill-stones of dread. When he passes the extended body of the dead
+Christ he takes off his hat to the Lord of Death. Christ is the Deathly
+One, He is Death incarnate.
+
+And the driver of the pack-horses acknowledges this deathly Christ as
+supreme Lord. The mountain peasant seems grounded upon fear, the fear of
+death, of physical death. Beyond this he knows nothing. His supreme
+sensation is in physical pain, and in its culmination. His great climax,
+his consummation, is death. Therefore he worships it, bows down before
+it, and is fascinated by it all the while. It is his fulfilment, death,
+and his approach to fulfilment is through physical pain.
+
+And so these monuments to physical death are found everywhere in the
+valleys. By the same hand that carved the big Christ, a little further
+on, at the end of a bridge, was another crucifix, a small one. This
+Christ had a fair beard, and was thin, and his body was hanging almost
+lightly, whereas the other Christ was large and dark and handsome. But
+in this, as well as in the other, was the same neutral triumph of death,
+complete, negative death, so complete as to be abstract, beyond cynicism
+in its completeness of leaving off.
+
+Everywhere is the same obsession with the fact of physical pain,
+accident, and sudden death. Wherever a misfortune has befallen a man,
+there is nailed up a little memorial of the event, in propitiation of
+the God of hurt and death. A man is standing up to his waist in water,
+drowning in full stream, his arms in the air. The little painting in its
+wooden frame is nailed to the tree, the spot is sacred to the accident.
+Again, another little crude picture fastened to a rock: a tree, falling
+on a man's leg, smashes it like a stalk, while the blood flies up.
+Always there is the strange ejaculation of anguish and fear, perpetuated
+in the little paintings nailed up in the place of the disaster.
+
+This is the worship, then, the worship of death and the approaches to
+death, physical violence, and pain. There is something crude and
+sinister about it, almost like depravity, a form of reverting, turning
+back along the course of blood by which we have come.
+
+Turning the ridge on the great road to the south, the imperial road to
+Rome, a decisive change takes place. The Christs have been taking on
+various different characters, all of them more or less realistically
+conveyed. One Christus is very elegant, combed and brushed and foppish
+on his cross, as Gabriele D'Annunzio's son posing as a martyred saint.
+The martyrdom of this Christ is according to the most polite convention.
+The elegance is very important, and very Austrian. One might almost
+imagine the young man had taken up this striking and original position
+to create a delightful sensation among the ladies. It is quite in the
+Viennese spirit. There is something brave and keen in it, too. The
+individual pride of body triumphs over every difficulty in the
+situation. The pride and satisfaction in the clean, elegant form, the
+perfectly trimmed hair, the exquisite bearing, are more important than
+the fact of death or pain. This may be foolish, it is at the same time
+admirable.
+
+But the tendency of the crucifix, as it nears the ridge to the south, is
+to become weak and sentimental. The carved Christs turn up their faces
+and roll back their eyes very piteously, in the approved Guido Reni
+fashion. They are overdoing the pathetic turn. They are looking to
+heaven and thinking about themselves, in self-commiseration. Others
+again are beautiful as elegies. It is dead Hyacinth lifted and extended
+to view, in all his beautiful, dead youth. The young, male body droops
+forward on the cross, like a dead flower. It looks as if its only true
+nature were to be dead. How lovely is death, how poignant, real,
+satisfying! It is the true elegiac spirit.
+
+Then there are the ordinary, factory-made Christs, which are not very
+significant. They are as null as the Christs we see represented in
+England, just vulgar nothingness. But these figures have gashes of red,
+a red paint of blood, which is sensational.
+
+Beyond the Brenner, I have only seen vulgar or sensational crucifixes.
+There are great gashes on the breast and the knees of the Christ-figure,
+and the scarlet flows out and trickles down, till the crucified body has
+become a ghastly striped thing of red and white, just a sickly thing of
+striped red.
+
+They paint the rocks at the corners of the tracks, among the mountains;
+a blue and white ring for the road to Ginzling, a red smear for the way
+to St Jakob. So one follows the blue and white ring, or the three
+stripes of blue and white, or the red smear, as the case may be. And the
+red on the rocks, the dabs of red paint, are of just the same colour as
+the red upon the crucifixes; so that the red upon the crucifixes is
+paint, and the signs on the rocks are sensational, like blood.
+
+I remember the little brooding Christ of the Isar, in his little cloak
+of red flannel and his crown of gilded thorns, and he remains real and
+dear to me, among all this violence of representation.
+
+'_Couvre-toi de gloire, Tartarin--couvre-toi de flanelle._' Why should
+it please me so that his cloak is of red flannel?
+
+In a valley near St Jakob, just over the ridge, a long way from the
+railway, there is a very big, important shrine by the roadside. It is a
+chapel built in the baroque manner, florid pink and cream outside, with
+opulent small arches. And inside is the most startling sensational
+Christus I have ever seen. He is a big, powerful man, seated after the
+crucifixion, perhaps after the resurrection, sitting by the grave. He
+sits sideways, as if the extremity were over, finished, the agitation
+done with, only the result of the experience remaining. There is some
+blood on his powerful, naked, defeated body, that sits rather hulked.
+But it is the face which is so terrifying. It is slightly turned over
+the hulked, crucified shoulder, to look. And the look of this face, of
+which the body has been killed, is beyond all expectation horrible. The
+eyes look at one, yet have no seeing in them, they seem to see only
+their own blood. For they are bloodshot till the whites are scarlet, the
+iris is purpled. These red, bloody eyes with their stained pupils,
+glancing awfully at all who enter the shrine, looking as if to see
+through the blood of the late brutal death, are terrible. The naked,
+strong body has known death, and sits in utter dejection, finished,
+hulked, a weight of shame. And what remains of life is in the face,
+whose expression is sinister and gruesome, like that of an unrelenting
+criminal violated by torture. The criminal look of misery and hatred on
+the fixed, violated face and in the bloodshot eyes is almost impossible.
+He is conquered, beaten, broken, his body is a mass of torture, an
+unthinkable shame. Yet his will remains obstinate and ugly, integral
+with utter hatred.
+
+It is a great shock to find this figure sitting in a handsome, baroque,
+pink-washed shrine in one of those Alpine valleys which to our thinking
+are all flowers and romance, like the picture in the Tate Gallery.
+'Spring in the Austrian Tyrol' is to our minds a vision of pristine
+loveliness. It contains also this Christ of the heavy body defiled by
+torture and death, the strong, virile life overcome by physical
+violence, the eyes still looking back bloodshot in consummate hate
+and misery.
+
+The shrine was well kept and evidently much used. It was hung with
+ex-voto limbs and with many gifts. It was a centre of worship, of a sort
+of almost obscene worship. Afterwards the black pine-trees and the river
+of that valley seemed unclean, as if an unclean spirit lived there. The
+very flowers seemed unnatural, and the white gleam on the mountain-tops
+was a glisten of supreme, cynical horror.
+
+After this, in the populous valleys, all the crucifixes were more or
+less tainted and vulgar. Only high up, where the crucifix becomes
+smaller and smaller, is there left any of the old beauty and religion.
+Higher and higher, the monument becomes smaller and smaller, till in the
+snows it stands out like a post, or a thick arrow stuck barb upwards.
+The crucifix itself is a small thing under the pointed hood, the barb of
+the arrow. The snow blows under the tiny shed, upon the little, exposed
+Christ. All round is the solid whiteness of snow, the awful curves and
+concaves of pure whiteness of the mountain top, the hollow whiteness
+between the peaks, where the path crosses the high, extreme ridge of the
+pass. And here stands the last crucifix, half buried, small and tufted
+with snow. The guides tramp slowly, heavily past, not observing the
+presence of the symbol, making no salute. Further down, every mountain
+peasant lifted his hat. But the guide tramps by without concern. His is
+a professional importance now.
+
+On a small mountain track on the Jaufen, not far from Meran, was a
+fallen Christus. I was hurrying downhill to escape from an icy wind
+which almost took away my consciousness, and I was looking up at the
+gleaming, unchanging snow-peaks all round. They seemed like blades
+immortal in the sky. So I almost ran into a very old Martertafel. It
+leaned on the cold, stony hillside surrounded by the white peaks in the
+upper air.
+
+The wooden hood was silver-grey with age, and covered, on the top, with
+a thicket of lichen, which stuck up in hoary tufts. But on the rock at
+the foot of the post was the fallen Christ, armless, who had tumbled
+down and lay in an unnatural posture, the naked, ancient wooden
+sculpture of the body on the naked, living rock. It was one of the old
+uncouth Christs hewn out of bare wood, having the long, wedge-shaped
+limbs and thin flat legs that are significant of the true spirit, the
+desire to convey a religious truth, not a sensational experience.
+
+The arms of the fallen Christ had broken off at the shoulders, and they
+hung on their nails, as ex-voto limbs hang in the shrines. But these
+arms dangled from the palms, one at each end of the cross, the muscles,
+carved sparely in the old wood, looking all wrong, upside down. And the
+icy wind blew them backwards and forwards, so that they gave a painful
+impression, there in the stark, sterile place of rock and cold. Yet I
+dared not touch the fallen body of the Christ, that lay on its back in
+so grotesque a posture at the foot of the post. I wondered who would
+come and take the broken thing away, and for what purpose.
+
+
+
+
+_On the Lago di Garda_
+
+
+
+_1_
+
+THE SPINNER AND THE MONKS
+
+
+The Holy Spirit is a Dove, or an Eagle. In the Old Testament it was an
+Eagle; in the New Testament it is a Dove.
+
+And there are, standing over the Christian world, the Churches of the
+Dove and the Churches of the Eagle. There are, moreover, the Churches
+which do not belong to the Holy Spirit at all, but which are built to
+pure fancy and logic; such as the Wren Churches in London.
+
+The Churches of the Dove are shy and hidden: they nestle among trees,
+and their bells sound in the mellowness of Sunday; or they are gathered
+into a silence of their own in the very midst of the town, so that one
+passes them by without observing them; they are as if invisible,
+offering no resistance to the storming of the traffic.
+
+But the Churches of the Eagle stand high, with their heads to the skies,
+as if they challenged the world below. They are the Churches of the
+Spirit of David, and their bells ring passionately, imperiously, falling
+on the subservient world below.
+
+The Church of San Francesco was a Church of the Dove. I passed it
+several times in the dark, silent little square, without knowing it was
+a church. Its pink walls were blind, windowless, unnoticeable, it gave
+no sign, unless one caught sight of the tan curtain hanging in the door,
+and the slit of darkness beneath. Yet it was the chief church of
+the village.
+
+But the Church of San Tommaso perched over the village. Coming down the
+cobbled, submerged street, many a time I looked up between the houses
+and saw the thin old church standing above in the light, as if it
+perched on the house-roofs. Its thin grey neck was held up stiffly,
+beyond was a vision of dark foliage, and the high hillside.
+
+I saw it often, and yet for a long time it never occurred to me that it
+actually existed. It was like a vision, a thing one does not expect to
+come close to. It was there standing away upon the house-tops, against a
+glamour of foliaged hillside. I was submerged in the village, on the
+uneven, cobbled street, between old high walls and cavernous shops and
+the houses with flights of steps.
+
+For a long time I knew how the day went, by the imperious clangour of
+midday and evening bells striking down upon the houses and the edge of
+the lake. Yet it did not occur to me to ask where these bells rang. Till
+at last my everyday trance was broken in upon, and I knew the ringing of
+the Church of San Tommaso. The church became a living connexion with me.
+
+So I set out to find it, I wanted to go to it. It was very near. I could
+see it from the piazza by the lake. And the village itself had only a
+few hundreds of inhabitants. The church must be within a stone's throw.
+
+Yet I could not find it. I went out of the back door of the house, into
+the narrow gully of the back street. Women glanced down at me from the
+top of the flights of steps, old men stood, half-turning, half-crouching
+under the dark shadow of the walls, to stare. It was as if the strange
+creatures of the under-shadow were looking at me. I was of
+another element.
+
+The Italian people are called 'Children of the Sun'. They might better
+be called 'Children of the Shadow'. Their souls are dark and nocturnal.
+If they are to be easy, they must be able to hide, to be hidden in lairs
+and caves of darkness. Going through these tiny chaotic backways of the
+village was like venturing through the labyrinth made by furtive
+creatures, who watched from out of another element. And I was pale, and
+clear, and evanescent, like the light, and they were dark, and close,
+and constant, like the shadow.
+
+So I was quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the
+village. I could not find my way. I hurried towards the broken end of a
+street, where the sunshine and the olive trees looked like a mirage
+before me. And there above me I saw the thin, stiff neck of old San
+Tommaso, grey and pale in the sun. Yet I could not get up to the church,
+I found myself again on the piazza.
+
+Another day, however, I found a broken staircase, where weeds grew in
+the gaps the steps had made in falling, and maidenhair hung on the
+darker side of the wall. I went up unwillingly, because the Italians
+used this old staircase as a privy, as they will any deep side-passage.
+
+But I ran up the broken stairway, and came out suddenly, as by a
+miracle, clean on the platform of my San Tommaso, in the
+tremendous sunshine.
+
+It was another world, the world of the eagle, the world of fierce
+abstraction. It was all clear, overwhelming sunshine, a platform hung in
+the light. Just below were the confused, tiled roofs of the village, and
+beyond them the pale blue water, down below; and opposite, opposite my
+face and breast, the clear, luminous snow of the mountain across the
+lake, level with me apparently, though really much above.
+
+I was in the skies now, looking down from my square terrace of cobbled
+pavement, that was worn like the threshold of the ancient church. Round
+the terrace ran a low, broad wall, the coping of the upper heaven where
+I had climbed.
+
+There was a blood-red sail like a butterfly breathing down on the blue
+water, whilst the earth on the near side gave off a green-silver smoke
+of olive trees, coming up and around the earth-coloured roofs.
+
+It always remains to me that San Tommaso and its terrace hang suspended
+above the village, like the lowest step of heaven, of Jacob's ladder.
+Behind, the land rises in a high sweep. But the terrace of San Tommaso
+is let down from heaven, and does not touch the earth.
+
+I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries
+of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous creature. My
+senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced darkness. My
+skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if
+it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical
+contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the
+enclosure. It was a thick, fierce darkness of the senses. But my
+soul shrank.
+
+I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the
+marvellous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed to
+distil me into itself.
+
+Across, the heavy mountain crouched along the side of the lake, the
+upper half brilliantly white, belonging to the sky, the lower half dark
+and grim. So, then, that is where heaven and earth are divided. From
+behind me, on the left, the headland swept down out of a great,
+pale-grey, arid height, through a rush of russet and crimson, to the
+olive smoke and the water of the level earth. And between, like a blade
+of the sky cleaving the earth asunder, went the pale-blue lake, cleaving
+mountain from mountain with the triumph of the sky.
+
+Then I noticed that a big, blue-checked cloth was spread on the parapet
+before me, over the parapet of heaven. I wondered why it hung there.
+
+Turning round, on the other side of the terrace, under a caper-bush that
+hung like a blood-stain from the grey wall above her, stood a little
+grey woman whose fingers were busy. Like the grey church, she made me
+feel as if I were not in existence. I was wandering by the parapet of
+heaven, looking down. But she stood back against the solid wall, under
+the caper-bush, unobserved and unobserving. She was like a fragment of
+earth, she was a living stone of the terrace, sun-bleached. She took no
+notice of me, who was hesitating looking down at the earth beneath. She
+stood back under the sun-bleached solid wall, like a stone rolled down
+and stayed in a crevice.
+
+Her head was tied in a dark-red kerchief, but pieces of hair, like dirty
+snow, quite short, stuck out over her ears. And she was spinning. I
+wondered so much, that I could not cross towards her. She was grey, and
+her apron, and her dress, and her kerchief, and her hands and her face
+were all sun-bleached and sun-stained, greyey, bluey, browny, like
+stones and half-coloured leaves, sunny in their colourlessness. In my
+black coat, I felt myself wrong, false, an outsider.
+
+She was spinning, spontaneously, like a little wind. Under her arm she
+held a distaff of dark, ripe wood, just a straight stick with a clutch
+at the end, like a grasp of brown fingers full of a fluff of blackish,
+rusty fleece, held up near her shoulder. And her fingers were plucking
+spontaneously at the strands of wool drawn down from it. And hanging
+near her feet, spinning round upon a black thread, spinning busily, like
+a thing in a gay wind, was her shuttle, her bobbin wound fat with the
+coarse, blackish worsted she was making.
+
+All the time, like motion without thought, her fingers teased out the
+fleece, drawing it down to a fairly uniform thickness: brown, old,
+natural fingers that worked as in a sleep, the thumb having a long grey
+nail; and from moment to moment there was a quick, downward rub, between
+thumb and forefinger, of the thread that hung in front of her apron, the
+heavy bobbin spun more briskly, and she felt again at the fleece as she
+drew it down, and she gave a twist to the thread that issued, and the
+bobbin spun swiftly.
+
+Her eyes were clear as the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were
+dear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was like a
+sun-worn stone.
+
+'You are spinning,' I said to her.
+
+Her eyes glanced over me, making no effort of attention.
+
+'Yes,' she said.
+
+She saw merely a man's figure, a stranger standing near. I was a bit of
+the outside, negligible. She remained as she was, clear and sustained
+like an old stone upon the hillside. She stood short and sturdy, looking
+for the most part straight in front, unseeing, but glancing from time to
+time, with a little, unconscious attention, at the thread. She was
+slightly more animated than the sunshine and the stone and the
+motionless caper-bush above her. Still her fingers went along the strand
+of fleece near her breast.
+
+'That is an old way of spinning,' I said.
+
+'What?'
+
+She looked up at me with eyes clear and transcendent as the heavens. But
+she was slightly roused. There was the slight motion of the eagle in her
+turning to look at me, a faint gleam of rapt light in her eyes. It was
+my unaccustomed Italian.
+
+'That is an old way of spinning,' I repeated.
+
+'Yes--an old way,' she repeated, as if to say the words so that they
+should be natural to her. And I became to her merely a transient
+circumstance, a man, part of the surroundings. We divided the gift of
+speech, that was all.
+
+She glanced at me again, with her wonderful, unchanging eyes, that were
+like the visible heavens, unthinking, or like two flowers that are open
+in pure clear unconsciousness. To her I was a piece of the environment.
+That was all. Her world was clear and absolute, without consciousness of
+self. She was not self-conscious, because she was not aware that there
+was anything in the universe except _her_ universe. In her universe I
+was a stranger, a foreign _signore_. That I had a world of my own, other
+than her own, was not conceived by her. She did not care.
+
+So we conceive the stars. We are told that they are other worlds. But
+the stars are the clustered and single gleaming lights in the night-sky
+of our world. When I come home at night, there are the stars. When I
+cease to exist as the microcosm, when I begin to think of the cosmos,
+then the stars are other worlds. Then the macrocosm absorbs me. But the
+macrocosm is not me. It is something which I, the microcosm, am not.
+
+So that there is something which is unknown to me and which nevertheless
+exists. I am finite, and my understanding has limits. The universe is
+bigger than I shall ever see, in mind or spirit. There is that which
+is not me.
+
+If I say 'The planet Mars is inhabited,' I do not know what I mean by
+'inhabited', with reference to the planet Mars. I can only mean that
+that world is not my world. I can only know there is that which is not
+me. I am the microcosm, but the macrocosm is that also which I am not.
+
+The old woman on the terrace in the sun did not know this. She was
+herself the core and centre to the world, the sun, and the single
+firmament. She knew that I was an inhabitant of lands which she had
+never seen. But what of that! There were parts of her own body which she
+had never seen, which physiologically she could never see. They were
+none the less her own because she had never seen them. The lands she had
+not seen were corporate parts of her own living body, the knowledge she
+had not attained was only the hidden knowledge of her own self. She
+_was_ the substance of the knowledge, whether she had the knowledge in
+her mind or not. There was nothing which was not herself, ultimately.
+Even the man, the male, was part of herself. He was the mobile, separate
+part, but he was none the less herself because he was sometimes severed
+from her. If every apple in the world were cut in two, the apple would
+not be changed. The reality is the apple, which is just the same in the
+half-apple as in the whole.
+
+And she, the old spinning-woman, was the apple, eternal, unchangeable,
+whole even in her partiality. It was this which gave the wonderful clear
+unconsciousness to her eyes. How could she be conscious of herself when
+all was herself?
+
+She was talking to me of a sheep that had died, but I could not
+understand because of her dialect. It never occurred to her that I could
+not understand. She only thought me different, stupid. And she talked
+on. The ewes had lived under the house, and a part was divided off for
+the he-goat, because the other people brought their she-goats to be
+covered by the he-goat. But how the ewe came to die I could not
+make out.
+
+Her fingers worked away all the time in a little, half-fretful movement,
+yet spontaneous as butterflies leaping here and there. She chattered
+rapidly on in her Italian that I could not understand, looking meanwhile
+into my face, because the story roused her somewhat. Yet not a feature
+moved. Her eyes remained candid and open and unconscious as the skies.
+Only a sharp will in them now and then seemed to gleam at me, as if to
+dominate me.
+
+Her shuttle had caught in a dead chicory plant, and spun no more. She
+did not notice. I stooped and broke off the twigs. There was a glint of
+blue on them yet. Seeing what I was doing, she merely withdrew a few
+inches from the plant. Her bobbin hung free.
+
+She went on with her tale, looking at me wonderfully. She seemed like
+the Creation, like the beginning of the world, the first morning. Her
+eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless.
+
+Her thread broke. She seemed to take no notice, but mechanically picked
+up the shuttle, wound up a length of worsted, connected the ends from
+her wool strand, set the bobbin spinning again, and went on talking, in
+her half-intimate, half-unconscious fashion, as if she were talking to
+her own world in me.
+
+So she stood in the sunshine on the little platform, old and yet like
+the morning, erect and solitary, sun-coloured, sun-discoloured, whilst I
+at her elbow, like a piece of night and moonshine, stood smiling into
+her eyes, afraid lest she should deny me existence.
+
+Which she did. She had stopped talking, did not look at me any more, but
+went on with her spinning, the brown shuttle twisting gaily. So she
+stood, belonging to the sunshine and the weather, taking no more notice
+of me than of the dark-stained caper-bush which hung from the wall above
+her head, whilst I, waiting at her side, was like the moon in the
+daytime sky, overshone, obliterated, in spite of my black clothes.
+
+'How long has it taken you to do that much?' I asked.
+
+She waited a minute, glanced at her bobbin.
+
+'This much? I don't know. A day or two.'
+
+'But you do it quickly.'
+
+She looked at me, as if suspiciously and derisively. Then, quite
+suddenly, she started forward and went across the terrace to the great
+blue-and-white checked cloth that was drying on the wall. I hesitated.
+She had cut off her consciousness from me. So I turned and ran away,
+taking the steps two at a time, to get away from her. In a moment I was
+between the walls, climbing upwards, hidden.
+
+The schoolmistress had told me I should find snowdrops behind San
+Tommaso. If she had not asserted such confident knowledge I should have
+doubted her translation of _perce-neige_. She meant Christmas roses all
+the while.
+
+However, I went looking for snowdrops. The walls broke down suddenly,
+and I was out in a grassy olive orchard, following a track beside pieces
+of fallen overgrown masonry. So I came to skirt the brink of a steep
+little gorge, at the bottom of which a stream was rushing down its steep
+slant to the lake. Here I stood to look for my snowdrops. The grassy,
+rocky bank went down steep from my feet. I heard water tittle-tattling
+away in deep shadow below. There were pale flecks in the dimness, but
+these, I knew, were primroses. So I scrambled down.
+
+Looking up, out of the heavy shadow that lay in the cleft, I could see,
+right in the sky, grey rocks shining transcendent in the pure empyrean.
+'Are they so far up?' I thought. I did not dare to say, 'Am I so far
+down?' But I was uneasy. Nevertheless it was a lovely place, in the cold
+shadow, complete; when one forgot the shining rocks far above, it was a
+complete, shadowless world of shadow. Primroses were everywhere in nests
+of pale bloom upon the dark, steep face of the cleft, and tongues of
+fern hanging out, and here and there under the rods and twigs of bushes
+were tufts of wrecked Christmas roses, nearly over, but still, in the
+coldest corners, the lovely buds like handfuls of snow. There had been
+such crowded sumptuous tufts of Christmas roses everywhere in the
+stream-gullies, during the shadow of winter, that these few remaining
+flowers were hardly noticeable.
+
+I gathered instead the primroses, that smelled of earth and of the
+weather. There were no snowdrops. I had found the day before a bank of
+crocuses, pale, fragile, lilac-coloured flowers with dark veins,
+pricking up keenly like myriad little lilac-coloured flames among the
+grass, under the olive trees. And I wanted very much to find the
+snowdrops hanging in the gloom. But there were not any.
+
+I gathered a handful of primroses, then I climbed suddenly, quickly out
+of the deep watercourse, anxious to get back to the sunshine before the
+evening fell. Up above I saw the olive trees in the sunny golden grass,
+and sunlit grey rocks immensely high up. I was afraid lest the evening
+would fall whilst I was groping about like an otter in the damp and the
+darkness, that the day of sunshine would be over.
+
+Soon I was up in the sunshine again, on the turf under the olive trees,
+reassured. It was the upper world of glowing light, and I was
+safe again.
+
+All the olives were gathered, and the mills were going night and day,
+making a great, acrid scent of olive oil in preparation, by the lake.
+The little stream rattled down. A mule driver 'Hued!' to his mules on
+the Strada Vecchia. High up, on the Strada Nuova, the beautiful, new,
+military high-road, which winds with beautiful curves up the
+mountain-side, crossing the same stream several times in clear-leaping
+bridges, travelling cut out of sheer slope high above the lake, winding
+beautifully and gracefully forward to the Austrian frontier, where it
+ends: high up on the lovely swinging road, in the strong evening
+sunshine, I saw a bullock wagon moving like a vision, though the
+clanking of the wagon and the crack of the bullock whip responded close
+in my ears.
+
+Everything was clear and sun-coloured up there, clear-grey rocks
+partaking of the sky, tawny grass and scrub, browny-green spires of
+cypresses, and then the mist of grey-green olives fuming down to the
+lake-side. There was no shadow, only clear sun-substance built up to the
+sky, a bullock wagon moving slowly in the high sunlight, along the
+uppermost terrace of the military road. It sat in the warm stillness of
+the transcendent afternoon.
+
+The four o'clock steamer was creeping down the lake from the Austrian
+end, creeping under the cliffs. Far away, the Verona side, beyond the
+Island, lay fused in dim gold. The mountain opposite was so still, that
+my heart seemed to fade in its beating as if it too would be still. All
+was perfectly still, pure substance. The little steamer on the floor of
+the world below, the mules down the road cast no shadow. They too were
+pure sun-substance travelling on the surface of the sun-made world.
+
+A cricket hopped near me. Then I remembered that it was Saturday
+afternoon, when a strange suspension comes over the world. And then,
+just below me, I saw two monks walking in their garden between the
+naked, bony vines, walking in their wintry garden of bony vines and
+olive trees, their brown cassocks passing between the brown vine-stocks,
+their heads bare to the sunshine, sometimes a glint of light as their
+feet strode from under their skirts.
+
+It was so still, everything so perfectly suspended, that I felt them
+talking. They marched with the peculiar march of monks, a long, loping
+stride, their heads together, their skirts swaying slowly, two brown
+monks with hidden hands, sliding under the bony vines and beside the
+cabbages, their heads always together in hidden converse. It was as if I
+were attending with my dark soul to their inaudible undertone. All the
+time I sat still in silence, I was one with them, a partaker, though I
+could hear no sound of their voices. I went with the long stride of
+their skirted feet, that slid springless and noiseless from end to end
+of the garden, and back again. Their hands were kept down at their
+sides, hidden in the long sleeves, and the skirts of their robes. They
+did not touch each other, nor gesticulate as they walked. There was no
+motion save the long, furtive stride and the heads leaning together. Yet
+there was an eagerness in their conversation. Almost like
+shadow-creatures ventured out of their cold, obscure element, they went
+backwards and forwards in their wintry garden, thinking nobody could
+see them.
+
+Across, above them, was the faint, rousing dazzle of snow. They never
+looked up. But the dazzle of snow began to glow as they walked, the
+wonderful, faint, ethereal flush of the long range of snow in the
+heavens, at evening, began to kindle. Another world was coming to pass,
+the cold, rare night. It was dawning in exquisite, icy rose upon the
+long mountain-summit opposite. The monks walked backwards and forwards,
+talking, in the first undershadow.
+
+And I noticed that up above the snow, frail in the bluish sky, a frail
+moon had put forth, like a thin, scalloped film of ice floated out on
+the slow current of the coming night. And a bell sounded.
+
+And still the monks were pacing backwards and forwards, backwards and
+forwards, with a strange, neutral regularity.
+
+The shadows were coming across everything, because of the mountains in
+the west. Already the olive wood where I sat was extinguished. This was
+the world of the monks, the rim of pallor between night and day. Here
+they paced, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, in the
+neutral, shadowless light of shadow.
+
+Neither the flare of day nor the completeness of night reached them,
+they paced the narrow path of the twilight, treading in the neutrality
+of the law. Neither the blood nor the spirit spoke in them, only the
+law, the abstraction of the average. The infinite is positive and
+negative. But the average is only neutral. And the monks trod backward
+and forward down the line of neutrality.
+
+Meanwhile, on the length of mountain-ridge, the snow grew
+rosy-incandescent, like heaven breaking into blossom. After all, eternal
+not-being and eternal being are the same. In the rosy snow that shone in
+heaven over a darkened earth was the ecstasy of consummation. Night and
+day are one, light and dark are one, both the same in the origin and in
+the issue, both the same in the moment, of ecstasy, light fused in
+darkness and darkness fused in light, as in the rosy snow above
+the twilight.
+
+But in the monks it was not ecstasy, in them it was neutrality, the
+under earth. Transcendent, above the shadowed, twilit earth was the rosy
+snow of ecstasy. But spreading far over us, down below, was the
+neutrality of the twilight, of the monks. The flesh neutralizing the
+spirit, the spirit neutralizing the flesh, the law of the average
+asserted, this was the monks as they paced backward and forward.
+
+The moon climbed higher, away from the snowy, fading ridge, she became
+gradually herself. Between the roots of the olive tree was a rosy-tipped
+daisy just going to sleep. I gathered it and put it among the frail,
+moony little bunch of primroses, so that its sleep should warm the rest.
+Also I put in some little periwinkles, that were very blue, reminding me
+of the eyes of the old woman.
+
+The day was gone, the twilight was gone, and the snow was invisible as I
+came down to the side of the lake. Only the moon, white and shining, was
+in the sky, like a woman glorying in her own loveliness as she loiters
+superbly to the gaze of all the world, looking sometimes through the
+fringe of dark olive leaves, sometimes looking at her own superb,
+quivering body, wholly naked in the water of the lake.
+
+My little old woman was gone. She, all day-sunshine, would have none of
+the moon. Always she must live like a bird, looking down on all the
+world at once, so that it lay all subsidiary to herself, herself the
+wakeful consciousness hovering over the world like a hawk, like a sleep
+of wakefulness. And, like a bird, she went to sleep as the shadows came.
+
+She did not know the yielding up of the senses and the possession of the
+unknown, through the senses, which happens under a superb moon. The
+all-glorious sun knows none of these yieldings up. He takes his way. And
+the daisies at once go to sleep. And the soul of the old spinning-woman
+also closed up at sunset, the rest was a sleep, a cessation.
+
+It is all so strange and varied: the dark-skinned Italians ecstatic in
+the night and the moon, the blue-eyed old woman ecstatic in the busy
+sunshine, the monks in the garden below, who are supposed to unite both,
+passing only in the neutrality of the average. Where, then, is the
+meeting-point: where in mankind is the ecstasy of light and dark
+together, the supreme transcendence of the afterglow, day hovering in
+the embrace of the coming night like two angels embracing in the
+heavens, like Eurydice in the arms of Orpheus, or Persephone embraced
+by Pluto?
+
+Where is the supreme ecstasy in mankind, which makes day a delight and
+night a delight, purpose an ecstasy and a concourse in ecstasy, and
+single abandon of the single body and soul also an ecstasy under the
+moon? Where is the transcendent knowledge in our hearts, uniting sun and
+darkness, day and night, spirit and senses? Why do we not know that the
+two in consummation are one; that each is only part; partial and alone
+for ever; but that the two in consummation are perfect, beyond the range
+of loneliness or solitude?
+
+
+
+_2_
+
+THE LEMON GARDENS
+
+
+The padrone came just as we were drinking coffee after dinner. It was
+two o'clock, because the steamer going down the lake to Desenzano had
+bustled through the sunshine, and the rocking of the water still made
+lights that danced up and down upon the wall among the shadows by
+the piano.
+
+The signore was very apologetic. I found him bowing in the hall, cap in
+one hand, a slip of paper in the other, protesting eagerly, in broken
+French, against disturbing me.
+
+He is a little, shrivelled man, with close-cropped grey hair on his
+skull, and a protruding jaw, which, with his gesticulations, always
+makes me think of an ancient, aristocratic monkey. The signore is a
+gentleman, and the last, shrivelled representative of his race. His only
+outstanding quality, according to the villagers, is his avarice.
+
+_'Mais--mais, monsieur--je crains que--que--que je vous dérange--'_
+
+He spreads wide his hands and bows, looking up at me with implicit brown
+eyes, so ageless in his wrinkled, monkey's face, like onyx. He loves to
+speak French, because then he feels grand. He has a queer, naïve,
+ancient passion to be grand. As the remains of an impoverished family,
+he is not much better than a well-to-do peasant. But the old spirit is
+eager and pathetic in him.
+
+He loves to speak French to me. He holds his chin and waits, in his
+anxiety for the phrase to come. Then it stammers forth, a little rush,
+ending in Italian. But his pride is all on edge: we must continue
+in French.
+
+The hall is cold, yet he will not come into the large room. This is not
+a courtesy visit. He is not here in his quality of gentleman. He is only
+an anxious villager.
+
+'_Voyez, monsieur--cet--cet--qu'est-ce que--qu'est-ce que veut dire
+cet--cela?_'
+
+He shows me the paper. It is an old scrap of print, the picture of an
+American patent door-spring, with directions: 'Fasten the spring either
+end up. Wind it up. Never unwind.'
+
+It is laconic and American. The signore watches me anxiously, waiting,
+holding his chin. He is afraid he ought to understand my English. I
+stutter off into French, confounded by the laconic phrases of the
+directions. Nevertheless, I make it clear what the paper says.
+
+He cannot believe me. It must say something else as well. He has not
+done anything contrary to these directions. He is most distressed.
+
+'_Mais, monsieur, la porte--la porte--elle ferme_ pas--_elle s'ouvre_--'
+
+He skipped to the door and showed me the whole tragic mystery. The door,
+it is shut--_ecco_! He releases the catch, and pouf!--she flies open.
+She flies _open_. It is quite final.
+
+The brown, expressionless, ageless eyes, that remind me of a monkey's,
+or of onyx, wait for me. I feel the responsibility devolve upon me. I
+am anxious.
+
+'Allow me,' I said, 'to come and look at the door.'
+
+I feel uncomfortably like Sherlock Holmes. The padrone protests--_non,
+monsieur, non, cela vous dérange_--that he only wanted me to translate
+the words, he does not want to disturb me. Nevertheless, we go. I feel I
+have the honour of mechanical England in my hands.
+
+The Casa di Paoli is quite a splendid place. It is large, pink and
+cream, rising up to a square tower in the centre, throwing off a painted
+loggia at either extreme of the façade. It stands a little way back from
+the road, just above the lake, and grass grows on the bay of cobbled
+pavement in front. When at night the moon shines full on this pale
+façade, the theatre is far outdone in staginess.
+
+The hall is spacious and beautiful, with great glass doors at either
+end, through which shine the courtyards where bamboos fray the sunlight
+and geraniums glare red. The floor is of soft red tiles, oiled and
+polished like glass, the walls are washed grey-white, the ceiling is
+painted with pink roses and birds. This is half-way between the outer
+world and the interior world, it partakes of both.
+
+The other rooms are dark and ugly. There is no mistake about their being
+interior. They are like furnished vaults. The red-tiled, polished floor
+in the drawing-room seems cold and clammy, the carved, cold furniture
+stands in its tomb, the air has been darkened and starved to death, it
+is perished.
+
+Outside, the sunshine runs like birds singing. Up above, the grey rocks
+build the sun-substance in heaven, San Tommaso guards the terrace. But
+inside here is the immemorial shadow.
+
+Again I had to think of the Italian soul, how it is dark, cleaving to
+the eternal night. It seems to have become so, at the Renaissance, after
+the Renaissance.
+
+In the Middle Ages Christian Europe seems to have been striving, out of
+a strong, primitive, animal nature, towards the self-abnegation and the
+abstraction of Christ. This brought about by itself a great sense of
+completeness. The two halves were joined by the effort towards the one
+as yet unrealized. There was a triumphant joy in the Whole.
+
+But the movement all the time was in one direction, towards the
+elimination of the flesh. Man wanted more and more to become purely free
+and abstract. Pure freedom was in pure abstraction. The Word was
+absolute. When man became as the Word, a pure law, then he was free.
+
+But when this conclusion was reached, the movement broke. Already
+Botticelli painted Aphrodite, queen of the senses, supreme along with
+Mary, Queen of Heaven. And Michelangelo suddenly turned back on the
+whole Christian movement, back to the flesh. The flesh was supreme and
+god-like, in the oneness of the flesh, in the oneness of our physical
+being, we are one with God, with the Father. God the Father created man
+in the flesh, in His own image. Michelangelo swung right back to the old
+Mosaic position. Christ did not exist. To Michelangelo there was no
+salvation in the spirit. There was God the Father, the Begetter, the
+Author of all flesh. And there was the inexorable law of the flesh, the
+Last Judgement, the fall of the immortal flesh into Hell.
+
+This has been the Italian position ever since. The mind, that is the
+Light; the senses, they are the Darkness. Aphrodite, the queen of the
+senses, she, born of the sea-foam, is the luminousness of the gleaming
+senses, the phosphorescence of the sea, the senses become a conscious
+aim unto themselves; she is the gleaming darkness, she is the luminous
+night, she is goddess of destruction, her white, cold fire consumes and
+does not create.
+
+This is the soul of the Italian since the Renaissance. In the sunshine
+he basks asleep, gathering up a vintage into his veins which in the
+night-time he will distil into ecstatic sensual delight, the intense,
+white-cold ecstasy of darkness and moonlight, the raucous, cat-like,
+destructive enjoyment, the senses conscious and crying out in their
+consciousness in the pangs of the enjoyment, which has consumed the
+southern nation, perhaps all the Latin races, since the Renaissance.
+
+It is a lapse back, back to the original position, the Mosaic position,
+of the divinity of the flesh, and the absoluteness of its laws. But also
+there is the Aphrodite-worship. The flesh, the senses, are now
+self-conscious. They know their aim. Their aim is in supreme sensation.
+They seek the maximum of sensation. They seek the reduction of the
+flesh, the flesh reacting upon itself, to a crisis, an ecstasy, a
+phosphorescent transfiguration in ecstasy.
+
+The mind, all the time, subserves the senses. As in a cat, there is
+subtlety and beauty and the dignity of the darkness. But the fire is
+cold, as in the eyes of a cat, it is a green fire. It is fluid,
+electric. At its maximum it is the white ecstasy of phosphorescence, in
+the darkness, always amid the darkness, as under the black fur of a cat.
+Like the feline fire, it is destructive, always consuming and reducing
+to the ecstasy of sensation, which is the end in itself.
+
+There is the I, always the I. And the mind is submerged, overcome. But
+the senses are superbly arrogant. The senses are the absolute, the
+god-like. For I can never have another man's senses. These are me, my
+senses absolutely me. And all that is can only come to me through my
+senses. So that all is me, and is administered unto me. The rest, that
+is not me, is nothing, it is something which is nothing. So the Italian,
+through centuries, has avoided our Northern purposive industry, because
+it has seemed to him a form of nothingness.
+
+It is the spirit of the tiger. The tiger is the supreme manifestation of
+the senses made absolute. This is the
+
+    Tiger, tiger burning bright,
+    In the forests of the night
+
+of Blake. It does indeed burn within the darkness. But the
+_essential_ fate, of the tiger is cold and white, a white ecstasy.
+It is seen in the white eyes of the blazing cat. This is the supremacy
+of the flesh, which devours all, and becomes transfigured into a
+magnificent brindled flame, a burning bush indeed.
+
+This is one way of transfiguration into the eternal flame, the
+transfiguration through ecstasy in the flesh. Like the tiger in the
+night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until this fuel blazes up
+in me to the consummate fire of the Infinite. In the ecstacy I am
+Infinite, I become again the great Whole, I am a flame of the One White
+Flame which is the Infinite, the Eternal, the Originator, the Creator,
+the Everlasting God. In the sensual ecstasy, having drunk all blood and
+devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire, I am infinite.
+
+This is the way of the tiger; the tiger is supreme. His head is
+flattened as if there were some great weight on the hard skull,
+pressing, pressing, pressing the mind into a stone, pressing it down
+under the blood, to serve the blood. It is the subjugate instrument of
+the blood. The will lies above the loins, as it were at the base of the
+spinal column, there is the living will, the living mind of the tiger,
+there in the slender loins. That is the node, there in the spinal cord.
+
+So the Italian, so the soldier. This is the spirit of the soldier. He,
+too, walks with his consciousness concentrated at the base of the spine,
+his mind subjugated, submerged. The will of the soldier is the will of
+the great cats, the will to ecstasy in destruction, in absorbing life
+into his own life, always his own life supreme, till the ecstasy burst
+into the white, eternal flame, the Infinite, the Flame of the Infinite.
+Then he is satisfied, he has been consummated in the Infinite.
+
+This is the true soldier, this is the immortal climax of the senses.
+This is the acme of the flesh, the one superb tiger who has devoured all
+living flesh, and now paces backwards and forwards in the cage of its
+own infinite, glaring with blind, fierce, absorbed eyes at that which is
+nothingness to it.
+
+The eyes of the tiger cannot see, except with the light from within
+itself, by the light of its own desire. Its own white, cold light is so
+fierce that the other warm light of day is outshone, it is not, it does
+not exist. So the white eyes of the tiger gleam to a point of
+concentrated vision, upon that which does not exist. Hence its
+terrifying sightlessness. The something which I know I am is hollow
+space to its vision, offers no resistance to the tiger's looking. It can
+only see of me that which it knows I am, a scent, a resistance, a
+voluptuous solid, a struggling warm violence that it holds overcome, a
+running of hot blood between its Jaws, a delicious pang of live flesh in
+the mouth. This it sees. The rest is not.
+
+And what is the rest, that which is-not the tiger, that which the tiger
+is-not? What is this?
+
+What is that which parted ways with the terrific eagle-like angel of the
+senses at the Renaissance? The Italians said, 'We are one in the Father:
+we will go back.' The Northern races said, 'We are one in Christ: we
+will go on.'
+
+What _is_ the consummation in Christ? Man knows satisfaction when he
+surpasses all conditions and becomes, to himself, consummate in the
+Infinite, when he reaches a state of infinity. In the supreme ecstasy
+of the flesh, the Dionysic ecstasy, he reaches this state. But how does
+it come to pass in Christ?
+
+It is not the mystic ecstasy. The mystic ecstasy is a special sensual
+ecstasy, it is the senses satisfying themselves with a self-created
+object. It is self-projection into the self, the sensuous self satisfied
+in a projected self.
+
+    Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
+
+    Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for
+    theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
+
+The kingdom of heaven is this Infinite into which we may be consummated,
+then, if we are poor in spirit or persecuted for righteousness' sake.
+
+    Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other
+    also.
+
+    Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that
+    hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and
+    persecute you.
+
+    Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is
+    perfect.
+
+To be perfect, to be one with God, to be infinite and eternal, what
+shall we do? We must turn the other cheek, and love our enemies.
+
+Christ is the lamb which the eagle swoops down upon, the dove taken by
+the hawk, the deer which the tiger devours.
+
+What then, if a man come to me with a sword, to kill me, and I do not
+resist him, but suffer his sword and the death from his sword, what am
+I? Am I greater than he, am I stronger than he? Do I know a consummation
+in the Infinite, I, the prey, beyond the tiger who devours me? By my
+non-resistance I have robbed him of his consummation. For a tiger knows
+no consummation unless he kill a violated and struggling prey. There is
+no consummation merely for the butcher, nor for a hyena. I can rob the
+tiger of his ecstasy, his consummation, his very __my non-resistance. In
+my non-resistance the tiger is infinitely destroyed.
+
+But I, what am I? 'Be ye therefore perfect.' Wherein am I perfect in
+this submission? Is there an affirmation, behind my negation, other than
+the tiger's affirmation of his own glorious infinity?
+
+What is the Oneness to which I subscribe, I who offer no resistance in
+the flesh?
+
+Have I only the negative ecstasy of being devoured, of becoming thus
+part of the Lord, the Great Moloch, the superb and terrible God? I have
+this also, this subject ecstasy of consummation. But is there
+nothing else?
+
+The Word of the tiger is: my senses are supremely Me, and my senses are
+God in me. But Christ said: God is in the others, who are not-me. In all
+the multitude of the others is God, and this is the great God, greater
+than the God which is Me. God is that which is Not-Me.
+
+And this is the Christian truth, a truth complementary to the pagan
+affirmation: 'God is that which is Me.'
+
+God is that which is Not-Me. In realizing the Not-Me I am consummated, I
+become infinite. In turning the other cheek I submit to God who is
+greater than I am, other than I am, who is in that which is not me. This
+is the supreme consummation. To achieve this consummation I love my
+neighbour as myself. My neighbour is all that is not me. And if I love
+all this, have I not become one with the Whole, is not my consummation
+complete, am I not one with God, have I not achieved the Infinite?
+
+After the Renaissance the Northern races continued forward to put into
+practice this religious belief in the God which is Not-Me. Even the idea
+of the saving of the soul was really negative: it was a question of
+escaping damnation. The Puritans made the last great attack on the God
+who is Me. When they beheaded Charles the First, the king by Divine
+Right, they destroyed, symbolically, for ever, the supremacy of the Me
+who am the image of God, the Me of the flesh, of the senses, Me, the
+tiger burning bright, me the king, the Lord, the aristocrat, me who am
+divine because I am the body of God.
+
+After the Puritans, we have been gathering data for the God who is
+not-me. When Pope said 'Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The
+proper study of mankind is Man,' he was stating the proposition: A man
+is right, he is consummated, when he is seeking to know Man, the great
+abstract; and the method of knowledge is by the analysis, which is the
+destruction, of the Self. The proposition up to that time was, a man is
+the epitome of the universe. He has only to express himself, to fulfil
+his desires, to satisfy his supreme senses.
+
+Now the change has come to pass. The individual man is a limited being,
+finite in himself. Yet he is capable of apprehending that which is not
+himself. 'The proper study of mankind is Man.' This is another way of
+saying, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' Which means, a man
+is consummated in his knowledge of that which is not himself, the
+abstract Man. Therefore the consummation lies in seeking that other, in
+knowing that other. Whereas the Stuart proposition was: 'A man is
+consummated in expressing his own Self.'
+
+The new spirit developed into the empirical and ideal systems of
+philosophy. Everything that is, is consciousness. And in every man's
+consciousness, Man is great and illimitable, whilst the individual is
+small and fragmentary. Therefore the individual must sink himself in the
+great whole of Mankind.
+
+This is the spirituality of Shelley, the perfectibility of man. This is
+the way in which we fulfil the commandment, 'Be ye therefore perfect,
+even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.' This is Saint
+Paul's, 'Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.'
+
+When a man knows everything and understands everything, then he will be
+perfect, and life will be blessed. He is capable of knowing everything
+and understanding everything. Hence he is justified in his hope of
+infinite freedom and blessedness.
+
+The great inspiration of the new religion was the inspiration of
+freedom. When I have submerged or distilled away my concrete body and my
+limited desires, when I am like the skylark dissolved in the sky yet
+filling heaven and earth with song, then I am perfect, consummated in
+the Infinite. When I am all that is not-me, then I have perfect liberty,
+I know no limitation. Only I must eliminate the Self.
+
+It was this religious belief which expressed itself in science. Science
+was the analysis of the outer self, the elementary substance of the
+self, the outer world. And the machine is the great reconstructed
+selfless power. Hence the active worship to which we were given at the
+end of the last century, the worship of mechanized force.
+
+Still we continue to worship that which is not-me, the Selfless world,
+though we would fain bring in the Self to help us. We are shouting the
+Shakespearean advice to warriors: 'Then simulate the action of the
+tiger.' We are trying to become again the tiger, the supreme, imperial,
+warlike Self. At the same time our ideal is the selfless world
+of equity.
+
+We continue to give service to the Selfless God, we worship the great
+selfless oneness in the spirit, oneness in service of the great
+humanity, that which is Not-Me. This selfless God is He who works for
+all alike, without consideration. And His image is the machine which
+dominates and cows us, we cower before it, we run to serve it. For it
+works for all humanity alike.
+
+At the same time, we want to be warlike tigers. That is the horror: the
+confusing of the two ends. We warlike tigers fit ourselves out with
+machinery, and our blazing tiger wrath is emitted through a machine. It
+is a horrible thing to see machines hauled about by tigers, at the mercy
+of tigers, forced to express the tiger. It is a still more horrible
+thing to see tigers caught up and entangled and torn in machinery. It is
+horrible, a chaos beyond chaos, an unthinkable hell.
+
+The tiger is not wrong, the machine is not wrong, but we, liars,
+lip-servers, duplicate fools, we are unforgivably wrong. We say: 'I will
+be a tiger because I love mankind; out of love for other people, out of
+selfless service to that which is not me, I will even become a tiger.'
+Which is absurd. A tiger devours because it is consummated in devouring,
+it achieves its absolute self in devouring. It does not devour because
+its unselfish conscience bids it do so, for the sake of the other deer
+and doves, or the other tigers.
+
+Having arrived at the one extreme of mechanical selflessness, we
+immediately embrace the other extreme of the transcendent Self. But we
+try to be both at once. We do not cease to be the one before we become
+the other. We do not even play the roles in turn. We want to be the
+tiger and the deer both in one. Which is just ghastly nothingness. We
+try to say, 'The tiger is the lamb and the lamb is the tiger.' Which is
+nil, nihil, nought.
+
+The padrone took me into a small room almost contained in the thickness
+of the wall. There the Signora's dark eyes glared with surprise and
+agitation, seeing me intrude. She is younger than the Signore, a mere
+village tradesman's daughter, and, alas, childless.
+
+It was quite true, the door stood open. Madame put down the screw-driver
+and drew herself erect. Her eyes were a flame of excitement. This
+question of a door-spring that made the door fly open when it should
+make it close roused a vivid spark in her soul. It was she who was
+wrestling with the angel of mechanism.
+
+She was about forty years old, and flame-like and fierily sad. I think
+she did not know she was sad. But her heart was eaten by some impotence
+in her life.
+
+She subdued her flame of life to the little padrone. He was strange and
+static, scarcely human, ageless, like a monkey. She supported him with
+her flame, supported his static, ancient, beautiful form, kept it
+intact. But she did not believe in him.
+
+Now, the Signora Gemma held her husband together whilst he undid the
+screw that fixed the spring. If they had been alone, she would have done
+it, pretending to be under his direction. But since I was there, he did
+it himself; a grey, shaky, highly-bred little gentleman, standing on a
+chair with a long screw-driver, whilst his wife stood behind him, her
+hands half-raised to catch him if he should fall. Yet he was strangely
+absolute, with a strange, intact force in his breeding.
+
+They had merely adjusted the strong spring to the shut door, and
+stretched it slightly in fastening it to the door-jamb, so that it drew
+together the moment the latch was released, and the door flew open.
+
+We soon made it right. There was a moment of anxiety, the screw was
+fixed. And the door swung to. They were delighted. The Signora Gemma,
+who roused in me an electric kind of melancholy, clasped her hands
+together in ecstasy as the door swiftly shut itself.
+
+'_Ecco!_' she cried, in her vibrating, almost warlike woman's voice:
+'_Ecco!_'
+
+Her eyes were aflame as they looked at the door. She ran forward to try
+it herself. She opened the door expectantly, eagerly. Pouf!--it shut
+with a bang.
+
+'_Ecco!_' she cried, her voice quivering like bronze, overwrought but
+triumphant.
+
+I must try also. I opened the door. Pouf! It shut with a bang. We all
+exclaimed with joy.
+
+Then the Signor di Paoli turned to me, with a gracious, bland, formal
+grin. He turned his back slightly on the woman, and stood holding his
+chin, his strange horse-mouth grinning almost pompously at me. It was an
+affair of gentlemen. His wife disappeared as if dismissed. Then the
+padrone broke into cordial motion. We must drink.
+
+He would show me the estate. I had already seen the house. We went out
+by the glass doors on the left, into the domestic courtyard.
+
+It was lower than the gardens round it, and the sunshine came through
+the trellised arches on to the flagstones, where the grass grew fine and
+green in the cracks, and all was deserted and spacious and still. There
+were one or two orange-tubs in the light.
+
+Then I heard a noise, and there in the corner, among all the pink
+geraniums and the sunshine, the Signora Gemma sat laughing with a baby.
+It was a fair, bonny thing of eighteen months. The Signora was
+concentrated upon the child as he sat, stolid and handsome, in his
+little white cap, perched on a bench picking at the pink geraniums.
+
+She laughed, bent forward her dark face out of the shadow, swift into a
+glitter of sunshine near the sunny baby, laughing again excitedly,
+making mother-noises. The child took no notice of her. She caught him
+swiftly into the shadow, and they were obscured; her dark head was
+against the baby's wool jacket, she was kissing his neck, avidly, under
+the creeper leaves. The pink geraniums still frilled joyously in
+the sunshine.
+
+I had forgotten the padrone. Suddenly I turned to him inquiringly.
+
+'The Signora's nephew,' he explained, briefly, curtly, in a small voice.
+It was as if he were ashamed, or too deeply chagrined.
+
+The woman had seen us watching, so she came across the sunshine with the
+child, laughing, talking to the baby, not coming out of her own world to
+us, not acknowledging us, except formally.
+
+The Signor Pietro, queer old horse, began to laugh and neigh at the
+child, with strange, rancorous envy. The child twisted its face to cry.
+The Signora caught it away, dancing back a few yards from her
+old husband.
+
+'I am a stranger,' I said to her across the distance. 'He is afraid of a
+stranger.'
+
+'No, no,' she cried back, her eyes flaring up. 'It is the man. He always
+cries at the men.'
+
+She advanced again, laughing and roused, with the child in her arms. Her
+husband stood as if overcast, obliterated. She and I and the baby, in
+the sunshine, laughed a moment. Then I heard the neighing, forced laugh
+of the old man. He would not be left out. He seemed to force himself
+forward. He was bitter, acrid with chagrin and obliteration, struggling
+as if to assert his own existence. He was nullified.
+
+The woman also was uncomfortable. I could see she wanted to go away with
+the child, to enjoy him alone, with palpitating, pained enjoyment. It
+was her brother's boy. And the old padrone was as if nullified by her
+ecstasy over the baby. He held his chin, gloomy, fretful, unimportant.
+
+He was annulled. I was startled when I realized it. It was as though his
+reality were not attested till he had a child. It was as if his _raison
+d'être_ had been to have a son. And he had no children. Therefore he had
+no _raison d'être_. He was nothing, a shadow that vanishes into nothing.
+And he was ashamed, consumed by his own nothingness.
+
+I was startled. This, then, is the secret of Italy's attraction for us,
+this phallic worship. To the Italian the phallus is the symbol of
+individual creative immortality, to each man his own Godhead. The child
+is but the evidence of the Godhead.
+
+And this is why the Italian is attractive, supple, and beautiful,
+because he worships the Godhead in the flesh. We envy him, we feel pale
+and insignificant beside him. Yet at the same time we feel superior to
+him, as if he were a child and we adult.
+
+Wherein are we superior? Only because we went beyond the phallus in the
+search of the Godhead, the creative origin. And we found the physical
+forces and the secrets of science.
+
+We have exalted Man far above the man who is in each one of us. Our aim
+is a perfect humanity, a perfect and equable human consciousness,
+selfless. And we obtain it in the subjection, reduction, analysis, and
+destruction of the Self. So on we go, active in science and mechanics,
+and social reform.
+
+But we have exhausted ourselves in the process. We have found great
+treasures, and we are now impotent to use them. So we have said: 'What
+good are these treasures, they are vulgar nothings.' We have said: 'Let
+us go back from this adventuring, let us enjoy our own flesh, like the
+Italian.' But our habit of life, our very constitution, prevents our
+being quite like the Italian. The phallus will never serve us as a
+Godhead, because we do not believe in it: no Northern race does.
+Therefore, either we set ourselves to serve our children, calling them
+'the future', or else we turn perverse and destructive, give ourselves
+joy in the destruction of the flesh.
+
+The children are not the future. The living truth is the future. Time
+and people do not make the future. Retrogression is not the future.
+Fifty million children growing up purposeless, with no purpose save the
+attainment of their own individual desires, these are not the future,
+they are only a disintegration of the past. The future is in living,
+growing truth, in advancing fulfilment.
+
+But it is no good. Whatever we do, it is within the greater will towards
+self-reduction and a perfect society, analysis on the one hand, and
+mechanical construction on the other. This will dominates us as a whole,
+and until the whole breaks down, the will must persist. So that now,
+continuing in the old, splendid will for a perfect selfless humanity, we
+have become inhuman and unable to help ourselves, we are but attributes
+of the great mechanized society we have created on our way to
+perfection. And this great mechanized society, being selfless, is
+pitiless. It works on mechanically and destroys us, it is our master
+and our God.
+
+It is past the time to leave off, to cease entirely from what we are
+doing, and from what we have been doing for hundreds of years. It is
+past the time to cease seeking one Infinite, ignoring, striving to
+eliminate the other. The Infinite is twofold, the Father and the Son,
+the Dark and the Light, the Senses and the Mind, the Soul and the
+Spirit, the self and the not-self, the Eagle and the Dove, the Tiger and
+the Lamb. The consummation of man is twofold, in the Self and in
+Selflessness. By great retrogression back to the source of darkness in
+me, the Self, deep in the senses, I arrive at the Original, Creative
+Infinite. By projection forth from myself, by the elimination of my
+absolute sensual self, I arrive at the Ultimate Infinite, Oneness in the
+Spirit. They are two Infinites, twofold approach to God. And man must
+know both.
+
+But he must never confuse them. They are eternally separate. The lion
+shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally shall devour the
+lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured. Man knows the great
+consummation in the flesh, the sensual ecstasy, and that is eternal.
+Also the spiritual ecstasy of unanimity, that is eternal. But the two
+are separate and never to be confused. To neutralize the one with the
+other is unthinkable, an abomination. Confusion is horror and
+nothingness.
+
+The two Infinites, negative and positive, they are always related, but
+they are never identical. They are always opposite, but there exists a
+relation between them. This is the Holy Ghost of the Christian Trinity.
+And it is this, the relation which is established between the two
+Infinites, the two natures of God, which we have transgressed,
+forgotten, sinned against. The Father is the Father, and the Son is the
+Son. I may know the Son and deny the Father, or know the Father and deny
+the Son. But that which I may never deny, and which I have denied, is
+the Holy Ghost which relates the dual Infinites into One Whole, which
+relates and keeps distinct the dual natures of God. To say that the two
+are one, this is the inadmissible lie. The two are related, by the
+intervention of the Third, into a Oneness.
+
+There are two ways, there is not only One. There are two opposite ways
+to consummation. But that which relates them, like the base of the
+triangle, this is the constant, the Absolute, this makes the Ultimate
+Whole. And in the Holy Spirit I know the Two Ways, the Two Infinites,
+the Two Consummations. And knowing the Two, I admit the Whole. But
+excluding One, I exclude the Whole. And confusing the two, I make
+nullity nihil.
+
+'_Mais_,' said the Signore, starting from his scene of ignominy, where
+his wife played with another man's child, '_mais--voulez-vous vous
+promener dans mes petites terres?_'
+
+It came out fluently, he was so much roused in self-defence and
+self-assertion.
+
+We walked under the pergola of bony vine-stocks, secure in the sunshine
+within the walls, only the long mountain, parallel with us, looking in.
+
+I said how I liked the big vine-garden, I asked when it ended. The pride
+of the padrone came back with a click. He pointed me to the terrace, to
+the great shut lemon-houses above. They were all his. But--he shrugged
+his Italian shoulders--it was nothing, just a little garden, _vous
+savez, monsieur_. I protested it was beautiful, that I loved it, and
+that it seemed to me _very_ large indeed. He admitted that today,
+perhaps, it was beautiful.
+
+'_Perchè--parce que--il fait un tempo--così--très bell'--très beau,
+ecco!_'
+
+He alighted on the word _beau_ hurriedly, like a bird coming to ground
+with a little bounce.
+
+The terraces of the garden are held up to the sun, the sun falls full
+upon them, they are like a vessel slanted up, to catch the superb, heavy
+light. Within the walls we are remote, perfect, moving in heavy spring
+sunshine, under the bony avenue of vines. The padrone makes little
+exclamatory noises that mean nothing, and teaches me the names of
+vegetables. The land is rich and black.
+
+Opposite us, looking down on our security, is the long, arched mountain
+of snow. We climbed one flight of steps, and we could see the little
+villages on the opposite side of the lake. We climbed again, and could
+see the water rippling.
+
+We came to a great stone building that I had thought was a storehouse,
+for open-air storage, because the walls are open halfway up, showing the
+darkness inside and the corner pillar very white and square and distinct
+in front of it.
+
+Entering carelessly into the dimness, I started, for at my feet was a
+great floor of water, clear and green in its obscurity, going down
+between the walls, a reservoir in the gloom. The Signore laughed at my
+surprise. It was for irrigating the land, he said. It stank, slightly,
+with a raw smell; otherwise, I said, what a wonderful bath it would
+make. The old Signore gave his little neighing laugh at the idea.
+
+Then we climbed into a great loft of leaves, ruddy brown, stored in a
+great bank under the roof, seeming to give off a little red heat, as
+they gave off the lovely perfume of the hills. We passed through, and
+stood at the foot of the lemon-house. The big, blind building rose high
+in the sunshine before us.
+
+All summer long, upon the mountain slopes steep by the lake, stands the
+rows of naked pillars rising out of the green foliage like ruins of
+temples: white, square pillars of masonry, standing forlorn in their
+colonnades and squares, rising up the mountain-sides here and there, as
+if they remained from some great race that had once worshipped here. And
+still, in the winter, some are seen, standing away in lonely places
+where the sun streams full, grey rows of pillars rising out of a broken
+wall, tier above tier, naked to the sky, forsaken.
+
+They are the lemon plantations, and the pillars are to support the heavy
+branches of the trees, but finally to act as scaffolding of the great
+wooden houses that stand blind and ugly, covering the lemon trees in
+the winter.
+
+In November, when cold winds came down and snow had fallen on the
+mountains, from out of the storehouses the men were carrying timber, and
+we heard the clang of falling planks. Then, as we walked along the
+military road on the mountain-side, we saw below, on the top of the
+lemon gardens, long, thin poles laid from pillar to pillar, and we heard
+the two men talking and singing as they walked across perilously,
+placing the poles. In their clumsy zoccoli they strode easily across,
+though they had twenty or thirty feet to fall if they slipped. But the
+mountain-side, rising steeply, seemed near, and above their heads the
+rocks glowed high into the sky, so that the sense of elevation must have
+been taken away. At any rate, they went easily from pillar-summit to
+pillar-summit, with a great cave of space below. Then again was the
+rattle and clang of planks being laid in order, ringing from the
+mountain-side over the blue lake, till a platform of timber, old and
+brown, projected from the mountain-side, a floor when seen from above, a
+hanging roof when seen from below. And we, on the road above, saw the
+men sitting easily on this flimsy hanging platform, hammering the
+planks. And all day long the sound of hammering echoed among the rocks
+and olive woods, and came, a faint, quick concussion, to the men on the
+boats far out. When the roofs were on they put in the fronts, blocked in
+between the white pillars withhold, dark wood, in roughly made panels.
+And here and there, at irregular intervals, was a panel of glass, pane
+overlapping pane in the long strip of narrow window. So that now these
+enormous, unsightly buildings bulge out on the mountain-sides, rising in
+two or three receding tiers, blind, dark, sordid-looking places.
+
+In the morning I often lie in bed and watch the sunrise. The lake lies
+dim and milky, the mountains are dark blue at the back, while over them
+the sky gushes and glistens with light. At a certain place on the
+mountain ridge the light burns gold, seems to fuse a little groove on
+the hill's rim. It fuses and fuses at this point, till of a sudden it
+comes, the intense, molten, living light. The mountains melt suddenly,
+the light steps down, there is a glitter, a spangle, a clutch of
+spangles, a great unbearable sun-track flashing across the milky lake,
+and the light falls on my face. Then, looking aside, I hear the little
+slotting noise which tells me they are opening the lemon gardens, a long
+panel here and there, a long slot of darkness at irregular intervals
+between the brown wood and the glass stripes.
+
+'_Voulez-vous_'--the Signore bows me in with outstretched
+hand--'_voulez-vous entrer, monsieur?_'
+
+I went into the lemon-house, where the poor threes seem to mope in the
+darkness. It is an immense, dark, cold place. Tall lemon trees, heavy
+with half-visible fruit, crowd together, and rise in the gloom. They
+look like ghosts in the darkness of the underworld, stately, and as if
+in life, but only grand shadows of themselves. And lurking here and
+there, I see one of the pillars, But he, too, seems a shadow, not one of
+the dazzling white fellows I knew. Here we are trees, men, pillars, the
+dark earth, the sad black paths, shut in in this enormous box. It is
+true, there are long strips of window and slots of space, so that the
+front is striped, and an occasional beam of light fingers the leaves of
+an enclosed tree and the sickly round lemons. But it is nevertheless
+very gloomy.
+
+'But it is much colder in here than outside,' I said.
+
+'Yes,' replied the Signore, 'now. But at night--I _think_--'
+
+I almost wished it were night to try. I wanted to imagine the trees
+cosy. They seemed now in the underworld. Between the lemon trees, beside
+the path, were little orange trees, and dozens of oranges hanging like
+hot coals in the twilight. When I warm my hands at them the Signore
+breaks me off one twig after another, till I have a bunch of burning
+oranges among dark leaves, a heavy bouquet. Looking down the Hades of
+the lemon-house, the many ruddy-clustered oranges beside the path remind
+me of the lights of a village along the lake at night, while the pale
+lemons above are the stars. There is a subtle, exquisite scent of lemon
+flowers. Then I notice a citron. He hangs heavy and bloated upon so
+small a tree, that he seems a dark green enormity. There is a great host
+of lemons overhead, half-visible, a swarm of ruddy oranges by the paths,
+and here and there a fat citron. It is almost like being under the sea.
+
+At the corners of the path were round little patches of ash and stumps
+of charred wood, where fires had been kindled inside the house on cold
+nights. For during the second and third weeks in January the snow came
+down so low on the mountains that, after climbing for an hour, I found
+myself in a snow lane, and saw olive orchards on lawns of snow.
+
+The padrone says that all lemons and sweet oranges are grafted on a
+bitter-orange stock. The plants raised from seed, lemon and sweet
+orange, fell prey to disease, so the cultivators found it safe only to
+raise the native bitter orange, and then graft upon it.
+
+And the maestra--she is the schoolmistress, who wears black gloves while
+she teaches us Italian--says that the lemon was brought by St Francis of
+Assisi, who came to the Garda here and founded a church and a monastery.
+Certainly the church of San Francesco is very old and dilapidated, and
+its cloisters have some beautiful and original carvings of leaves and
+fruit upon the pillars, which seem to connect San Francesco with the
+lemon. I imagine him wandering here with a lemon in his pocket. Perhaps
+he made lemonade in the hot summer. But Bacchus had been before him in
+the drink trade.
+
+Looking at his lemons, the Signore sighed. I think he hates them. They
+are leaving him in the lurch. They are sold retail at a halfpenny each
+all the year round. 'But that is as dear, or dearer, than in England,' I
+say. 'Ah, but,' says the maestra, 'that is because your lemons are
+outdoor fruit from Sicily. _Però_--one of our lemons is as good as _two_
+from elsewhere.'
+
+It is true these lemons have an exquisite fragrance and perfume, but
+whether their force as lemons is double that of an ordinary fruit is a
+question. Oranges are sold at fourpence halfpenny the kilo--it comes
+about five for twopence, small ones. The citrons are sold also by weight
+in Salò for the making of that liqueur known as 'Cedro'. One citron
+fetches sometimes a shilling or more, but then the demand is necessarily
+small. So that it is evident, from these figures, the Lago di Garda
+cannot afford to grow its lemons much longer. The gardens are already
+many of them in ruins, and still more 'Da Vendere'.
+
+We went out of the shadow of the lemon-house on to the roof of the
+section below us. When we came to the brink of the roof I sat down. The
+padrone stood behind me, a shabby, shaky little figure on his roof in
+the sky, a little figure of dilapidation, dilapidated as the
+lemon-houses themselves.
+
+We were always level with the mountain-snow opposite. A film of pure
+blue was on the hills to the right and the left. There had been a wind,
+but it was still now. The water breathed an iridescent dust on the far
+shore, where the villages were groups of specks.
+
+On the low level of the world, on the lake, an orange-sailed boat leaned
+slim to the dark-blue water, which had flecks of foam. A woman went
+down-hill quickly, with two goats and a sheep. Among the olives a man
+was whistling.
+
+'_Voyez_,' said the padrone, with distant, perfect melancholy. 'There
+was once a lemon garden also there--you see the short pillars, cut off
+to make a pergola for the vine. Once there were twice as many lemons as
+now. Now we must have vine instead. From that piece of land I had two
+hundred lire a year, in lemons. From the vine I have only eighty.'
+
+'But wine is a valuable crop,' I said.
+
+'Ah--_così-così_! For a man who grows much. For me--_poco, poco--peu_.'
+
+Suddenly his face broke into a smile of profound melancholy, almost a
+grin, like a gargoyle. It was the real Italian melancholy, very
+deep, static.
+
+'_Vous voyez, monsieur_--the lemon, it is all the year, all the year.
+But the vine--one crop--?'
+
+He lifts his shoulders and spreads his hands with that gesture of
+finality and fatality, while his face takes the blank, ageless look of
+misery, like a monkey's. There is no hope. There is the present. Either
+that is enough, the present, or there is nothing.
+
+I sat and looked at the lake. It was beautiful as paradise, as the first
+creation. On the shores were the ruined lemon-pillars standing out in
+melancholy, the clumsy, enclosed lemon-houses seemed ramshackle, bulging
+among vine stocks and olive trees. The villages, too, clustered upon
+their churches, seemed to belong to the past. They seemed to be
+lingering in bygone centuries.
+
+'But it is very beautiful,' I protested. 'In England--'
+
+'Ah, in England,' exclaimed the padrone, the same ageless, monkey-like
+grin of fatality, tempered by cunning, coming on his face, 'in England
+you have the wealth--_les richesses_--you have the mineral coal and the
+machines, _vous savez_. Here we have the sun--'
+
+He lifted his withered hand to the sky, to the wonderful source of that
+blue day, and he smiled, in histrionic triumph. But his triumph was only
+histrionic. The machines were more to his soul than the sun. He did not
+know these mechanisms, their great, human-contrived, inhuman power, and
+he wanted to know them. As for the sun, that is common property, and no
+man is distinguished by it. He wanted machines, machine production,
+money, and human power. He wanted to know the joy of man who has got the
+earth in his grip, bound it up with railways, burrowed it with iron
+fingers, subdued it. He wanted this last triumph of the ego, this last
+reduction. He wanted to go where the English have gone, beyond the Self,
+into the great inhuman Not Self, to create the great unliving creators,
+the machines, out of the active forces of nature that existed
+before flesh.
+
+But he is too old. It remains for the young Italian to embrace his
+mistress, the machine.
+
+I sat on the roof of the lemon-house, with the lake below and the snowy
+mountain opposite, and looked at the ruins on the old, olive-fuming
+shores, at all the peace of the ancient world still covered in sunshine,
+and the past seemed to me so lovely that one must look towards it,
+backwards, only backwards, where there is peace and beauty and no more
+dissonance.
+
+I thought of England, the great mass of London, and the black, fuming,
+laborious Midlands and north-country. It seemed horrible. And yet, it
+was better than the padrone, this old, monkey-like cunning of fatality.
+It is better to go forward into error than to stay fixed inextricably
+in the past.
+
+Yet what should become of the world? There was London and the industrial
+counties spreading like a blackness over all the world, horrible, in the
+end destructive. And the Garda was so lovely under the sky of sunshine,
+it was intolerable. For away, beyond, beyond all the snowy Alps, with
+the iridescence of eternal ice above them, was this England, black and
+foul and dry, with her soul worn down, almost worn away. And England was
+conquering the world with her machines and her horrible destruction of
+natural life. She was conquering the whole world.
+
+And yet, was she not herself finished in this work? She had had enough.
+She had conquered the natural life to the end: she was replete with the
+conquest of the outer world, satisfied with the destruction of the Self.
+She would cease, she would turn round; or else expire.
+
+If she still lived, she would begin to build her knowledge into a great
+structure of truth. There it lay, vast masses of rough-hewn knowledge,
+vast masses of machines and appliances, vast masses of ideas and
+methods, and nothing done with it, only teeming swarms of disintegrated
+human beings seething and perishing rapidly away amongst it, till it
+seems as if a world will be left covered with huge ruins, and scored by
+strange devices of industry, and quite dead, the people disappeared,
+swallowed up in the last efforts towards a perfect, selfless society.
+
+
+
+_3_
+
+THE THEATRE
+
+
+During carnival a company is playing in the theatre. On Christmas Day
+the padrone came in with the key of his box, and would we care to see
+the drama? The theatre was small, a mere nothing, in fact; a mere affair
+of peasants, you understand; and the Signor Di Paoli spread his hands
+and put his head on one side, parrot-wise; but we might find a little
+diversion--_un peu de divertiment_. With this he handed me the key.
+
+I made suitable acknowledgements, and was really impressed. To be handed
+the key of a box at the theatre, so simply and pleasantly, in the large
+sitting-room looking over the grey lake of Christmas Day; it seemed to
+me a very graceful event. The key had a chain and a little shield of
+bronze, on which was beaten out a large figure 8.
+
+So the next day we went to see _I Spettri_, expecting some good, crude
+melodrama. The theatre is an old church. Since that triumph of the deaf
+and dumb, the cinematograph, has come to give us the nervous excitement
+of speed--grimace agitation, and speed, as of flying atoms, chaos--many
+an old church in Italy has taken a new lease of life.
+
+This cast-off church made a good theatre. I realized how cleverly it had
+been constructed for the dramatic presentation of religious ceremonies.
+The east end is round, the walls are windowless, sound is well
+distributed. Now everything is theatrical, except the stone floor and
+two pillars at the back of the auditorium, and the slightly
+ecclesiastical seats below.
+
+There are two tiers of little boxes in the theatre, some forty in all,
+with fringe and red velvet, and lined with dark red paper, quite like
+real boxes in a real theatre. And the padrone's is one of the best. It
+just holds three people.
+
+We paid our threepence entrance fee in the stone hall and went upstairs.
+I opened the door of Number 8, and we were shut in our little cabin,
+looking down on the world. Then I found the barber, Luigi, bowing
+profusely in a box opposite. It was necessary to make bows all round:
+ah, the chemist, on the upper tier, near the barber; how-do-you-do to
+the padrona of the hotel, who is our good friend, and who sits, wearing
+a little beaver shoulder-cape, a few boxes off; very cold salutation to
+the stout village magistrate with the long brown beard, who leans
+forward in the box facing the stage, while a grouping of faces look out
+from behind him; a warm smile to the family of the Signora Gemma, across
+next to the stage. Then we are settled.
+
+I cannot tell why I hate the village magistrate. He looks like a family
+portrait by a Flemish artist, he himself weighing down the front of the
+picture with his portliness and his long brown beard, whilst the faces
+of his family are arranged in two groups for the background. I think he
+is angry at our intrusion. He is very republican and self-important. But
+we eclipse him easily, with the aid of a large black velvet hat, and
+black furs, and our Sunday clothes.
+
+Downstairs the villagers are crowding, drifting like a heavy current.
+The women are seated, by church instinct, all together on the left, with
+perhaps an odd man at the end of a row, beside his wife. On the right,
+sprawling in the benches, are several groups of bersaglieri, in grey
+uniforms and slanting cock's-feather hats; then peasants, fishermen, and
+an odd couple or so of brazen girls taking their places on the
+men's side.
+
+At the back, lounging against the pillars or standing very dark and
+sombre, are the more reckless spirits of the village. Their black felt
+hats are pulled down, their cloaks are thrown over their mouths, they
+stand very dark and isolated in their moments of stillness, they shout
+and wave to each other when anything occurs.
+
+The men are clean, their clothes are all clean washed. The rags of the
+poorest porter are always well washed. But it is Sunday tomorrow, and
+they are shaved only on a Sunday. So that they have a week's black
+growth on their chins. But they have dark, soft eyes, unconscious and
+vulnerable. They move and balance with loose, heedless motion upon their
+clattering zoccoli, they lounge with wonderful ease against the wall at
+the back, or against the two pillars, unconscious of the patches on
+their clothes or of their bare throats, that are knotted perhaps with a
+scarlet rag. Loose and abandoned, they lounge and talk, or they watch
+with wistful absorption the play that is going on.
+
+They are strangely isolated in their own atmosphere, and as if revealed.
+It is as if their vulnerable being was exposed and they have not the wit
+to cover it. There is a pathos of physical sensibility and mental
+inadequacy. Their mind is not sufficiently alert to run with their
+quick, warm senses.
+
+The men keep together, as if to support each other, the women also are
+together; in a hard, strong herd. It is as if the power, the hardness,
+the triumph, even in this Italian village, were with the women in their
+relentless, vindictive unity.
+
+That which drives men and women together, the indomitable necessity, is
+like a bondage upon the people. They submit as under compulsion, under
+constraint. They come together mostly in anger and in violence of
+destructive passion. There is no comradeship between men and women, none
+whatsoever, but rather a condition of battle, reserve, hostility.
+
+On Sundays the uncomfortable, excited, unwilling youth walks for an hour
+with his sweetheart, at a little distance from her, on the public
+highway in the afternoon. This is a concession to the necessity for
+marriage. There is no real courting, no happiness of being together,
+only the roused excitement which is based on a fundamental hostility.
+There is very little flirting, and what there is is of the subtle, cruel
+kind, like a sex duel. On the whole, the men and women avoid each other,
+almost shun each other. Husband and wife are brought together in a
+child, which they both worship. But in each of them there is only the
+great reverence for the infant, and the reverence for fatherhood or
+motherhood, as the case may be; there is no spiritual love.
+
+In marriage, husband and wife wage the subtle, satisfying war of sex
+upon each other. It gives a profound satisfaction, a profound intimacy.
+But it destroys all joy, all unanimity in action.
+
+On Sunday afternoons the uncomfortable youth walks by the side of his
+maiden for an hour in the public highway. Then he escapes; as from a
+bondage he goes back to his men companions. On Sunday afternoons and
+evenings the married woman, accompanied by a friend or by a child--she
+dare not go alone, afraid of the strange, terrible sex-war between her
+and the drunken man--is seen leading home the wine-drunken, liberated
+husband. Sometimes she is beaten when she gets home. It is part of the
+process. But there is no synthetic love between men and women, there is
+only passion, and passion is fundamental hatred, the act of love is
+a fight.
+
+The child, the outcome, is divine. Here the union, the oneness, is
+manifest. Though spirit strove with spirit, in mortal conflict, during
+the sex-passion, yet the flesh united with flesh in oneness. The phallus
+is still divine. But the spirit, the mind of man, this has
+become nothing.
+
+So the women triumph. They sit down below in the theatre, their
+perfectly dressed hair gleaming, their backs very straight, their heads
+carried tensely. They are not very noticeable. They seem held in
+reserve. They are just as tense and stiff as the men are slack and
+abandoned. Some strange will holds the women taut. They seem like
+weapons, dangerous. There is nothing charming nor winning about them; at
+the best a full, prolific maternity, at the worst a yellow poisonous
+bitterness of the flesh that is like a narcotic. But they are too strong
+for the men. The male spirit, which would subdue the immediate flesh to
+some conscious or social purpose, is overthrown. The woman in her
+maternity is the law-giver, the supreme authority. The authority of the
+man, in work, in public affairs, is something trivial in comparison. The
+pathetic ignominy of the village male is complete on Sunday afternoon,
+on his great day of liberation, when he is accompanied home, drunk but
+sinister, by the erect, unswerving, slightly cowed woman. His drunken
+terrorizing is only pitiable, she is so obviously the more
+constant power.
+
+And this is why the men must go away to America. It is not the money. It
+is the profound desire to rehabilitate themselves, to recover some
+dignity as men, as producers, as workers, as creators from the spirit,
+not only from the flesh. It is a profound desire to get away from women
+altogether, the terrible subjugation to sex, the phallic worship.
+
+The company of actors in the little theatre was from a small town away
+on the plain, beyond Brescia. The curtain rose, everybody was still,
+with that profound, naïve attention which children give. And after a few
+minutes I realized that _I Spettri_ was Ibsen's _Ghosts_. The peasants
+and fishermen of the Garda, even the rows of ungovernable children, sat
+absorbed in watching as the Norwegian drama unfolded itself.
+
+The actors are peasants. The leader is the son of a peasant proprietor.
+He is qualified as a chemist, but is unsettled, vagrant, prefers
+play-acting. The Signer Pietro di Paoli shrugs his shoulders and
+apologizes for their vulgar accent. It is all the same to me. I am
+trying to get myself to rights with the play, which I have just lately
+seen in Munich, perfectly produced and detestable.
+
+It was such a change from the hard, ethical, slightly mechanized
+characters in the German play, which was as perfect an interpretation as
+I can imagine, to the rather pathetic notion of the Italian peasants,
+that I had to wait to adjust myself.
+
+The mother was a pleasant, comfortable woman harassed by something, she
+did not quite know what. The pastor was a ginger-haired caricature
+imitated from the northern stage, quite a lay figure. The peasants never
+laughed, they watched solemnly and absorbedly like children. The servant
+was just a slim, pert, forward hussy, much too flagrant. And then the
+son, the actor-manager: he was a dark, ruddy man, broad and thick-set,
+evidently of peasant origin, but with some education now; he was the
+important figure, the play was his.
+
+And he was strangely disturbing. Dark, ruddy, and powerful, he could not
+be the blighted son of 'Ghosts', the hectic, unsound, northern issue of
+a diseased father. His flashy Italian passion for his half-sister was
+real enough to make one uncomfortable: something he wanted and would
+have in spite of his own soul, something which fundamentally he did
+not want.
+
+It was this contradiction within the man that made the play so
+interesting. A robust, vigorous man of thirty-eight, flaunting and
+florid as a rather successful Italian can be, there was yet a secret
+sickness which oppressed him. But it was no taint in the blood, it was
+rather a kind of debility in the soul. That which he wanted and would
+have, the sensual excitement, in his soul he did not want it, no, not at
+all. And yet he must act from his physical desires, his physical will.
+
+His true being, his real self, was impotent. In his soul he was
+dependent, forlorn. He was childish and dependent on the mother. To hear
+him say, '_Grazia, mamma!_' would have tormented the mother-soul in any
+woman living. Such a child crying in the night! And for what?
+
+For he was hot-blooded, healthy, almost in his prime, and free as a man
+can be in his circumstances. He had his own way, he admitted no
+thwarting. He governed his circumstances pretty much, coming to our
+village with his little company, playing the plays he chose himself. And
+yet, that which he would have he did not vitally want, it was only a
+sort of inflamed obstinacy that made him so insistent, in the masculine
+way. He was not going to be governed by women, he was not going to be
+dictated to in the least by any one. And this because he was beaten by
+his own flesh.
+
+His real man's soul, the soul that goes forth and builds up a new world
+out of the void, was ineffectual. It could only revert to the senses.
+His divinity was the phallic divinity. The other male divinity, which is
+the spirit that fulfils in the world the new germ of an idea, this was
+denied and obscured in him, unused. And it was this spirit which cried
+out helplessly in him through the insistent, inflammable flesh. Even
+this play-acting was a form of physical gratification for him, it had in
+it neither real mind nor spirit.
+
+It was so different from Ibsen, and so much more moving. Ibsen is
+exciting, nervously sensational. But this was really moving, a real
+crying in the night. One loved the Italian nation, and wanted to help it
+with all one's soul. But when one sees the perfect Ibsen, how one hates
+the Norwegian and Swedish nations! They are detestable.
+
+They seem to be fingering with the mind the secret places and sources of
+the blood, impertinent, irreverent, nasty. There is a certain
+intolerable nastiness about the real Ibsen: the same thing is in
+Strindberg and in most of the Norwegian and Swedish writings. It is with
+them a sort of phallic worship also, but now the worship is mental and
+perverted: the phallus is the real fetish, but it is the source of
+uncleanliness and corruption and death, it is the Moloch, worshipped in
+obscenity.
+
+Which is unbearable. The phallus is a symbol of creative divinity. But
+it represents only part of creative divinity. The Italian has made it
+represent the whole. Which is now his misery, for he has to destroy his
+symbol in himself.
+
+Which is why the Italian men have the enthusiasm for war, unashamed.
+Partly it is the true phallic worship, for the phallic principle is to
+absorb and dominate all life. But also it is a desire to expose
+themselves to death, to know death, that death may destroy in them this
+too strong dominion of the blood, may once more liberate the spirit of
+outgoing, of uniting, of making order out of chaos, in the outer world,
+as the flesh makes a new order from chaos in begetting a new life, set
+them free to know and serve a greater idea.
+
+The peasants below sat and listened intently, like children who hear and
+do not understand, yet who are spellbound. The children themselves sit
+spellbound on the benches till the play is over. They do not fidget or
+lose interest. They watch with wide, absorbed eyes at the mystery, held
+in thrall by the sound of emotion.
+
+But the villagers do not really care for Ibsen. They let it go. On the
+feast of Epiphany, as a special treat, was given a poetic drama by
+D'Annunzio, _La Fiaccola sotto il Moggio_--_The Light under the Bushel_.
+
+It is a foolish romantic play of no real significance. There are several
+murders and a good deal of artificial horror. But it is all a very nice
+and romantic piece of make-believe, like a charade.
+
+So the audience loved it. After the performance of _Ghosts_ I saw the
+barber, and he had the curious grey clayey look of an Italian who is
+cold and depressed. The sterile cold inertia, which the so-called
+passionate nations know so well, had settled on him, and he went
+obliterating himself in the street, as if he were cold, dead.
+
+But after the D'Annunzio play he was like a man who has drunk sweet wine
+and is warm.
+
+'_Ah, bellissimo, bellissimo_!' he said, in tones of intoxicated
+reverence, when he saw me.
+
+'Better than _I Spettri_?' I said.
+
+He half-raised his hands, as if to imply the fatuity of the question.
+
+'Ah, but--' he said, 'it was D'Annunzio. The other....'
+
+'That was Ibsen--a great Norwegian,' I said, 'famous all over the
+world.'
+
+'But you know--D'Annunzio is a poet--oh, beautiful, beautiful!' There
+was no going beyond this '_bello--bellissimo_'.
+
+It was the language which did it. It was the Italian passion for
+rhetoric, for the speech which appeals to the senses and makes no demand
+on the mind. When an Englishman listens to a speech he wants at least to
+imagine that he understands thoroughly and impersonally what is meant.
+But an Italian only cares about the emotion. It is the movement, the
+physical effect of the language upon the blood which gives him supreme
+satisfaction. His mind is scarcely engaged at all. He is like a child,
+hearing and feeling without understanding. It is the sensuous
+gratification he asks for. Which is why D'Annunzio is a god in Italy. He
+can control the current of the blood with his words, and although much
+of what he says is bosh, yet his hearer is satisfied, fulfilled.
+
+Carnival ends on the 5th of February, so each Thursday there is a Serata
+d' Onore of one of the actors. The first, and the only one for which
+prices were raised--to a fourpence entrance fee instead of
+threepence--was for the leading lady. The play was _The Wife of the
+Doctor_, a modern piece, sufficiently uninteresting; the farce that
+followed made me laugh.
+
+Since it was her Evening of Honour, Adelaida was the person to see. She
+is very popular, though she is no longer young. In fact, she is the
+mother of the young pert person of _Ghosts_.
+
+Nevertheless, Adelaida, stout and blonde and soft and pathetic, is the
+real heroine of the theatre, the prima. She is very good at sobbing; and
+afterwards the men exclaim involuntarily, out of their strong emotion,
+'_bella, bella_!' The women say nothing. They sit stiffly and
+dangerously as ever. But, no doubt, they quite agree this is the true
+picture of ill-used, tear-stained woman, the bearer of many wrongs.
+Therefore they take unto themselves the homage of the men's '_bella,
+bella_!' that follows the sobs: it is due recognition of their hard
+wrongs: 'the woman pays.' Nevertheless, they despise in their souls the
+plump, soft Adelaida.
+
+Dear Adelaida, she is irreproachable. In every age, in every clime, she
+is dear, at any rate to the masculine soul, this soft, tear-blenched,
+blonde, ill-used thing. She must be ill-used and unfortunate. Dear
+Gretchen, dear Desdemona, dear Iphigenia, dear Dame aux Camélias, dear
+Lucy of Lammermoor, dear Mary Magdalene, dear, pathetic, unfortunate
+soul, in all ages and lands, how we love you. In the theatre she
+blossoms forth, she is the lily of the stage. Young and inexperienced as
+I am, I have broken my heart over her several times. I could write a
+sonnet-sequence to her, yes, the fair, pale, tear-stained thing,
+white-robed, with her hair down her back; I could call her by a hundred
+names, in a hundred languages, Melisande, Elizabeth, Juliet, Butterfly,
+Phèdre, Minnehaha, etc. Each new time I hear her voice, with its faint
+clang of tears, my heart grows big and hot, and my bones melt. I detest
+her, but it is no good. My heart begins to swell like a bud under the
+plangent rain.
+
+The last time I saw her was here, on the Garda, at Salò. She was the
+chalked, thin-armed daughter of Rigoletto. I detested her, her voice had
+a chalky squeak in it. And yet, by the end, my heart was overripe in my
+breast, ready to burst with loving affection. I was ready to walk on to
+the stage, to wipe out the odious, miscreant lover, and to offer her all
+myself, saying, 'I can see it is real _love_ you want, and you shall
+have it: _I_ will give it to you.'
+
+Of course I know the secret of the Gretchen magic; it is all in the
+'Save me, Mr Hercules!' phrase. Her shyness, her timidity, her
+trustfulness, her tears foster my own strength and grandeur. I am the
+positive half of the universe. But so I am, if it comes to that, just as
+positive as the other half.
+
+Adelaida is plump, and her voice has just that moist, plangent strength
+which gives one a real voluptuous thrill. The moment she comes on the
+stage and looks round--a bit scared--she is _she_, Electra, Isolde,
+Sieglinde, Marguèrite. She wears a dress of black voile, like the lady
+who weeps at the trial in the police-court. This is her modern uniform.
+Her antique garment is of trailing white, with a blonde pigtail and a
+flower. Realistically, it is black voile and a handkerchief.
+
+Adelaida always has a handkerchief. And still I cannot resist it. I say,
+'There's the hanky!' Nevertheless, in two minutes it has worked its way
+with me. She squeezes it in her poor, plump hand as the tears begin to
+rise; Fate, or man, is inexorable, so cruel. There is a sob, a cry; she
+presses the fist and the hanky to her eyes, one eye, then the other. She
+weeps real tears, tears shaken from the depths of her soft, vulnerable,
+victimized female self. I cannot stand it. There I sit in the padrone's
+little red box and stifle my emotion, whilst I repeat in my heart: 'What
+a shame, child, what a shame!' She is twice my age, but what is age in
+such circumstances? 'Your poor little hanky, it's sopping. There, then,
+don't cry. It'll be all right. _I'll_ see you're all right. _All_ men
+are not beasts, you know.' So I cover her protectively in my arms, and
+soon I shall be kissing her, for comfort, in the heat and prowess of my
+compassion, kissing her soft, plump cheek and neck closely, bringing my
+comfort nearer and nearer.
+
+It is a pleasant and exciting role for me to play. Robert Burns did the
+part to perfection:
+
+    O wert thou in the cauld blast
+    On yonder lea, on yonder lea.
+
+How many times does one recite that to all the Ophelias and Gretchens in
+the world:
+
+    Thy bield should be my bosom.
+
+How one admires one's bosom in that capacity! Looking down at one's
+shirt-front, one is filled with strength and pride.
+
+Why are the women so bad at playing this part in real life, this
+Ophelia-Gretchen role? Why are they so unwilling to go mad and die for
+our sakes? They do it regularly on the stage.
+
+But perhaps, after all, we write the plays. What a villain I am, what a
+black-browed, passionate, ruthless, masculine villain I am to the
+leading lady on the stage; and, on the other hand, dear heart, what a
+hero, what a fount of chivalrous generosity and faith! I am _anything_
+but a dull and law-abiding citizen. I am a Galahad, full of purity and
+spirituality, I am the Lancelot of valour and lust; I fold my hands, or
+I cock my hat in one side, as the case may be: I am _myself_. Only, I am
+not a respectable citizen, not that, in this hour of my glory and
+my escape.
+
+Dear Heaven, how Adelaida wept, her voice plashing like violin music, at
+my ruthless, masculine cruelty. Dear heart, how she sighed to rest on my
+sheltering bosom! And how I enjoyed my dual nature! How I
+admired myself!
+
+Adelaida chose _La Moglie del Dottore_ for her Evening of Honour. During
+the following week came a little storm of coloured bills: 'Great Evening
+of Honour of Enrico Persevalli.'
+
+This is the leader, the actor-manager. What should he choose for his
+great occasion, this broad, thick-set, ruddy descendant of the peasant
+proprietors of the plain? No one knew. The title of the play was
+not revealed.
+
+So we were staying at home, it was cold and wet. But the maestra came
+inflammably on that Thursday evening, and were we not going to the
+theatre, to see _Amleto_?
+
+Poor maestra, she is yellow and bitter-skinned, near fifty, but her dark
+eyes are still corrosively inflammable. She was engaged to a lieutenant
+in the cavalry, who got drowned when she was twenty-one. Since then she
+has hung on the tree unripe, growing yellow and bitter-skinned, never
+developing.
+
+'_Amleto!_' I say. '_Non lo conosco._'
+
+A certain fear comes into her eyes. She is schoolmistress, and has a
+mortal dread of being wrong.
+
+'_Si_,' she cries, wavering, appealing, '_una dramma inglese_.'
+
+'English!' I repeated.
+
+'Yes, an English drama.'
+
+'How do you write it?'
+
+Anxiously, she gets a pencil from her reticule, and, with black-gloved
+scrupulousness, writes _Amleto_.
+
+'_Hamlet_!' I exclaim wonderingly.
+
+'_Ecco, Amleto!_' cries the maestra, her eyes aflame with thankful
+justification.
+
+Then I knew that Signore Enrico Persevalli was looking to me for an
+audience. His Evening of Honour would be a bitter occasion to him if the
+English were not there to see his performance.
+
+I hurried to get ready, I ran through the rain. I knew he would take it
+badly that it rained on his Evening of Honour. He counted himself a man
+who had fate against him.
+
+'_Sono un disgraziato, io._'
+
+I was late. The First Act was nearly over. The play was not yet alive,
+neither in the bosoms of the actors nor in the audience. I closed the
+door of the box softly, and came forward. The rolling Italian eyes of
+Hamlet glanced up at me. There came a new impulse over the Court
+of Denmark.
+
+Enrico looked a sad fool in his melancholy black. The doublet sat close,
+making him stout and vulgar, the knee-breeches seemed to exaggerate the
+commonness of his thick, rather short, strutting legs. And he carried a
+long black rag, as a cloak, for histrionic purposes. And he had on his
+face a portentous grimace of melancholy and philosophic importance. His
+was the caricature of Hamlet's melancholy self-absorption.
+
+I stooped to arrange my footstool and compose my countenance. I was
+trying not to grin. For the first time, attired in philosophic
+melancholy of black silk, Enrico looked a boor and a fool. His
+close-cropped, rather animal head was common above the effeminate
+doublet, his sturdy, ordinary figure looked absurd in a
+melancholic droop.
+
+All the actors alike were out of their element. Their Majesties of
+Denmark were touching. The Queen, burly little peasant woman, was ill at
+ease in her pink satin. Enrico had had no mercy. He knew she loved to be
+the scolding servant or housekeeper, with her head tied up in a
+handkerchief, shrill and vulgar. Yet here she was pranked out in an
+expanse of satin, la Regina. Regina, indeed!
+
+She obediently did her best to be important. Indeed, she rather fancied
+herself; she looked sideways at the audience, self-consciously, quite
+ready to be accepted as an imposing and noble person, if they would
+esteem her such. Her voice sounded hoarse and common, but whether it was
+the pink satin in contrast, or a cold, I do not know. She was almost
+childishly afraid to move. Before she began a speech she looked down and
+kicked her skirt viciously, so that she was sure it was under control.
+Then she let go. She was a burly, downright little body of sixty, one
+rather expected her to box Hamlet on the ears.
+
+Only she liked being a queen when she sat on the throne. There she
+perched with great satisfaction, her train splendidly displayed down the
+steps. She was as proud as a child, and she looked like Queen Victoria
+of the Jubilee period.
+
+The King, her noble consort, also had new honours thrust upon him, as
+well as new garments. His body was real enough but it had nothing at all
+to do with his clothes. They established a separate identity by
+themselves. But wherever he went, they went with him, to the confusion
+of everybody.
+
+He was a thin, rather frail-looking peasant, pathetic, and very gentle.
+There was something pure and fine about him, he was so exceedingly
+gentle and by natural breeding courteous. But he did not feel kingly, he
+acted the part with beautiful, simple resignation.
+
+Enrico Persevalli had overshot himself in every direction, but worst of
+all in his own. He had become a hulking fellow, crawling about with his
+head ducked between his shoulders, pecking and poking, creeping about
+after other people, sniffing at them, setting traps for them, absorbed
+by his own self-important self-consciousness. His legs, in their black
+knee-breeches, had a crawling, slinking look; he always carried the
+black rag of a cloak, something for him to twist about as he twisted in
+his own soul, overwhelmed by a sort of inverted perversity.
+
+I had always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean thing he
+seems, on the stage, whether he is Forbes Robertson or anybody else. His
+nasty poking and sniffing at his mother, his setting traps for the King,
+his conceited perversion with Ophelia make him always intolerable. The
+character is repulsive in its conception, based on self-dislike and a
+spirit of disintegration.
+
+There is, I think, this strain of cold dislike, or self-dislike, through
+much of the Renaissance art, and through all the later Shakespeare. In
+Shakespeare it is a kind of corruption in the flesh and a conscious
+revolt from this. A sense of corruption in the flesh makes Hamlet
+frenzied, for he will never admit that it is his own flesh. Leonardo da
+Vinci is the same, but Leonardo loves the corruption maliciously.
+Michelangelo rejects any feeling of corruption, he stands by the flesh,
+the flesh only. It is the corresponding reaction, but in the opposite
+direction. But that is all four hundred years ago. Enrico Persevalli has
+just reached the position. He _is_ Hamlet, and evidently he has great
+satisfaction in the part. He is the modern Italian, suspicious,
+isolated, self-nauseated, labouring in a sense of physical corruption.
+But he will not admit it is in himself. He creeps about in self-conceit,
+transforming his own self-loathing. With what satisfaction did he reveal
+corruption--corruption in his neighbours he gloated in--letting his
+mother know he had discovered her incest, her uncleanness, gloated in
+torturing the incestuous King. Of all the unclean ones, Hamlet was the
+uncleanest. But he accused only the others.
+
+Except in the 'great' speeches, and there Enrico was betrayed, Hamlet
+suffered the extremity of physical self-loathing, loathing of his own
+flesh. The play is the statement of the most significant philosophic
+position of the Renaissance. Hamlet is far more even than Orestes, his
+prototype, a mental creature, anti-physical, anti-sensual. The whole
+drama is the tragedy of the convulsed reaction of the mind from the
+flesh, of the spirit from the self, the reaction from the great
+aristocratic to the great democratic principle.
+
+An ordinary instinctive man, in Hamlet's position, would either have set
+about murdering his uncle, by reflex action, or else would have gone
+right away. There would have been no need for Hamlet to murder his
+mother. It would have been sufficient blood-vengeance if he had killed
+his uncle. But that is the statement according to the aristocratic
+principle.
+
+Orestes was in the same position, but the same position two thousand
+years earlier, with two thousand years of experience wanting. So that
+the question was not so intricate in him as in Hamlet, he was not nearly
+so conscious. The whole Greek life was based on the idea of the
+supremacy of the self, and the self was always male. Orestes was his
+father's child, he would be the same whatever mother he had. The mother
+was but the vehicle, the soil in which the paternal seed was planted.
+When Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon, it was as if a common individual
+murdered God, to the Greek.
+
+But Agamemnon, King and Lord, was not infallible. He was fallible. He
+had sacrificed Iphigenia for the sake of glory in war, for the
+fulfilment of the superb idea of self, but on the other hand he had made
+cruel dissension for the sake of the concubines captured in war. The
+paternal flesh was fallible, ungodlike. It lusted after meaner pursuits
+than glory, war, and slaying, it was not faithful to the highest idea of
+the self. Orestes was driven mad by the furies of his mother, because of
+the justice that they represented. Nevertheless he was in the end
+exculpated. The third play of the trilogy is almost foolish, with its
+prating gods. But it means that, according to the Greek conviction,
+Orestes was right and Clytemnestra entirely wrong. But for all that, the
+infallible King, the infallible male Self, is dead in Orestes, killed by
+the furies of Clytemnestra. He gains his peace of mind after the
+revulsion from his own physical fallibility, but he will never be an
+unquestioned lord, as Agamemnon was. Orestes is left at peace,
+neutralized. He is the beginning of non-aristocratic Christianity.
+
+Hamlet's father, the King, is, like Agamemnon, a warrior-king. But,
+unlike Agamemnon, he is blameless with regard to Gertrude. Yet Gertrude,
+like Clytemnestra, is the potential murderer of her husband, as Lady
+Macbeth is murderess, as the daughters of Lear. The women murder the
+supreme male, the ideal Self, the King and Father.
+
+This is the tragic position Shakespeare must dwell upon. The woman
+rejects, repudiates the ideal Self which the male represents to her. The
+supreme representative, King and Father, is murdered by the Wife and the
+Daughters.
+
+What is the reason? Hamlet goes mad in a revulsion of rage and nausea.
+Yet the women-murderers only represent some ultimate judgement in his
+own soul. At the bottom of his own soul Hamlet has decided that the Self
+in its supremacy, Father and King, must die. It is a suicidal decision
+for his involuntary soul to have arrived at. Yet it is inevitable. The
+great religious, philosophic tide, which has been swelling all through
+the Middle Ages, had brought him there.
+
+The question, to be or not to be, which Hamlet puts himself, does not
+mean, to live or not to live. It is not the simple human being who puts
+himself the question, it is the supreme I, King and Father. To be or not
+to be King, Father, in the Self supreme? And the decision is, not to be.
+
+It is the inevitable philosophic conclusion of all the Renaissance. The
+deepest impulse in man, the religious impulse, is the desire to be
+immortal, or infinite, consummated. And this impulse is satisfied in
+fulfilment of an idea, a steady progression. In this progression man is
+satisfied, he seems to have reached his goal, this infinity, this
+immortality, this eternal being, with every step nearer which he takes.
+
+And so, according to his idea of fulfilment, man establishes the whole
+order of life. If my fulfilment is the fulfilment and establishment of
+the unknown divine Self which I am, then I shall proceed in the
+realizing of the greatest idea of the self, the highest conception of
+the I, my order of life will be kingly, imperial, aristocratic. The body
+politic also will culminate in this divinity of the flesh, this body
+imbued with glory, invested with divine power and might, the King, the
+Emperor. In the body politic also I shall desire a king, an emperor, a
+tyrant, glorious, mighty, in whom I see myself consummated and
+fulfilled. This is inevitable!
+
+But during the Middle Ages, struggling within this pagan, original
+transport, the transport of the Ego, was a small dissatisfaction, a
+small contrary desire. Amid the pomp of kings and popes was the Child
+Jesus and the Madonna. Jesus the King gradually dwindled down. There was
+Jesus the Child, helpless, at the mercy of all the world. And there was
+Jesus crucified.
+
+The old transport, the old fulfilment of the Ego, the Davidian ecstasy,
+the assuming of all power and glory unto the self, the becoming infinite
+through the absorption of all into the Ego, this gradually became
+unsatisfactory. This was not the infinite, this was not immortality.
+This was eternal death, this was damnation.
+
+The monk rose up with his opposite ecstasy, the Christian ecstasy. There
+was a death to die: the flesh, the self, must die, so that the spirit
+should rise again immortal, eternal, infinite. I am dead unto myself,
+but I live in the Infinite. The finite Me is no more, only the Infinite,
+the Eternal, is.
+
+At the Renaissance this great half-truth overcame the other great
+half-truth. The Christian Infinite, reached by a process of abnegation,
+a process of being absorbed, dissolved, diffused into the great
+Not-Self, supplanted the old pagan Infinite, wherein the self like a
+root threw out branches and radicles which embraced the whole universe,
+became the Whole.
+
+There is only one Infinite, the world now cried, there is the great
+Christian Infinite of renunciation and consummation in the not-self. The
+other, that old pride, is damnation. The sin of sins is Pride, it is the
+way to total damnation. Whereas the pagans based their life on pride.
+
+And according to this new Infinite, reached through renunciation and
+dissolving into the Others, the Neighbour, man must build up his actual
+form of life. With Savonarola and Martin Luther the living Church
+actually transformed itself, for the Roman Church was still pagan. Henry
+VIII simply said: 'There is no Church, there is only the State.' But
+with Shakespeare the transformation had reached the State also. The
+King, the Father, the representative of the Consummate Self, the maximum
+of all life, the symbol of the consummate being, the becoming Supreme,
+Godlike, Infinite, he must perish and pass away. This Infinite was not
+infinite, this consummation was not consummated, all this was fallible,
+false. It was rotten, corrupt. It must go. But Shakespeare was also the
+thing itself. Hence his horror, his frenzy, his self-loathing.
+
+The King, the Emperor is killed in the soul of man, the old order of
+life is over, the old tree is dead at the root. So said Shakespeare. It
+was finally enacted in Cromwell. Charles I took up the old position of
+kingship by divine right. Like Hamlet's father, he was blameless
+otherwise. But as representative of the old form of life, which mankind
+now hated with frenzy, he must be cut down, removed. It was a
+symbolic act.
+
+The world, our world of Europe, had now really turned, swung round to a
+new goal, a new idea, the Infinite reached through the omission of Self.
+God is all that which is Not-Me. I am consummate when my Self, the
+resistant solid, is reduced and diffused into all that which is Not-Me:
+my neighbour, my enemy, the great Otherness. Then I am perfect.
+
+And from this belief the world began gradually to form a new State, a
+new body politic, in which the Self should be removed. There should be
+no king, no lords, no aristocrats. The world continued in its religious
+belief, beyond the French Revolution, beyond the great movement of
+Shelley and Godwin. There should be no Self. That which was supreme was
+that which was Not-Me, the other. The governing factor in the State was
+the idea of the good of others; that is, the Common Good. And the
+_vital_ governing idea in the State has been this idea since Cromwell.
+
+Before Cromwell the idea was 'For the King', because every man saw
+himself consummated in the King. After Cromwell the idea was 'For the
+good of my neighbour', or 'For the good of the people', or 'For the good
+of the whole'. This has been our ruling idea, by which we have more or
+less lived.
+
+Now this has failed. Now we say that the Christian Infinite is not
+infinite. We are tempted, like Nietzsche, to return back to the old
+pagan Infinite, to say that is supreme. Or we are inclined, like the
+English and the Pragmatist, to say, 'There is no Infinite, there is no
+Absolute. The only Absolute is expediency, the only reality is sensation
+and momentariness.' But we may say this, even act on it, _à la Sanine_.
+But we never believe it.
+
+What is really Absolute is the mystic Reason which connects both
+Infinites, the Holy Ghost that relates both natures of God. If we now
+wish to make a living State, we must build it up to the idea of the Holy
+Spirit, the supreme Relationship. We must say, the pagan Infinite is
+infinite, the Christian Infinite is infinite: these are our two
+Consummations, in both of these we are consummated. But that which
+relates them alone is absolute.
+
+This Absolute of the Holy Ghost we may call Truth or Justice or Right.
+These are partial names, indefinite and unsatisfactory unless there be
+kept the knowledge of the two Infinites, pagan and Christian, which they
+go between. When both are there, they are like a superb bridge, on which
+one can stand and know the whole world, my world, the two halves of
+the universe.
+
+'_Essere, o non essere, è qui il punto._'
+
+To be or not to be was the question for Hamlet to settle. It is no
+longer our question, at least, not in the same sense. When it is a
+question of death, the fashionable young suicide declares that his
+self-destruction is the final proof of his own incontrovertible being.
+And as for not-being in our public life, we have achieved it as much as
+ever we want to, as much as is necessary. Whilst in private life there
+is a swing back to paltry selfishness as a creed. And in the war there
+is the position of neutralization and nothingness. It is a question of
+knowing how _to be_, and how _not to be_, for we must fulfil both.
+Enrico Persevalli was detestable with his '_Essere, o non essere_'. He
+whispered it in a hoarse whisper as if it were some melodramatic murder
+he was about to commit. As a matter of fact, he knows quite well, and
+has known all his life, that his pagan Infinite, his transport of the
+flesh and the supremacy of the male in fatherhood, is all
+unsatisfactory. All his life he has really cringed before the northern
+Infinite of the Not-Self, although he has continued in the Italian habit
+of Self. But it is mere habit, sham.
+
+How can he know anything about being and not-being when he is only a
+maudlin compromise between them, and all he wants is to be a maudlin
+compromise? He is neither one nor the other. He has neither being nor
+riot-being. He is as equivocal as the monks. He was detestable, mouthing
+Hamlet's sincere words. He has still to let go, to know what not-being
+is, before he can _be_. Till he has gone through the Christian negation
+of himself, and has known the Christian consummation, he is a mere
+amorphous heap.
+
+For the soliloquies of Hamlet are as deep as the soul of man can go, in
+one direction, and as sincere as the Holy Spirit itself in their
+essence. But thank heaven, the bog into which Hamlet struggled is almost
+surpassed.
+
+It is a strange thing, if a man covers his face, and speaks with his
+eyes blinded, how significant and poignant he becomes. The ghost of this
+Hamlet was very simple. He was wrapped down to the knees in a great
+white cloth, and over his face was an open-work woollen shawl. But the
+naïve blind helplessness and verity of his voice was strangely
+convincing. He seemed the most real thing in the play. From the knees
+downward he was Laertes, because he had on Laertes' white trousers and
+patent leather slippers. Yet he was strangely real, a voice out of
+the dark.
+
+The Ghost is really one of the play's failures, it is so trivial and
+unspiritual and vulgar. And it was spoilt for me from the first. When I
+was a child I went to the twopenny travelling theatre to see _Hamlet_.
+The Ghost had on a helmet and a breastplate. I sat in pale transport.
+
+''Amblet, 'Amblet, I _am_ thy father's ghost.'
+
+Then came a voice from the dark, silent audience, like a cynical knife
+to my fond soul:
+
+'Why tha arena, I can tell thy voice.'
+
+The peasants loved Ophelia: she was in white with her hair down her
+back. Poor thing, she was pathetic, demented. And no wonder, after
+Hamlet's 'O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!' What then of
+her young breasts and her womb? Hamlet with her was a very disagreeable
+sight. The peasants loved her. There was a hoarse roar, half of
+indignation, half of roused passion, at the end of her scene.
+
+The graveyard scene, too, was a great success, but I could not bear
+Hamlet. And the grave-digger in Italian was a mere buffoon. The whole
+scene was farcical to me because of the Italian, '_Questo cranio,
+Signore_--'And Enrico, dainty fellow, took the skull in a corner of his
+black cloak. As an Italian, he would not willingly touch it. It was
+unclean. But he looked a fool, hulking himself in his lugubriousness. He
+was as self-important as D'Annunzio.
+
+The close fell flat. The peasants had applauded the whole graveyard
+scene wildly. But at the end of all they got up and crowded to the
+doors, as if to hurry away: this in spite of Enrico's final feat: he
+fell backwards, smack down three steps of the throne platform, on to the
+stage. But planks and braced muscle will bounce, and Signer Amleto
+bounced quite high again.
+
+It was the end of _Amleto_, and I was glad. But I loved the theatre, I
+loved to look down on the peasants, who were so absorbed. At the end of
+the scenes the men pushed back their black hats, and rubbed their hair
+across their brows with a pleased, excited movement. And the women
+stirred in their seats.
+
+Just one man was with his wife and child, and he was of the same race as
+my old woman at San Tommaso. He was fair, thin, and clear, abstract, of
+the mountains. He seemed to have gathered his wife and child together
+into another, finer atmosphere, like the air of the mountains, and to
+guard them in it. This is the real Joseph, father of the child. He has a
+fierce, abstract look, wild and untamed as a hawk, but like a hawk at
+its own nest, fierce with love. He goes out and buys a tiny bottle of
+lemonade for a penny, and the mother and child sip it in tiny sips,
+whilst he bends over, like a hawk arching its wings.
+
+It is the fierce spirit of the Ego come out of the primal infinite, but
+detached, isolated, an aristocrat. He is not an Italian, dark-blooded.
+He is fair, keen as steel, with the blood of the mountaineer in him. He
+is like my old spinning woman. It is curious how, with his wife and
+child, he makes a little separate world down there in the theatre, like
+a hawk's nest, high and arid under the gleaming sky.
+
+The Bersaglieri sit close together in groups, so that there is a
+strange, corporal connexion between them. They have close-cropped, dark,
+slightly bestial heads, and thick shoulders, and thick brown hands on
+each other's shoulders. When an act is over they pick up their cherished
+hats and fling on their cloaks and go into the hall. They are rather
+rich, the Bersaglieri.
+
+They are like young, half-wild oxen, such strong, sturdy, dark lads,
+thickly built and with strange hard heads, like young male caryatides.
+They keep close together, as if there were some physical instinct
+connecting them. And they are quite womanless. There is a curious
+inter-absorption among themselves, a sort of physical trance that holds
+them all, and puts their minds to sleep. There is a strange, hypnotic
+unanimity among them as they put on their plumed hats and go out
+together, always very close, as if their bodies must touch. Then they
+feel safe and content in this heavy, physical trance. They are in love
+with one another, the young men love the young men. They shrink from the
+world beyond, from the outsiders, from all who are not Bersaglieri of
+their barracks.
+
+One man is a sort of leader. He is very straight and solid, solid like a
+wall, with a dark, unblemished will. His cock-feathers slither in a
+profuse, heavy stream from his black oil-cloth hat, almost to his
+shoulder. He swings round. His feathers slip into a cascade. Then he
+goes out to the hall, his feather tossing and falling richly. He must be
+well off. The Bersaglieri buy their own black cock's-plumes, and some
+pay twenty or thirty francs for the bunch, so the maestra said. The poor
+ones have only poor, scraggy plumes.
+
+There is something very primitive about these men. They remind me really
+of Agamemnon's soldiers clustered oil the seashore, men, all men, a
+living, vigorous, physical host of men. But there is a pressure on these
+Italian soldiers, as if they were men caryatides, with a great weight on
+their heads, making their brain hard, asleep, stunned. They all look is
+if their real brain were stunned, as if there were another centre of
+physical consciousness from which they lived.
+
+Separate from them all is Pietro, the young man who lounges on the wharf
+to carry things from the steamer. He starts up from sleep like a
+wild-cat as somebody claps him on the shoulder. It is the start of a man
+who has many enemies. He is almost an outlaw. Will he ever find himself
+in prison? He is the _gamin_ of the village, well detested.
+
+He is twenty-four years old, thin, dark, handsome, with a cat-like
+lightness and grace, and a certain repulsive, _gamin_ evil in his face.
+Where everybody is so clean and tidy, he is almost ragged. His week's
+beard shows very black in his slightly hollow cheeks. He hates the man
+who has waked him by clapping him on the shoulder.
+
+Pietro is already married, yet he behaves as if he were not. He has been
+carrying on with a loose woman, the wife of the citron-coloured barber,
+the Siciliano. Then he seats himself on the women's side of the theatre,
+behind a young person from Bogliaco, who also has no reputation, and
+makes her talk to him. He leans forward, resting his arms on the seat
+before him, stretching his slender, cat-like, flexible loins. The
+padrona of the hotel hates him--'_ein frecher Kerl_,' she says with
+contempt, and she looks away. Her eyes hate to see him.
+
+In the village there is the clerical party, which is the majority;
+there is the anti-clerical party, and there are the ne'er-do-wells. The
+clerical people are dark and pious and cold; there is a curious
+stone-cold, ponderous darkness over them, moral and gloomy. Then the
+anti-clerical party, with the Syndaco at the head, is bourgeois and
+respectable as far as the middle-aged people are concerned, banal,
+respectable, shut off as by a wall from the clerical people. The young
+anti-clericals are the young bloods of the place, the men who gather
+every night in the more expensive and less-respectable cafe. These young
+men are all free-thinkers, great dancers, singers, players of the
+guitar. They are immoral and slightly cynical. Their leader is the young
+shopkeeper, who has lived in Vienna, who is a bit of a bounder, with a
+veneer of sneering irony on an original good nature. He is well-to-do,
+and gives dances to which only the looser women go, with these reckless
+young men. He also gets up parties of pleasure, and is chiefly
+responsible for the coming of the players to the theatre this carnival.
+These young men are disliked, but they belong to the important class,
+they are well-to-do, and they have the life of the village in their
+hands. The clerical peasants are priest-ridden and good, because they
+are poor and afraid and superstitious. There is, lastly, a sprinkling of
+loose women, one who keeps the inn where the soldiers drink. These women
+are a definite set. They know what they are, they pretend nothing else.
+They are not prostitutes, but just loose women. They keep to their own
+clique, among men and women, never wanting to compromise anybody else.
+
+And beyond all these there are the Franciscan friars in their brown
+robes, so shy, so silent, so obliterated, as they stand back in the
+shop, waiting to buy the bread for the monastery, waiting obscure and
+neutral, till no one shall be in the shop wanting to be served. The
+village women speak to them in a curious neutral, official, slightly
+contemptuous voice. They answer neutral and humble, though distinctly.
+
+At the theatre, now the play is over, the peasants in their black hats
+and cloaks crowd the hall. Only Pietro, the wharf-lounger, has no cloak,
+and a bit of a cap on the side of his head instead of a black felt hat.
+His clothes are thin and loose on his thin, vigorous, cat-like body, and
+he is cold, but he takes no notice. His hands are always in his pockets,
+his shoulders slightly raised.
+
+The few women slip away home. In the little theatre bar the well-to-do
+young atheists are having another drink. Not that they spend much. A
+tumbler of wine or a glass of vermouth costs a penny. And the wine is
+horrible new stuff. Yet the little baker, Agostino, sits on a bench with
+his pale baby on his knee, putting the wine to its lips. And the baby
+drinks, like a blind fledgeling.
+
+Upstairs, the quality has paid its visits and shaken hands: the Syndaco
+and the well-to-do half-Austrian owners of the woodyard, the Bertolini,
+have ostentatiously shown their mutual friendship; our padrone, the
+Signer Pietro Di Paoli, has visited his relatives the Graziani in the
+box next the stage and has spent two intervals with us in our box;
+meanwhile, his two peasants standing down below, pathetic, thin
+contadini of the old school, like worn stones, have looked up at us as
+if we are the angels in heaven, with a reverential, devotional eye, they
+themselves far away below, standing in the bay at the back, below all.
+
+The chemist and the grocer and the schoolmistress pay calls. They have
+all sat self-consciously posed in the front of their boxes, like framed
+photographs of themselves. The second grocer and the baker visit each
+other. The barber looks in on the carpenter, then drops downstairs among
+the crowd. Class distinctions are cut very fine. As we pass with the
+padrona of the hotel, who is a Bavarian, we stop to speak to our own
+padroni, the Di Paoli. They have a warm handshake and effusive polite
+conversation for us; for Maria Samuelli, a distant bow. We realize
+our mistake.
+
+The barber--not the Siciliano, but flashy little Luigi with the big
+tie-ring and the curls--knows all about the theatre. He says that Enrico
+Persevalli has for his mistress Carina, the servant in _Ghosts_: that
+the thin, gentle, old-looking king in _Hamlet_ is the husband of
+Adelaida, and Carina is their daughter: that the old, sharp, fat little
+body of a queen is Adelaida's mother: that they all like Enrico
+Persevalli, because he is a very clever man: but that the 'Comic', Il
+Brillante, Francesco, is unsatisfied.
+
+In three performances in Epiphany week, the company took two hundred and
+sixty-five francs, which was phenomenal. The manager, Enrico Persevalli,
+and Adelaida pay twenty-four francs for every performance, or every
+evening on which a performance is given, as rent for the theatre,
+including light. The company is completely satisfied with its reception
+on the Lago di Garda.
+
+So it is all over. The Bersaglieri go running all the way home, because
+it is already past half past ten. The night is very dark. About four
+miles up the lake the searchlights of the Austrian border are swinging,
+looking for smugglers. Otherwise the darkness is complete.
+
+
+
+_4_
+
+SAN GAUDENZIO
+
+
+In the autumn the little rosy cyclamens blossom in the shade of this
+west side of the lake. They are very cold and fragrant, and their scent
+seems to belong to Greece, to the Bacchae. They are real flowers of the
+past. They seem to be blossoming in the landscape of Phaedra and Helen.
+They bend down, they brood like little chill fires. They are little
+living myths that I cannot understand.
+
+After the cyclamens the Christmas roses are in bud. It is at this season
+that the cacchi are ripe on the trees in the garden, whole naked trees
+full of lustrous, orange-yellow, paradisal fruit, gleaming against the
+wintry blue sky. The monthly roses still blossom frail and pink, there
+are still crimson and yellow roses. But the vines are bare and the
+lemon-houses shut. And then, mid-winter, the lowest buds of the
+Christmas roses appear under the hedges and rocks and by the streams.
+They are very lovely, these first large, cold, pure buds, like violets,
+like magnolias, but cold, lit up with the light from the snow.
+
+The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine
+is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown,
+and water sounds hoarse in the ravines. It is so still and transcendent,
+the cypress trees poise like flames of forgotten darkness, that should
+have been blown out at the end of the summer. For as we have candles to
+light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the
+darkness aflame in the full sunshine.
+
+Meanwhile, the Christmas roses become many. They rise from their budded,
+intact humbleness near the ground, they rise up, they throw up their
+crystal, they become handsome, they are heaps of confident, mysterious
+whiteness in the shadow of a rocky stream. It is almost uncanny to see
+them. They are the flowers of darkness, white and wonderful
+beyond belief.
+
+Then their radiance becomes soiled and brown, they thaw, break, and
+scatter and vanish away. Already the primroses are coming out, and the
+almond is in bud. The winter is passing away. On the mountains the
+fierce snow gleams apricot gold as evening approaches, golden, apricot,
+but so bright that it is almost frightening. What can be so fiercely
+gleaming when all is shadowy? It is something inhuman and unmitigated
+between heaven and earth.
+
+The heavens are strange and proud all the winter, their progress goes on
+without reference to the dim earth. The dawns come white and
+translucent, the lake is a moonstone in the dark hills, then across the
+lake there stretches a vein of fire, then a whole, orange, flashing
+track over the whiteness. There is the exquisite silent passage of the
+day, and then at evening the afterglow, a huge incandescence of rose,
+hanging above and gleaming, as if it were the presence of a host of
+angels in rapture. It gleams like a rapturous chorus, then passes away,
+and the stars appear, large and flashing.
+
+Meanwhile, the primroses are dawning on the ground, their light is
+growing stronger, spreading over the banks and under the bushes. Between
+the olive roots the violets are out, large, white, grave violets, and
+less serious blue ones. And looking down the bill, among the grey smoke
+of olive leaves, pink puffs of smoke are rising up. It is the almond and
+the apricot trees, it is the Spring.
+
+Soon the primroses are strong on the ground. There is a bank of small,
+frail crocuses shooting the lavender into this spring. And then the
+tussocks and tussocks of primroses are fully out, there is full morning
+everywhere on the banks and roadsides and stream-sides, and around the
+olive roots, a morning of primroses underfoot, with an invisible
+threading of many violets, and then the lovely blue clusters of
+hepatica, really like pieces of blue sky showing through a clarity of
+primrose. The few birds are piping thinly and shyly, the streams sing
+again, there is a strange flowering shrub full of incense, overturned
+flowers of crimson and gold, like Bohemian glass. Between the olive
+roots new grass is coming, day is leaping all clear and coloured from
+the earth, it is full Spring, full first rapture.
+
+Does it pass away, or does it only lose its pristine quality? It deepens
+and intensifies, like experience. The days seem to be darker and richer,
+there is a sense of power in the strong air. On the banks by the lake
+the orchids are out, many, many pale bee-orchids standing clear from the
+short grass over the lake. And in the hollows are the grape hyacinths,
+purple as noon, with the heavy, sensual fragrance of noon. They are
+many-breasted, and full of milk, and ripe, and sun-darkened, like
+many-breasted Diana.
+
+We could not bear to live down in the village any more, now that the
+days opened large and spacious and the evenings drew out in sunshine. We
+could not bear the indoors, when above us the mountains shone in clear
+air. It was time to go up, to climb with the sun.
+
+So after Easter we went to San Gaudenzio. It was three miles away, up
+the winding mule-track that climbed higher and higher along the lake.
+Leaving the last house of the village, the path wound on the steep,
+cliff-like side of the lake, curving into the hollow where the landslip
+had tumbled the rocks in chaos, then out again on to the bluff of a
+headland that hung over the lake.
+
+Thus we came to the tall barred gate of San Gaudenzio, on which was the
+usual little fire-insurance tablet, and then the advertisements for
+beer, 'Birra, Verona', which is becoming a more and more popular drink.
+
+Through the gate, inside the high wall, is the little Garden of Eden, a
+property of three or four acres fairly level upon a headland over the
+lake. The high wall girds it on the land side, and makes it perfectly
+secluded. On the lake-side it is bounded by the sudden drops of the
+land, in sharp banks and terraces, overgrown with ilex and with laurel
+bushes, down to the brink of the cliff, so that the thicket of the first
+declivities seems to safeguard the property.
+
+The pink farm-house stands almost in the centre of the little territory,
+among the olive trees. It is a solid, six-roomed place, about fifty
+years old, having been rebuilt by Paolo's uncle. Here we came to live
+for a time with the Fiori, Maria and Paolo, and their three children,
+Giovanni and Marco and Felicina.
+
+Paolo had inherited, or partly inherited, San Gaudenzio, which had been
+in his family for generations. He was a peasant of fifty-three, very
+grey and wrinkled and worn-looking, but at the same time robust, with
+full strong limbs and a powerful chest. His face was old, but his body
+was solid and powerful. His eyes were blue like upper ice, beautiful. He
+had been a fair-haired man, now he was almost white.
+
+He, was strangely like the pictures of peasants in the northern Italian
+pictures, with the same curious nobility, the same aristocratic, eternal
+look of motionlessness, something statuesque. His head was hard and
+fine, the bone finely constructed, though the skin of his face was loose
+and furrowed with work. His temples had that fine, hard clarity which is
+seen in Mantegna, an almost jewel-like quality.
+
+We all loved Paolo, he was so finished in his being, detached, with an
+almost classic simplicity and gentleness, an eternal kind of sureness.
+There was also something concluded and unalterable about him, something
+inaccessible.
+
+Maria Fiori was different. She was from the plain, like Enrico
+Persevalli and the Bersaglier from the Venetian district. She reminded
+me again of oxen, broad-boned and massive in physique, dark-skinned,
+slow in her soul. But, like the oxen of the plain, she knew her work,
+she knew the other people engaged in the work. Her intelligence was
+attentive and purposive. She had been a housekeeper, a servant, in
+Venice and Verona, before her marriage. She had got the hang of this
+world of commerce and activity, she wanted to master it. But she was
+weighted down by her heavy animal blood.
+
+Paolo and she were the opposite sides of the universe, the light and the
+dark. Yet they lived together now without friction, detached, each
+subordinated in their common relationship. With regard to Maria, Paolo
+omitted himself; Maria omitted herself with regard to Paolo. Their souls
+were silent and detached, completely apart, and silent, quite silent.
+They shared the physical relationship of marriage as if it were
+something beyond them, a third thing.
+
+They had suffered very much in the earlier stages of their connexion.
+Now the storm had gone by, leaving them, as it were, spent. They were
+both by nature passionate, vehement. But the lines of their passion were
+opposite. Hers was the primitive, crude, violent flux of the blood,
+emotional and undiscriminating, but wanting to mix and mingle. His was
+the hard, clear, invulnerable passion of the bones, finely tempered and
+unchangeable. She was the flint and he the steel. But in continual
+striking together they only destroyed each other. The fire was a third
+thing, belonging to neither of them.
+
+She was still heavy and full of desire. She was much younger than he.
+
+'How long did you know your Signora before you were married?' she asked
+me.
+
+'Six weeks,' I said.
+
+'_Il Paolo e me, venti giorni, tre settimane_,' she cried vehemently.
+Three weeks they had known each other when they married. She still
+triumphed in the fact. So did Paolo. But it was past, strangely and
+rather terribly past.
+
+What did they want when they came together, Paolo and she? He was a man
+over thirty, she was a woman of twenty-three. They were both violent in
+desire and of strong will. They came together at once, like two
+wrestlers almost matched in strength. Their meetings must have been
+splendid. Giovanni, the eldest child, was a tall lad of sixteen, with
+soft brown hair and grey eyes, and a clarity of brow, and the same calm
+simplicity of bearing which made Paolo so complete; but the son had at
+the same time a certain brownness of skin, a heaviness of blood, which
+he had from his mother. Paolo was so clear and translucent.
+
+In Giovanni the fusion of the parents was perfect, he was a perfect
+spark from the flint and steel. There was in Paolo a subtle intelligence
+in feeling, a delicate appreciation of the other person. But the mind
+was unintelligent, he could not grasp a new order. Maria Fiori was much
+sharper and more adaptable to the ways of the world. Paolo had an almost
+glass-like quality, fine and clear and perfectly tempered; but he was
+also finished and brittle. Maria was much coarser, more vulgar, but also
+she was more human, more fertile, with crude potentiality. His passion
+was too fixed in its motion, hers too loose and overwhelming.
+
+But Giovanni was beautiful, gentle, and courtly like Paolo, but warm,
+like Maria, ready to flush like a girl with anger or confusion. He stood
+straight and tall, and seemed to look into the far distance with his
+clear grey eyes. Yet also he could look at one and touch one with his
+look, he could meet one. Paolo's blue eyes were like the eyes of the old
+spinning-woman, clear and blue and belonging to the mountains, their
+vision seemed to end in space, abstract. They reminded me of the eyes of
+the eagle, which looks into the sun, and which teaches its young to do
+the same, although they are unwilling.
+
+Marco, the second son, was thirteen years old. He was his mother's
+favourite, Giovanni loved his father best. But Marco was his mother's
+son, with the same brown-gold and red complexion, like a pomegranate,
+and coarse black hair, and brown eyes like pebble, like agate, like an
+animal's eyes. He had the same broad, bovine figure, though he was only
+a boy. But there was some discrepancy in him. He was not unified, he had
+no identity.
+
+He was strong and full of animal life, but always aimless, as though his
+wits scarcely controlled him. But he loved his mother with a
+fundamental, generous, undistinguishing love. Only he always forgot what
+he was going to do. He was much more sensitive than Maria, more shy and
+reluctant. But his shyness, his sensitiveness only made him more aimless
+and awkward, a tiresome clown, slack and uncontrolled, witless. All day
+long his mother shouted and shrilled and scolded at him, or hit him
+angrily. He did not mind, he came up like a cork, warm and roguish and
+curiously appealing. She loved him with a fierce protective love,
+grounded on pain. There was such a split, a contrariety in his soul, one
+part reacting against the other, which landed him always into trouble.
+
+It was when Marco was a baby that Paolo had gone to America. They were
+poor on San Gaudenzio. There were the few olive trees, the grapes, and
+the fruit; there was the one cow. But these scarcely made a living.
+Neither was Maria content with the real peasants' lot any more, polenta
+at midday and vegetable soup in the evening, and no way out, nothing to
+look forward to, no future, only this eternal present. She had been in
+service, and had eaten bread and drunk coffee, and known the flux and
+variable chance of life. She had departed from the old static
+conception. She knew what one might be, given a certain chance. The
+fixture was the thing she militated against. So Paolo went to America,
+to California, into the gold mines.
+
+Maria wanted the future, the endless possibility of life on earth. She
+wanted her sons to be freer, to achieve a new plane of living. The
+peasant's life was a slave's life, she said, railing against the poverty
+and the drudgery. And it was quite true, Paolo and Giovanni worked
+twelve and fourteen hours a day at heavy laborious work that would have
+broken an Englishman. And there was nothing at the end of it. Yet Paolo
+was even happy so. This was the truth to him.
+
+It was the mother who wanted things different. It was she who railed and
+railed against the miserable life of the peasants. When we were going to
+throw to the fowls a dry broken penny roll of white bread, Maria said,
+with anger and shame and resentment in her voice: 'Give it to Marco, he
+will eat it. It isn't too dry for him.'
+
+White bread was a treat for them even now, when everybody eats bread.
+And Maria Fiori hated it, that bread should be a treat to her children,
+when it was the meanest food of all the rest of the world. She was in
+opposition to this order. She did not want her sons to be peasants,
+fixed and static as posts driven in the earth. She wanted them to be in
+the great flux of life in the midst of all possibilities. So she at
+length sent Paolo to America to the gold-mines. Meanwhile, she covered
+the wall of her parlour with picture postcards, to bring the outer world
+of cities and industries into her house.
+
+Paolo was entirely remote from Maria's world. He had not yet even
+grasped the fact of money, not thoroughly. He reckoned in land and olive
+trees. So he had the old fatalistic attitude to his circumstances, even
+to his food. The earth was the Lord's and the fulness thereof; also the
+leanness thereof. Paolo could only do his part and leave the rest. If he
+ate in plenty, having oil and wine and sausage in the house, and plenty
+of maize-meal, he was glad with the Lord. If he ate meagrely, of poor
+polenta, that was fate, it was the skies that ruled these things, and no
+man ruled the skies. He took his fate as it fell from the skies.
+
+Maria was exorbitant about money. She would charge us all she could for
+what we had and for what was done for us.
+
+Yet she was not mean in her soul. In her soul she was in a state of
+anger because of her own closeness. It was a violation to her strong
+animal nature. Yet her mind had wakened to the value of money. She knew
+she could alter her position, the position of her children, by virtue of
+money. She knew it was only money that made the difference between
+master and servant. And this was all the difference she would
+acknowledge. So she ruled her life according to money. Her supreme
+passion was to be mistress rather than servant, her supreme aspiration
+for her children was that in the end they might be masters and
+not servants.
+
+Paolo was untouched by all this. For him there was some divinity about a
+master which even America had not destroyed. If we came in for supper
+whilst the family was still at table he would have the children at once
+take their plates to the wall, he would have Maria at once set the table
+for us, though their own meal were never finished. And this was not
+servility, it was the dignity of a religious conception. Paolo regarded
+us as belonging to the Signoria, those who are elect, near to God. And
+this was part of his religious service. His life was a ritual. It was
+very beautiful, but it made me unhappy, the purity of his spirit was so
+sacred and the actual facts seemed such a sacrilege to it. Maria was
+nearer to the actual truth when she said that money was the only
+distinction. But Paolo had hold of an eternal truth, where hers was
+temporal. Only Paolo misapplied this eternal truth. He should not have
+given Giovanni the inferior status and a fat, mean Italian tradesman the
+superior. That was false, a real falsity. Maria knew it and hated it.
+But Paolo could not distinguish between the accident of riches and the
+aristocracy of the spirit. So Maria rejected him altogether, and went to
+the other extreme. We were all human beings like herself; naked, there
+was no distinction between us, no higher nor lower. But we were
+possessed of more money than she. And she had to steer her course
+between these two conceptions. The money alone made the real
+distinction, the separation; the being, the life made the common level.
+
+Paolo had the curious peasant's avarice also, but it was not meanness.
+It was a sort of religious conservation of his own power, his own self.
+Fortunately he could leave all business transactions on our account to
+Maria, so that his relation with us was purely ritualistic. He would
+have given me anything, trusting implicitly that I would fulfil my own
+nature as Signore, one of those more godlike, nearer the light of
+perfection than himself, a peasant. It was pure bliss to him to bring us
+the first-fruit of the garden, it was like laying it on an altar.
+
+And his fulfilment was in a fine, subtle, exquisite relationship, not of
+manners, but subtle interappreciation. He worshipped a finer
+understanding and a subtler tact. A further fineness and dignity and
+freedom in bearing was to him an approach towards the divine, so he
+loved men best of all, they fulfilled his soul. A woman was always a
+woman, and sex was a low level whereon he did not esteem himself. But a
+man, a doer, the instrument of God, he was really godlike.
+
+Paolo was a Conservative. For him the world was established and divine
+in its establishment. His vision grasped a small circle. A finer nature,
+a higher understanding, took in a greater circle, comprehended the
+whole. So that when Paolo was in relation to a man of further vision, he
+himself was extended towards the whole. Thus he was fulfilled. And his
+initial assumption was that every signore, every gentleman, was a man of
+further, purer vision than himself. This assumption was false. But
+Maria's assumption, that no one had a further vision, no one was more
+elect than herself, that we are all one flesh and blood and being, was
+even more false. Paolo was mistaken in actual life, but Maria was
+ultimately mistaken.
+
+Paolo, conservative as he was, believing that a priest must be a priest
+of God, yet very rarely went to church. And he used the religious oaths
+that Maria hated, even _Porca-Maria_. He always used oaths, either
+Bacchus or God or Mary or the Sacrament. Maria was always offended. Yet
+it was she who, in her soul, jeered at the Church and at religion. She
+wanted the human society as the absolute, without religious
+abstractions. So Paolo's oaths enraged her, because of their profanity,
+she said. But it was really because of their subscribing to another
+superhuman order. She jeered at the clerical people. She made a loud
+clamour of derision when the parish priest of the village above went
+down to the big village on the lake, and across the piazza, the quay,
+with two pigs in a sack on his shoulder. This was a real picture of the
+sacred minister to her.
+
+One day, when a storm had blown down an olive tree in front of the
+house, and Paolo and Giovanni were beginning to cut it up, this same
+priest of Mugiano came to San Gaudenzio. He was an iron-grey, thin,
+disreputable-looking priest, very talkative and loud and queer. He
+seemed like an old ne'er-do-well in priests' black, and he talked
+loudly, almost to himself, as drunken people do. At once _he_ must show
+the Fiori how to cut up the tree, he must have the axe from Paolo. He
+shouted to Maria for a glass of wine. She brought it out to him with a
+sort of insolent deference, insolent contempt of the man and traditional
+deference to the cloth. The priest drained the tumblerful of wine at one
+drink, his thin throat with its Adam's apple working. And he did not pay
+the penny.
+
+Then he stripped off his cassock and put away his hat, and, a ludicrous
+figure in ill-fitting black knee-breeches and a not very clean shirt, a
+red handkerchief round his neck, he proceeded to give great extravagant
+blows at the tree. He was like a caricature. In the doorway Maria was
+encouraging him rather jeeringly, whilst she winked at me. Marco was
+stifling his hysterical amusement in his mother's apron, and prancing
+with glee. Paolo and Giovanni stood by the fallen tree, very grave and
+unmoved, inscrutable, abstract. Then the youth came away to the doorway,
+with a flush mounting on his face and a grimace distorting its
+youngness. Only Paolo, unmoved and detached, stood by the tree with
+unchanging, abstract face, very strange, his eyes fixed in the ageless
+stare which is so characteristic.
+
+Meanwhile the priest swung drunken blows at the tree, his thin buttocks
+bending in the green-black broadcloth, supported on thin shanks, and
+thin throat growing dull purple in the red-knotted kerchief.
+Nevertheless he was doing the job. His face was wet with sweat. He
+wanted another glass of wine.
+
+He took no notice of us. He was strangely a local, even a mountebank
+figure, but entirely local, an appurtenance of the district.
+
+It was Maria who jeeringly told us the story of the priest, who shrugged
+her shoulders to imply that he was a contemptible figure. Paolo sat with
+the abstract look on his face, as of one who hears and does not hear, is
+not really concerned. He never opposed or contradicted her, but stayed
+apart. It was she who was violent and brutal in her ways. But sometimes
+Paolo went into a rage, and then Maria, everybody, was afraid. It was a
+white heavy rage, when his blue eyes shone unearthly, and his mouth
+opened with a curious drawn blindness of the old Furies. There was
+something of the cruelty of a falling mass of snow, heavy, horrible.
+Maria drew away, there was a silence. Then the avalanche was finished.
+
+They must have had some cruel fights before they learned to withdraw
+from each other so completely. They must have begotten Marco in hatred,
+terrible disintegrated opposition and otherness. And it was after this,
+after the child of their opposition was born, that Paolo went away to
+California, leaving his San Gaudenzio, travelling with several
+companions, like blind beasts, to Havre, and thence to New York, then to
+California. He stayed five years in the gold-mines, in a wild valley,
+living with a gang of Italians in a town of corrugated iron.
+
+All the while he had never really left San Gaudenzio. I asked him, 'Used
+you to think of it, the lake, the Monte Baldo, the laurel trees down the
+slope?' He tried to see what I wanted to know. Yes, he said--but
+uncertainly. I could see that he had never been really homesick. It had
+been very wretched on the ship going from Havre to New York. That he
+told me about. And he told me about the gold-mines, the galleries, the
+valley, the huts in the valley. But he had never really fretted for San
+Gaudenzio whilst he was in California.
+
+In real truth he was at San Gaudenzio all the time, his fate was riveted
+there. His going away was an excursion from reality, a kind of
+sleep-walking. He left his own reality there in the soil above the lake
+of Garda. That his body was in California, what did it matter? It was
+merely for a time, and for the sake of his own earth, his land. He would
+pay off the mortgage. But the gate at home was his gate all the time,
+his hand was on the latch.
+
+As for Maria, he had felt his duty towards her. She was part of his
+little territory, the rooted centre of the world. He sent her home the
+money. But it did not occur to him, in his soul, to miss her. He wanted
+her to be safe with the children, that was all. In his flesh perhaps he
+missed the woman. But his spirit was even more completely isolated since
+marriage. Instead of having united with each other, they had made each
+other more terribly distinct and separate. He could live alone
+eternally. It was his condition. His sex was functional, like eating and
+drinking. To take a woman, a prostitute at the camp, or not to take her,
+was no more vitally important than to get drunk or not to get drunk of a
+Sunday. And fairly often on Sunday Paolo got drunk. His world remained
+unaltered.
+
+But Maria suffered more bitterly. She was a young, powerful, passionate
+woman, and she was unsatisfied body and soul. Her soul's satisfaction
+became a bodily unsatisfaction. Her blood was heavy, violent, anarchic,
+insisting on the equality of the blood in all, and therefore on her own
+absolute right to satisfaction.
+
+She took a wine licence for San Gaudenzio, and she sold wine. There were
+many scandals about her. Somehow it did not matter very much, outwardly.
+The authorities were too divided among themselves to enforce public
+opinion. Between the clerical party and the radicals and the socialists,
+what canons were left that were absolute? Besides, these wild villages
+had always been ungoverned.
+
+Yet Maria suffered. Even she, according to her conviction belonged to
+Paolo. And she felt betrayed, betrayed and deserted. The iron had gone
+deep into her soul. Paolo had deserted her, she had been betrayed to
+other men for five years. There was something cruel and implacable in
+life. She sat sullen and heavy, for all her quick activity. Her soul was
+sullen and heavy.
+
+I could never believe Felicina was Paolo's child. She was an
+unprepossessing little girl, affected, cold, selfish, foolish. Maria and
+Paolo, with real Italian greatness, were warm and natural towards the
+child in her. But they did not love her in their very souls, she was the
+fruit of ash to them. And this must have been the reason that she was so
+self-conscious and foolish and affected, small child that she was.
+
+Paolo had come back from America a year before she was born--a year
+before she was born, Maria insisted. The husband and wife lived together
+in a relationship of complete negation. In his soul he was sad for her,
+and in her soul she felt annulled. He sat at evening in the
+chimney-seat, smoking, always pleasant and cheerful, not for a moment
+thinking he was unhappy. It had all taken place in his subconsciousness.
+But his eyebrows and eyelids were lifted in a kind of vacancy, his blue
+eyes were round and somehow finished, though he was so gentle and
+vigorous in body. But the very quick of him was killed. He was like a
+ghost in the house, with his loose throat and powerful limbs, his open,
+blue extinct eyes, and his musical, slightly husky voice, that seemed to
+sound out of the past.
+
+And Maria, stout and strong and handsome like a peasant woman, went
+about as if there were a weight on her, and her voice was high and
+strident. She, too, was finished in her life. But she remained unbroken,
+her will was like a hammer that destroys the old form.
+
+Giovanni was patiently labouring to learn a little English. Paolo knew
+only four or five words, the chief of which were 'a'right', 'boss',
+'bread', and 'day'. The youth had these by heart, and was studying a
+little more. He was very graceful and lovable, but he found it difficult
+to learn. A confused light, like hot tears, would come into his eyes
+when he had again forgotten the phrase. But he carried the paper about
+with him, and he made steady progress.
+
+He would go to America, he also. Not for anything would he stay in San
+Gaudenzio. His dream was to be gone. He would come back. The world was
+not San Gaudenzio to Giovanni.
+
+The old order, the order of Paolo and of Pietro di Paoli, the
+aristocratic order of the supreme God, God the Father, the Lord, was
+passing away from the beautiful little territory. The household no
+longer receives its food, oil and wine and maize, from out of the earth
+in the motion of fate. The earth is annulled, and money takes its place.
+The landowner, who is the lieutenant of God and of Fate, like Abraham,
+he, too, is annulled. There is now the order of the rich, which
+supersedes the order of the Signoria.
+
+It is passing away from Italy as it has passed from England. The peasant
+is passing away, the workman is taking his place. The stability is gone.
+Paolo is a ghost, Maria is the living body. And the new order means
+sorrow for the Italian more even than it has meant for us. But he will
+have the new order.
+
+San Gaudenzio is already becoming a thing of the past. Below the house,
+where the land drops in sharp slips to the sheer cliff's edge, over
+which it is Maria's constant fear that Felicina will tumble, there are
+the deserted lemon gardens of the little territory, snug down below.
+They are invisible till one descends by tiny paths, sheer down into
+them. And there they stand, the pillars and walls erect, but a dead
+emptiness prevailing, lemon trees all dead, gone, a few vines in their
+place. It is only twenty years since the lemon trees finally perished of
+a disease and were not renewed. But the deserted terrace, shut between
+great walls, descending in their openness full to the south, to the lake
+and the mountain opposite, seem more terrible than Pompeii in their
+silence and utter seclusion. The grape hyacinths flower in the cracks,
+the lizards run, this strange place hangs suspended and forgotten,
+forgotten for ever, its erect pillars utterly meaningless.
+
+I used to sit and write in the great loft of the lemon-house, high up,
+far, far from the ground, the open front giving across the lake and the
+mountain snow opposite, flush with twilight. The old matting and boards,
+the old disused implements of lemon culture made shadows in the deserted
+place. Then there would come the call from the back, away above:
+'_Venga, venga mangiare_.'
+
+We ate in the kitchen, where the olive and laurel wood burned in the
+open fireplace. It was always soup in the evening. Then we played games
+or cards, all playing; or there was singing, with the accordion, and
+sometimes a rough mountain peasant with a guitar.
+
+But it is all passing away. Giovanni is in America, unless he has come
+back to the War. He will not want to live in San Gaudenzio when he is a
+man, he says. He and Marco will not spend their lives wringing a little
+oil and wine out of the rocky soil, even if they are not killed in the
+fighting which is going on at the end of the lake. In my loft by the
+lemon-houses now I should hear the guns. And Giovanni kissed me with a
+kind of supplication when I went on to the steamer, as if he were
+beseeching for a soul. His eyes were bright and clear and lit up with
+courage. He will make a good fight for the new soul he wants--that is,
+if they do not kill him in this War.
+
+
+
+_5_
+
+THE DANCE
+
+
+Maria had no real licence for San Gaudenzio, yet the peasants always
+called for wine. It is easy to arrange in Italy. The penny is paid
+another time.
+
+The wild old road that skirts the lake-side, scrambling always higher as
+the precipice becomes steeper, climbing and winding to the villages
+perched high up, passes under the high boundary-wall of San Gaudenzio,
+between that and the ruined church. But the road went just as much
+between the vines and past the house as outside, under the wall; for the
+high gates were always open, and men or women and mules come into the
+property to call at the door of the homestead. There was a loud shout,
+'Ah--a--a--ah--Mari--a. O--O--Oh Pa'o!' from outside, another wild,
+inarticulate cry from within, and one of the Fiori appeared in the
+doorway to hail the newcomer.
+
+It was usually a man, sometimes a peasant from Mugiano, high up,
+sometimes a peasant from the wilds of the mountain, a wood-cutter, or a
+charcoal-burner. He came in and sat in the house-place, his glass of
+wine in his hand between his knees, or on the floor between his feet,
+and he talked in a few wild phrases, very shy, like a hawk indoors, and
+unintelligible in his dialect.
+
+Sometimes we had a dance. Then, for the wine to drink, three men came
+with mandolines and guitars, and sat in a corner playing their rapid
+tunes, while all danced on the dusty brick floor of the little parlour.
+No strange women were invited, only men; the young bloods from the big
+village on the lake, the wild men from above. They danced the slow,
+trailing, lilting polka-waltz round and round the small room, the
+guitars and mandolines twanging rapidly, the dust rising from the soft
+bricks. There were only the two English women: so men danced with men,
+as the Italians love to do. They love even better to dance with men,
+with a dear blood-friend, than with women.
+
+'It's better like this, two men?' Giovanni says to me, his blue eyes
+hot, his face curiously tender.
+
+The wood-cutters and peasants take off their coats, their throats are
+bare. They dance with strange intentness, particularly if they have for
+partner an English Signora. Their feet in thick boots are curiously
+swift and significant. And it is strange to see the Englishwomen, as
+they dance with the peasants transfigured with a kind of brilliant
+surprise. All the while the peasants are very courteous, but quiet. They
+see the women dilate and flash, they think they have found a footing,
+they are certain. So the male dancers are quiet, but even grandiloquent,
+their feet nimble, their bodies wild and confident.
+
+They are at a loss when the two English Signoras move together and laugh
+excitedly at the end of the dance.
+
+'Isn't it fine?'
+
+'Fine! Their arms are like iron, carrying you round.'
+
+'Yes! Yes! And the muscles on their shoulders! I never knew there were
+such muscles! I'm almost frightened.'
+
+'But it's fine, isn't it? I'm getting into the dance.'
+
+'Yes--yes--you've only to let them take you.'
+
+Then the glasses are put down, the guitars give their strange, vibrant,
+almost painful summons, and the dance begins again.
+
+It is a strange dance, strange and lilting, and changing as the music
+changed. But it had always a kind of leisurely dignity, a trailing kind
+of polka-waltz, intimate, passionate, yet never hurried, never violent
+in its passion, always becoming more intense. The women's faces changed
+to a kind of transported wonder, they were in the very rhythm of
+delight. From the soft bricks of the floor the red ochre rose in a thin
+cloud of dust, making hazy the shadowy dancers; the three musicians, in
+their black hats and their cloaks, sat obscurely in the corner, making a
+music that came quicker and quicker, making a dance that grew swifter
+and more intense, more subtle, the men seeming to fly and to implicate
+other strange inter-rhythmic dance into the women, the women drifting
+and palpitating as if their souls shook and resounded to a breeze that
+was subtly rushing upon them, through them; the men worked their feet,
+their thighs swifter, more vividly, the music came to an almost
+intolerable climax, there was a moment when the dance passed into a
+possession, the men caught up the women and swung them from the earth,
+leapt with them for a second, and then the next phase of the dance had
+begun, slower again, more subtly interwoven, taking perfect, oh,
+exquisite delight in every interrelated movement, a rhythm within a
+rhythm, a subtle approaching and drawing nearer to a climax, nearer,
+till, oh, there was the surpassing lift and swing of the women, when the
+woman's body seemed like a boat lifted over the powerful, exquisite wave
+of the man's body, perfect, for a moment, and then once more the slow,
+intense, nearer movement of the dance began, always nearer, nearer,
+always to a more perfect climax.
+
+And the women waited as if in transport for the climax, when they would
+be flung into a movement surpassing all movement. They were flung, borne
+away, lifted like a boat on a supreme wave, into the zenith and nave of
+the heavens, consummate.
+
+Then suddenly the dance crashed to an end, and the dancers stood
+stranded, lost, bewildered, on a strange shore. The air was full of red
+dust, half-lit by the lamp on the wall; the players in the corner were
+putting down their instruments to take up their glasses.
+
+And the dancers sat round the wall, crowding in the little room, faint
+with the transport of repeated ecstasy. There was a subtle smile on the
+face of the men, subtle, knowing, so finely sensual that the conscious
+eyes could scarcely look at it. And the women were dazed, like creatures
+dazzled by too much light. The light was still on their faces, like a
+blindness, a reeling, like a transfiguration. The men were bringing
+wine, on a little tin tray, leaning with their proud, vivid loins, their
+faces flickering with the same subtle smile. Meanwhile, Maria Fiori was
+splashing water, much water, on the red floor. There was the smell of
+water among the glowing, transfigured men and women who sat gleaming in
+another world, round the walls.
+
+The peasants have chosen their women. For the dark, handsome
+Englishwoman, who looks like a slightly malignant Madonna, comes Il
+Duro; for the '_bella bionda_', the wood-cutter. But the peasants have
+always to take their turn after the young well-to-do men from the
+village below.
+
+Nevertheless, they are confident. They cannot understand the
+middle-class diffidence of the young men who wear collars and ties and
+finger-rings.
+
+The wood-cutter from the mountain is of medium height, dark, thin, and
+hard as a hatchet, with eyes that are black like the very flaming thrust
+of night. He is quite a savage. There is something strange about his
+dancing, the violent way he works one shoulder. He has a wooden leg,
+from the knee-joint. Yet he dances well, and is inordinately proud. He
+is fierce as a bird, and hard with energy as a thunderbolt. He will
+dance with the blonde signora. But he never speaks. He is like some
+violent natural phenomenon rather than a person. The woman begins to
+wilt a little in his possession.
+
+'_È bello--il ballo?_' he asked at length, one direct, flashing
+question.
+
+'_Si--molto bello_,' cries the woman, glad to have speech again.
+
+The eyes of the wood-cutter flash like actual possession. He seems now
+to have come into his own. With all his senses, he is dominant, sure.
+
+He is inconceivably vigorous in body, and his dancing is almost perfect,
+with a little catch in it, owing to his lameness, which brings almost a
+pure intoxication. Every muscle in his body is supple as steel, supple,
+as strong as thunder, and yet so quick, so delicately swift, it is
+almost unbearable. As he draws near to the swing, the climax, the
+ecstasy, he seems to lie in wait, there is a sense of a great strength
+crouching ready. Then it rushes forth, liquid, perfect, transcendent,
+the woman swoons over in the dance, and it goes on, enjoyment, infinite,
+incalculable enjoyment. He is like a god, a strange natural phenomenon,
+most intimate and compelling, wonderful.
+
+But he is not a human being. The woman, somewhere shocked in her
+independent soul, begins to fall away from him. She has another being,
+which he has not touched, and which she will fall back upon. The dance
+is over, she will fall back on herself. It is perfect, too perfect.
+
+During the next dance, while she is in the power of the educated Ettore,
+a perfect and calculated voluptuary, who knows how much he can get out
+of this Northern woman, and only how much, the wood-cutter stands on the
+edge of the darkness, in the open doorway, and watches. He is fixed upon
+her, established, perfect. And all the while she is aware of the
+insistent hawk-like poising of the face of the wood-cutter, poised on
+the edge of the darkness, in the doorway, in possession,
+unrelinquishing.
+
+And she is angry. There is something stupid, absurd, in the hard,
+talon-like eyes watching so fiercely and so confidently in the doorway,
+sure, unmitigated. Has the creature no sense?
+
+The woman reacts from him. For some time she will take no notice of him.
+But he waits, fixed. Then she comes near to him, and his will seems to
+take hold of her. He looks at her with a strange, proud, inhuman
+confidence, as if his influence with her was already accomplished.
+
+'_Venga--venga un po'_,' he says, jerking his head strangely to the
+darkness.
+
+'What?' she replies, and passes shaken and dilated and brilliant,
+consciously ignoring him, passes away among the others, among those
+who are safe.
+
+There is food in the kitchen, great hunks of bread, sliced sausage that
+Maria has made, wine, and a little coffee. But only the quality come to
+eat. The peasants may not come in. There is eating and drinking in the
+little house, the guitars are silent. It is eleven o'clock.
+
+Then there is singing, the strange bestial singing of these hills.
+Sometimes the guitars can play an accompaniment, but usually not. Then
+the men lift up their heads and send out the high, half-howling music,
+astounding. The words are in dialect. They argue among themselves for a
+moment: will the Signoria understand? They sing. The Signoria does not
+understand in the least. So with a strange, slightly malignant triumph,
+the men sing all the verses of their song, sitting round the walls of
+the little parlour. Their throats move, their faces have a slight
+mocking smile. The boy capers in the doorway like a faun, with glee, his
+straight black hair falling over his forehead. The elder brother sits
+straight and flushed, but even his eyes glitter with a kind of yellow
+light of laughter. Paolo also sits quiet, with the invisible smile on
+his face.' Only Maria, large and active, prospering now, keeps
+collected, ready to order a shrill silence in the same way as she orders
+the peasants, violently, to keep their places.
+
+The boy comes to me and says:
+
+'Do you know, Signore, what they are singing?'
+
+'No,' I say.
+
+So he capers with furious glee. The men with the watchful eyes, all
+roused, sit round the wall and sing more distinctly:
+
+    _Si verrà la primavera
+    Fiorann' le mandoline,
+    Vienn' di basso le Trentine
+    Coi 'taliani far' l'amor._
+
+But the next verses are so improper that I pretend not to understand.
+The women, with wakened, dilated faces, are listening, listening hard,
+their two faces beautiful in their attention, as if listening to
+something magical, a long way off. And the men sitting round the wall
+sing more plainly, coming nearer to the correct Italian. The song comes
+loud and vibrating and maliciously from their reedy throats, it
+penetrates everybody. The foreign women can understand the sound, they
+can feel the malicious, suggestive mockery. But they cannot catch the
+words. The smile becomes more dangerous on the faces of the men.
+
+Then Maria Fiori sees that I have understood, and she cries, in her
+loud, overriding voice:
+
+'_Basta--basta._
+
+The men get up, straighten their bodies with a curious, offering
+movement. The guitars and mandolines strike the vibrating strings. But
+the vague Northern reserve has come over the Englishwomen. They dance
+again, but without the fusion in the dance. They have had enough.
+
+The musicians are thanked, they rise and go into the night. The men pass
+off in pairs. But the wood-cutter, whose name and whose nickname I could
+never hear, still hovered on the edge of the darkness.
+
+Then Maria sent him also away, complaining that he was too wild,
+_proprio selvatico_, and only the 'quality' remained, the well-to-do
+youths from below. There was a little more coffee, and a talking, a
+story of a man who had fallen over a declivity in a lonely part going
+home drunk in the evening, and had lain unfound for eighteen hours. Then
+a story of a donkey who had kicked a youth in the chest and killed him.
+
+But the women were tired, they would go to bed. Still the two young men
+would not go away. We all went out to look at the night.
+
+The stars were very bright overhead, the mountain opposite and the
+mountains behind us faintly outlined themselves on the sky. Below, the
+lake was a black gulf. A little wind blew cold from the Adige.
+
+In the morning the visitors had gone. They had insisted on staying the
+night. They had eaten eight eggs each and much bread at one o'clock in
+the morning. Then they had gone to sleep, lying on the floor in the
+sitting-room.
+
+In the early sunshine they had drunk coffee and gone down to the village
+on the lake. Maria was very pleased. She would have made a good deal of
+money. The young men were rich. Her cupidity seemed like her
+very blossom.
+
+
+
+_6_
+
+IL DURO
+
+
+The first time I saw Il Duro was on a sunny day when there came up a
+party of pleasure-makers to San Gaudenzio. They were three women and
+three men. The women were in cotton frocks, one a large, dark, florid
+woman in pink, the other two rather insignificant. The men I scarcely
+noticed at first, except that two were young and one elderly.
+
+They were a queer party, even on a feast day, coming up purely for
+pleasure, in the morning, strange, and slightly uncertain, advancing
+between the vines. They greeted Maria and Paolo in loud, coarse voices.
+There was something blowsy and uncertain and hesitating about the women
+in particular, which made one at once notice them.
+
+Then a picnic was arranged for them out of doors, on the grass. They sat
+just in front of the house, under the olive tree, beyond the well. It
+should have been pretty, the women in their cotton frocks, and their
+friends, sitting with wine and food in the spring sunshine. But somehow
+it was not: it was hard and slightly ugly.
+
+But since they were picnicking out of doors, we must do so too. We were
+at once envious. But Maria was a little unwilling, and then she set a
+table for us.
+
+The strange party did not speak to us, they seemed slightly uneasy and
+angry at our presence. I asked Maria who they were. She lifted her
+shoulders, and, after a second's cold pause, said they were people from
+down below, and then, in her rather strident, shrill, slightly bitter,
+slightly derogatory voice, she added:
+
+'They are not people for you, signore. You don't know them.'
+
+She spoke slightly angrily and contemptuously of them, rather
+protectively of me. So that vaguely I gathered that they were not quite
+'respectable'.
+
+Only one man came into the house. He was very handsome, beautiful
+rather, a man of thirty-two or-three, with a clear golden skin, and
+perfectly turned face, something godlike. But the expression was
+strange. His hair was jet black and fine and smooth, glossy as a bird's
+wing, his brows were beautifully drawn, calm above his grey eyes, that
+had long dark lashes.
+
+His eyes, however, had a sinister light in them, a pale, slightly
+repelling gleam, very much like a god's pale-gleaming eyes, with the
+same vivid pallor. And all his face had the slightly malignant,
+suffering look of a satyr. Yet he was very beautiful.
+
+He walked quickly and surely, with his head rather down, passing from
+his desire to his object, absorbed, yet curiously indifferent, as if the
+transit were in a strange world, as if none of what he was doing were
+worth the while. Yet he did it for his own pleasure, and the light on
+his face, a pale, strange gleam through his clear skin, remained like a
+translucent smile, unchanging as time.
+
+He seemed familiar with the household, he came and fetched wine at his
+will. Maria was angry with him. She railed loudly and violently. He was
+unchanged. He went out with the wine to the party on the grass. Maria
+regarded them all with some hostility.
+
+They drank a good deal out there in the sunshine. The women and the
+older man talked floridly. Il Duro crouched at the feast in his curious
+fashion--he had strangely flexible loins, upon which he seemed to crouch
+forward. But he was separate, like an animal that remains quite single,
+no matter where it is.
+
+The party remained until about two o'clock. Then, slightly flushed, it
+moved on in a ragged group up to the village beyond. I do not know if
+they went to one of the inns of the stony village, or to the large
+strange house which belonged to the rich young grocer of the village
+below, a house kept only for feasts and riots, uninhabited for the most
+part. Maria would tell me nothing about them. Only the young well-to-do
+grocer, who had lived in Vienna, the Bertolotti, came later in the
+afternoon inquiring for the party.
+
+And towards sunset I saw the elderly man of the group stumbling home
+very drunk down the path, after the two women, who had gone on in front.
+Then Paolo sent Giovanni to see the drunken one safely past the
+landslip, which was dangerous. Altogether it was an unsatisfactory
+business, very much like any other such party in any other country.
+
+Then in the evening Il Duro came in. His name is Faustino, but everybody
+in the village has a nickname, which is almost invariably used. He came
+in and asked for supper. We had all eaten. So he ate a little food alone
+at the table, whilst we sat round the fire.
+
+Afterwards we played 'Up, Jenkins'. That was the one game we played with
+the peasants, except that exciting one of theirs, which consists in
+shouting in rapid succession your guesses at the number of fingers
+rapidly spread out and shut into the hands again upon the table.
+
+Il Duro joined in the game. And that was because he had been in America,
+and now was rich. He felt he could come near to the strange signori. But
+he was always inscrutable.
+
+It was queer to look at the hands spread on the table: the Englishwomen,
+having rings on their soft fingers; the large fresh hands of the elder
+boy, the brown paws of the younger; Paolo's distorted great hard hands
+of a peasant; and the big, dark brown, animal, shapely hands
+of Faustino.
+
+He had been in America first for two years and then for five
+years--seven years altogether--but he only spoke a very little English.
+He was always with Italians. He had served chiefly in a flag factory,
+and had had very little to do save to push a trolley with flags from the
+dyeing-room to the drying-room I believe it was this.
+
+Then he had come home from America with a fair amount of money, he had
+taken his uncle's garden, had inherited his uncle's little house, and he
+lived quite alone.
+
+He was rich, Maria said, shouting in her strident voice. He at once
+disclaimed it, peasant-wise. But before the signori he was glad also to
+appear rich. He was mean, that was more, Maria cried, half-teasing, half
+getting at him.
+
+He attended to his garden, grew vegetables all the year round, lived in
+his little house, and in spring made good money as a vine-grafter: he
+was an expert vine-grafter.
+
+After the boys had gone to bed he sat and talked to me. He was curiously
+attractive and curiously beautiful, but somehow like stone in his clear
+colouring and his clear-cut face. His temples, with the black hair, were
+distinct and fine as a work of art.
+
+But always his eyes had this strange, half-diabolic, half-tortured pale
+gleam, like a goat's, and his mouth was shut almost uglily, his cheeks
+stern. His moustache was brown, his teeth strong and spaced. The women
+said it was a pity his moustache was brown.
+
+'_Peccato!--sa, per bellezza, i baffi neri--ah-h!_'
+
+Then a long-drawn exclamation of voluptuous appreciation.
+
+'You live quite alone?' I said to him.
+
+He did. And even when he had been ill he was alone. He had been ill two
+years before. His cheeks seemed to harden like marble and to become pale
+at the thought. He was afraid, like marble with fear.
+
+'But why,' I said, 'why do you live alone? You are sad--_è triste_.'
+
+He looked at me with his queer, pale eyes. I felt a great static misery
+in him, something very strange.
+
+'_Triste!_' he repeated, stiffening up, hostile. I could not understand.
+
+'_Vuol' dire che hai l'aria dolorosa_,' cried Maria, like a chorus
+interpreting. And there was always a sort of loud ring of challenge
+somewhere in her voice.
+
+'Sad,' I said in English.
+
+'Sad I' he repeated, also in English. And he did not smile or change,
+only his face seemed to become more stone-like. And he only looked at
+me, into my eyes, with the long, pale, steady, inscrutable look of a
+goat, I can only repeat, something stone-like.
+
+'Why,' I said, 'don't you marry? Man doesn't live alone.'
+
+'I don't marry,' he said to me, in his emphatic, deliberate, cold
+fashion, 'because I've seen too much. _Ho visto troppo._'
+
+'I don't understand,' I said.
+
+Yet I could feel that Paolo, sitting silent, like a monolith also, in
+the chimney opening, he understood: Maria also understood.
+
+Il Duro looked again steadily into my eyes.
+
+'_Ho visto troppo_,' he repeated, and the words seemed engraved on
+stone. 'I've seen too much.'
+
+'But you can marry,' I said, 'however much you have seen, if you have
+seen all the world.'
+
+He watched me steadily, like a strange creature looking at me.
+
+'What woman?' he said to me.
+
+'You can find a woman--there are plenty of women,' I said.
+
+'Not for me,' he said. 'I have known too many. I've known too much, I
+can marry nobody.'
+
+'Do you dislike women?' I said.
+
+'No--quite otherwise. I don't think ill of them.'
+
+'Then why can't you marry? Why must you live alone?'
+
+'Why live with a woman?' he said to me, and he looked mockingly. 'Which
+woman is it to be?'
+
+'You can find her,' I said. 'There are many women.'
+
+Again he shook his head in the stony, final fashion.
+
+'Not for me. I have known too much.'
+
+'But does that prevent you from marrying?'
+
+He looked at me steadily, finally. And I could see it was impossible for
+us to understand each other, or for me to understand him. I could not
+understand the strange white gleam of his eyes, where it came from.
+
+Also I knew he liked me very much, almost loved me, which again was
+strange and puzzling. It was as if he were a fairy, a faun, and had no
+soul. But he gave me a feeling of vivid sadness, a sadness that gleamed
+like phosphorescence. He himself was not sad. There was a completeness
+about him, about the pallid otherworld he inhabited, which excluded
+sadness. It was too complete, too final, too defined. There was no
+yearning, no vague merging off into mistiness.... He was clear and fine
+as semi-transparent rock, as a substance in moonlight. He seemed like a
+crystal that has achieved its final shape and has nothing more
+to achieve.
+
+That night he slept on the floor of the sitting-room. In the morning he
+was gone. But a week after he came again, to graft the vines.
+
+All the morning and the afternoon he was among the vines, crouching
+before them, cutting them back with his sharp, bright knife, amazingly
+swift and sure, like a god. It filled me with a sort of panic to see him
+crouched flexibly, like some strange animal god, doubled on his
+haunches, before the young vines, and swiftly, vividly, without thought,
+cut, cut, cut at the young budding shoots, which fell unheeded on to the
+earth. Then again he strode with his curious half-goatlike movement
+across the garden, to prepare the lime.
+
+He mixed the messy stuff, cow-dung and lime and water and earth,
+carefully with his hands, as if he understood that too. He was not a
+worker. He was a creature in intimate communion with the sensible world,
+knowing purely by touch the limey mess he mixed amongst, knowing as if
+by relation between that soft matter and the matter of himself.
+
+Then again he strode over the earth, a gleaming piece of earth himself,
+moving to the young vines. Quickly, with a few clean cuts of the knife,
+he prepared the new shoot, which he had picked out of a handful which
+lay beside him on the ground; he went finely to the quick of the plant,
+inserted the graft, then bound it up, fast, hard.
+
+It was like God grafting the life of man upon the body of the earth,
+intimately conjuring with his own flesh.
+
+All the while Paolo stood by, somehow excluded from the mystery, talking
+to me, to Faustino. And Il Duro answered easily, as if his mind were
+disengaged. It was his senses that were absorbed in the sensible life of
+the plant, and the lime and the cow-dung he handled.
+
+Watching him, watching his absorbed, bestial, and yet godlike crouching
+before the plant, as if he were the god of lower life, I somehow
+understood his isolation, why he did not marry. Pan and the ministers of
+Pan do not marry, the sylvan gods. They are single and isolated in
+their being.
+
+It is in the spirit that marriage takes place. In the flesh there is
+connexion, but only in the spirit is there a new thing created out of
+two different antithetic things. In the body I am conjoined with the
+woman. But in the spirit my conjunction with her creates a third thing,
+an absolute, a Word, which is neither me nor her, nor of me nor of her,
+but which is absolute.
+
+And Faustino had none of this spirit. In him sensation itself was
+absolute--not spiritual consummation, but physical sensation. So he
+could not marry, it was not for him. He belonged to the god Pan, to the
+absolute of the senses.
+
+All the while his beauty, so perfect and so defined, fascinated me, a
+strange static perfection about him. But his movements, whilst they
+fascinated, also repelled. I can always see him crouched before the
+vines on his haunches, his haunches doubled together in a complete
+animal unconsciousness, his face seeming in its strange golden pallor
+and its hardness of line, with the gleaming black of the fine hair on
+the brow and temples, like something reflective, like the reflecting
+surface of a stone that gleams out of the depths of night. It was like
+darkness revealed in its steady, unchanging pallor.
+
+Again he stayed through the evening, having quarrelled once more with
+the Maria about money. He quarrelled violently, yet coldly. There was
+something terrifying in it. And as soon as the matter of dispute was
+settled, all trace of interest or feeling vanished from him.
+
+Yet he liked, above all things, to be near the English signori. They
+seemed to exercise a sort of magnetic attraction over him. It was
+something of the purely physical world, as a magnetized needle swings
+towards soft iron. He was quite helpless in the relation. Only by
+mechanical attraction he gravitated into line with us.
+
+But there was nothing between us except our complete difference. It was
+like night and day flowing together.
+
+
+
+_7_
+
+JOHN
+
+
+Besides Il Duro, we found another Italian who could speak English, this
+time quite well. We had walked about four or five miles up the lake,
+getting higher and higher. Then quite suddenly, on the shoulder of a
+bluff far up, we came on a village, icy cold, and as if forgotten.
+
+We went into the inn to drink something hot. The fire of olive sticks
+was burning in the open chimney, one or two men were talking at a table,
+a young woman with a baby stood by the fire watching something boil in a
+large pot. Another woman was seen in the house-place beyond.
+
+In the chimney-seats sat a young mule-driver, who had left his two mules
+at the door of the inn, and opposite him an elderly stout man. They got
+down and offered us the seats of honour, which we accepted with
+due courtesy.
+
+The chimneys are like the wide, open chimney-places of old English
+cottages, but the hearth is raised about a foot and a half or two feet
+from the floor, so that the fire is almost level with the hands; and
+those who sit in the chimney-seats are raised above the audience in the
+room, something like two gods flanking the fire, looking out of the cave
+of ruddy darkness into the open, lower world of the room.
+
+We asked for coffee with milk and rum. The stout landlord took a seat
+near us below. The comely young woman with the baby took the tin
+coffee-pot that stood among the grey ashes, put in fresh coffee among
+the old bottoms, filled it with water, then pushed it more into
+the fire.
+
+The landlord turned to us with the usual naïve, curious deference, and
+the usual question:
+
+'You are Germans?'
+
+'English.'
+
+'Ah--_Inglesi_.'
+
+Then there is a new note of cordiality--or so I always imagine--and the
+rather rough, cattle-like men who are sitting with their wine round the
+table look up more amicably. They do not like being intruded upon. Only
+the landlord is always affable.
+
+'I have a son who speaks English,' he says: he is a handsome, courtly
+old man, of the Falstaff sort.
+
+'Oh!'
+
+'He has been in America.'
+
+'And where is he now?'
+
+'He is at home. O--Nicoletta, where is the Giovann'?'
+
+The comely young woman with the baby came in.
+
+'He is with the band,' she said.
+
+The old landlord looked at her with pride.
+
+'This is my daughter-in-law,' he said.
+
+She smiled readily to the Signora.
+
+'And the baby?' we asked.
+
+'_Mio figlio_,' cried the young woman, in the strong, penetrating voice
+of these women. And she came forward to show the child to the Signora.
+
+It was a bonny baby: the whole company was united in adoration and
+service of the bambino. There was a moment of suspension, when religious
+submission seemed to come over the inn-room.
+
+Then the Signora began to talk, and it broke upon the Italian
+child-reverence.
+
+'What is he called?'
+
+'Oscare,' came the ringing note of pride. And the mother talked to the
+baby in dialect. All, men and women alike, felt themselves glorified by
+the presence of the child.
+
+At last the coffee in the tin coffee-pot was boiling and frothing out of
+spout and lid. The milk in the little copper pan was also hot, among the
+ashes. So we had our drink at last.
+
+The landlord was anxious for us to see Giovanni, his son. There was a
+village band performing up the street, in front of the house of a
+colonel who had come home wounded from Tripoli. Everybody in the village
+was wildly proud about the colonel and about the brass band, the music
+of which was execrable.
+
+We just looked into the street. The band of uncouth fellows was playing
+the same tune over and over again before a desolate, newish house. A
+crowd of desolate, forgotten villagers stood round in the cold upper
+air. It seemed altogether that the place was forgotten by God and man.
+
+But the landlord, burly, courteous, handsome, pointed out with a
+flourish the Giovanni, standing in the band playing a cornet. The band
+itself consisted only of five men, rather like beggars in the street.
+But Giovanni was the strangest! He was tall and thin and somewhat
+German-looking, wearing shabby American clothes and a very high double
+collar and a small American crush hat. He looked entirely like a
+ne'er-do-well who plays a violin in the street, dressed in the most
+down-at-heel, sordid respectability.
+
+'That is he--you see, Signore--the young one under the balcony.'
+
+The father spoke with love and pride, and the father was a gentleman,
+like Falstaff, a pure gentleman. The daughter-in-law also peered out to
+look at Il Giovann', who was evidently a figure of repute, in his
+sordid, degenerate American respectability. Meanwhile, this figure of
+repute blew himself red in the face, producing staccato strains on his
+cornet. And the crowd stood desolate and forsaken in the cold, upper
+afternoon.
+
+Then there was a sudden rugged '_Evviva, Evviva_!' from the people, the
+band stopped playing, somebody valiantly broke into a line of the song:
+
+    _Tripoli, sarà italiana,
+    Sarà italiana al rombo del cannon'._
+
+The colonel had appeared on the balcony, a smallish man, very yellow in
+the face, with grizzled black hair and very shabby legs. They all seemed
+so sordidly, hopelessly shabby.
+
+He suddenly began to speak, leaning forward, hot and feverish and
+yellow, upon the iron rail of the balcony. There was something hot and
+marshy and sick about him, slightly repulsive, less than human. He told
+his fellow-villagers how he loved them, how, when he lay uncovered on
+the sands of Tripoli, week after week, he had known they were watching
+him from the Alpine height of the village, he could feel that where he
+was they were all looking. When the Arabs came rushing like things gone
+mad, and he had received his wound, he had known that in his own
+village, among his own dear ones, there was recovery. Love would heal
+the wounds, the home country was a lover who would heal all her sons'
+wounds with love.
+
+Among the grey desolate crowd were sharp, rending 'Bravos!'--the people
+were in tears--the landlord at my side was repeating softly,
+abstractedly: '_Caro--caro--Ettore, caro colonello_--' and when it was
+finished, and the little colonel with shabby, humiliated legs was gone
+in, he turned to me and said, with challenge that almost frightened me:
+
+'_Un brav' uomo_.'
+
+'_Bravissimo_,' I said.
+
+Then we, too, went indoors.
+
+It was all, somehow, grey and hopeless and acrid, unendurable.
+
+The colonel, poor devil--we knew him afterwards--is now dead. It is
+strange that he is dead. There is something repulsive to me in the
+thought of his lying dead: such a humiliating, somehow degraded corpse.
+Death has no beauty in Italy, unless it be violent. The death of man or
+woman through sickness is an occasion of horror, repulsive. They belong
+entirely to life, they are so limited to life, these people.
+
+Soon the Giovanni came home, and took his cornet upstairs. Then he came
+to see us. He was an ingenuous youth, sordidly shabby and dirty. His
+fair hair was long and uneven, his very high starched collar made one
+aware that his neck and his ears were not clean, his American crimson
+tie was ugly, his clothes looked as if they had been kicking about on
+the floor for a year.
+
+Yet his blue eyes were warm and his manner and speech very gentle.
+
+'You will speak English with us,' I said.
+
+'Oh,' he said, smiling and shaking his head, 'I could speak English very
+well. But it is two years that I don't speak it now, over two years now,
+so I don't speak it.'
+
+'But you speak it very well.'
+
+'No. It is two years that I have not spoke, not a word--so, you see, I
+have--'
+
+'You have forgotten it? No, you haven't. It will quickly come back.'
+
+'If I hear it--when I go to America--then I shall--I shall--'
+
+'You will soon pick it up.'
+
+'Yes--I shall pick it up.'
+
+The landlord, who had been watching with pride, now went away. The wife
+also went away, and we were left with the shy, gentle, dirty, and
+frowsily-dressed Giovanni.
+
+He laughed in his sensitive, quick fashion.
+
+'The women in America, when they came into the store, they said, "Where
+is John, where is John?" Yes, they liked me.'
+
+And he laughed again, glancing with vague, warm blue eyes, very shy,
+very coiled upon himself with sensitiveness.
+
+He had managed a store in America, in a smallish town. I glanced at his
+reddish, smooth, rather knuckly hands, and thin wrists in the frayed
+cuff. They were real shopman's hands.
+
+The landlord brought some special feast-day cake, so overjoyed he was to
+have his Giovanni speaking English with the Signoria.
+
+When we went away, we asked 'John' to come down to our villa to see us.
+We scarcely expected him to turn up.
+
+Yet one morning he appeared, at about half past nine, just as we were
+finishing breakfast. It was sunny and warm and beautiful, so we asked
+him please to come with us picnicking.
+
+He was a queer shoot, again, in his unkempt longish hair and slovenly
+clothes, a sort of very vulgar down-at-heel American in appearance. And
+he was transported with shyness. Yet ours was the world he had chosen as
+his own, so he took his place bravely and simply, a hanger-on.
+
+We climbed up the water-course in the mountain-side, up to a smooth
+little lawn under the olive trees, where daisies were flowering and
+gladioli were in bud. It was a tiny little lawn of grass in a level
+crevice, and sitting there we had the world below us--the lake, the
+distant island, the far-off low Verona shore.
+
+Then 'John' began to talk, and he talked continuously, like a foreigner,
+not saying the things he would have said in Italian, but following the
+suggestion and scope of his limited English.
+
+In the first place, he loved his father--it was 'my father, my father'
+always. His father had a little shop as well as the inn in the village
+above. So John had had some education. He had been sent to Brescia and
+then to Verona to school, and there had taken his examinations to become
+a civil engineer. He was clever, and could pass his examinations. But he
+never finished his course. His mother died, and his father,
+disconsolate, had wanted him at home. Then he had gone back, when he was
+sixteen or seventeen, to the village beyond the lake, to be with his
+father and to look after the shop.
+
+'But didn't you mind giving up all your work?' I said.
+
+He did not quite understand.
+
+'My father wanted me to come back,' he said.
+
+It was evident that Giovanni had had no definite conception of what he
+was doing or what he wanted to do. His father, wishing to make a
+gentleman of him, had sent him to school in Verona. By accident he had
+been moved on into the engineering course. When it all fizzled to an
+end, and he returned half-baked to the remote, desolate village of the
+mountain-side, he was not disappointed or chagrined. He had never
+conceived of a coherent purposive life. Either one stayed in the
+village, like a lodged stone, or one made random excursions into the
+world, across the world. It was all aimless and purposeless.
+
+So he had stayed a while with his father, then he had gone, just as
+aimlessly, with a party of men who were emigrating to America. He had
+taken some money, had drifted about, living in the most comfortless,
+wretched fashion, then he had found a place somewhere in Pennsylvania,
+in a dry goods store. This was when he was seventeen or eighteen
+years old.
+
+All this seemed to have happened to him without his being very much
+affected, at least consciously. His nature was simple and self-complete.
+Yet not so self-complete as that of Il Duro or Paolo. They had passed
+through the foreign world and been quite untouched. Their souls were
+static, it was the world that had flowed unstable by.
+
+But John was more sensitive, he had come more into contact with his new
+surroundings. He had attended night classes almost every evening, and
+had been taught English like a child. He had loved the American free
+school, the teachers, the work.
+
+But he had suffered very much in America. With his curious,
+over-sensitive, wincing laugh, he told us how the boys had followed him
+and jeered at him, calling after him, 'You damn Dago, you damn Dago.'
+They had stopped him and his friend in the street and taken away their
+hats, and spat into them. So that at last he had gone mad. They were
+youths and men who always tortured him, using bad language which
+startled us very much as he repeated it, there on the little lawn under
+the olive trees, above the perfect lake: English obscenities and abuse
+so coarse and startling that we bit our lips, shocked almost into
+laughter, whilst John, simple and natural, and somehow, for all his long
+hair and dirty appearance, flower-like in soul, repeated to us these
+things which may never be repeated in decent company.
+
+'Oh,' he said, 'at last, I get mad. When they come one day, shouting,
+"You damn Dago, dirty dog," and will take my hat again, oh, I get mad,
+and I would kill them, I would kill them, I am so mad. I run to them,
+and throw one to the floor, and I tread on him while I go upon another,
+the biggest. Though they hit me and kick me all over, I feel nothing, I
+am mad. I throw the biggest to the floor, a man; he is older than I am,
+and I hit him so hard I would kill him. When the others see it they are
+afraid, they throw stones and hit me on the face. But I don't feel it--I
+don't know nothing. I hit the man on the floor, I almost kill him. I
+forget everything except I will kill him--'
+
+'But you didn't?'
+
+'No--I don't know--' and he laughed his queer, shaken laugh. 'The other
+man that was with me, my friend, he came to me and we went away. Oh, I
+was mad. I was completely mad. I would have killed them.'
+
+He was trembling slightly, and his eyes were dilated with a strange
+greyish-blue fire that was very painful and elemental. He looked beside
+himself. But he was by no means mad.
+
+We were shaken by the vivid, lambent excitement of the youth, we wished
+him to forget. We were shocked, too, in our souls to see the pure
+elemental flame shaken out of his gentle, sensitive nature. By his
+slight, crinkled laugh we could see how much he had suffered. He had
+gone out and faced the world, and he had kept his place, stranger and
+Dago though he was.
+
+'They never came after me no more, not all the while I was there.'
+
+Then he said he became the foreman in the store--at first he was only
+assistant. It was the best store in the town, and many English ladies
+came, and some Germans. He liked the English ladies very much: they
+always wanted him to be in the store. He wore white clothes there, and
+they would say:
+
+'You look very nice in the white coat, John'; or else:
+
+'Let John come, he can find it'; or else they said:
+
+'John speaks like a born American.'
+
+This pleased him very much.
+
+In the end, he said, he earned a hundred dollars a month. He lived with
+the extraordinary frugality of the Italians, and had quite a lot
+of money.
+
+He was not like Il Duro. Faustino had lived in a state of miserliness
+almost in America, but then he had had his debauches of shows and wine
+and carousals. John went chiefly to the schools, in one of which he was
+even asked to teach Italian. His knowledge of his own language was
+remarkable and most unusual!
+
+'But what,' I asked, 'brought you back?'
+
+'It was my father. You see, if I did not come to have my military
+service, I must stay till I am forty. So I think perhaps my father will
+be dead, I shall never see him. So I came.'
+
+He had come home when he was twenty to fulfil his military duties. At
+home he had married. He was very fond of his wife, but he had no
+conception of love in the old sense. His wife was like the past, to
+which he was wedded. Out of her he begot his child, as out of the past.
+But the future was all beyond her, apart from her. He was going away
+again, now, to America. He had been some nine months at home after his
+military service was over. He had no more to do. Now he was leaving his
+wife and child and his father to go to America.
+
+'But why,' I said, 'why? You are not poor, you can manage the shop in
+your village.'
+
+'Yes,' he said. 'But I will go to America. Perhaps I shall go into the
+store again, the same.'
+
+'But is it not just the same as managing the shop at home?'
+
+'No--no--it is quite different.'
+
+Then he told us how he bought goods in Brescia and in Said for the shop
+at home, how he had rigged up a funicular with the assistance of the
+village, an overhead wire by which you could haul the goods up the face
+of the cliffs right high up, to within a mile of the village. He was
+very proud of this. And sometimes he himself went down the funicular to
+the water's edge, to the boat, when he was in a hurry. This also
+pleased him.
+
+But he was going to Brescia this day to see about going again to
+America. Perhaps in another month he would be gone.
+
+It was a great puzzle to me why he would go. He could not say himself.
+He would stay four or five years, then he would come home again to see
+his father--and his wife and child.
+
+There was a strange, almost frightening destiny upon him, which seemed
+to take him away, always away from home, from the past, to that great,
+raw America. He seemed scarcely like a person with individual choice,
+more like a creature under the influence of fate which was
+disintegrating the old life and precipitating him, a fragment
+inconclusive, into the new chaos.
+
+He submitted to it all with a perfect unquestioning simplicity, never
+even knowing that he suffered, that he must suffer disintegration from
+the old life. He was moved entirely from within, he never questioned his
+inevitable impulse.
+
+'They say to me, "Don't go--don't go"--' he shook his head. 'But I say I
+will go.'
+
+And at that it was finished.
+
+So we saw him off at the little quay, going down the lake. He would
+return at evening, and be pulled up in his funicular basket. And in a
+month's time he would be standing on the same lake steamer going
+to America.
+
+Nothing was more painful than to see him standing there in his degraded,
+sordid American clothes, on the deck of the steamer, waving us good-bye,
+belonging in his final desire to our world, the world of consciousness
+and deliberate action. With his candid, open, unquestioning face, he
+seemed like a prisoner being conveyed from one form of life to another,
+or like a soul in trajectory, that has not yet found a resting-place.
+
+What were wife and child to him?--they were the last steps of the past.
+His father was the continent behind him; his wife and child the
+foreshore of the past; but his face was set outwards, away from it
+all--whither, neither he nor anybody knew, but he called it America.
+
+
+
+
+_Italians in Exile_
+
+
+When I was in Constance the weather was misty and enervating and
+depressing, it was no pleasure to travel on the big flat desolate lake.
+
+When I went from Constance, it was on a small steamer down the Rhine to
+Schaffhausen. That was beautiful. Still, the mist hung over the waters,
+over the wide shallows of the river, and the sun, coming through the
+morning, made lovely yellow lights beneath the bluish haze, so that it
+seemed like the beginning of the world. And there was a hawk in the
+upper air fighting with two crows, or two rooks. Ever they rose higher
+and higher, the crow flickering above the attacking hawk, the fight
+going on like some strange symbol in the sky, the Germans on deck
+watching with pleasure.
+
+Then we passed out of sight between wooded banks and under bridges where
+quaint villages of old romance piled their red and coloured pointed
+roofs beside the water, very still, remote, lost in the vagueness of the
+past. It could not be that they were real. Even when the boat put in to
+shore, and the customs officials came to look, the village remained
+remote in the romantic past of High Germany, the Germany of fairy tales
+and minstrels and craftsmen. The poignancy of the past was almost
+unbearable, floating there in colour upon the haze of the river.
+
+We went by some swimmers, whose white shadowy bodies trembled near the
+side of the steamer under water. One man with a round, fair head lifted
+his face and one arm from the water and shouted a greeting to us, as if
+he were a Niebelung, saluting with bright arm lifted from the water, his
+face laughing, the fair moustache hanging over his mouth. Then his white
+body swirled in the water, and he was gone, swimming with the
+side stroke.
+
+Schaffhausen the town, half old and bygone, half modern, with breweries
+and industries, that is not very real. Schaffhausen Falls, with their
+factory in the midst and their hotel at the bottom, and the general
+cinematograph effect, they are ugly.
+
+It was afternoon when I set out to walk from the Falls to Italy, across
+Switzerland. I remember the big, fat, rather gloomy fields of this part
+of Baden, damp and unliving. I remember I found some apples under a tree
+in a field near a railway embankment, then some mushrooms, and I ate
+both. Then I came on to a long, desolate high-road, with dreary,
+withered trees on either side, and flanked by great fields where groups
+of men and women were working. They looked at me as I went by down the
+long, long road, alone and exposed and out of the world.
+
+I remember nobody came at the border village to examine my pack, I
+passed through unchallenged. All was quiet and lifeless and hopeless,
+with big stretches of heavy land.
+
+Till sunset came, very red and purple, and suddenly, from the heavy
+spacious open land I dropped sharply into the Rhine valley again,
+suddenly, as if into another glamorous world.
+
+There was the river rushing along between its high, mysterious, romantic
+banks, which were high as hills, and covered with vine. And there was
+the village of tall, quaint houses flickering its lights on to the
+deep-flowing river, and quite silent, save for the rushing of water.
+
+There was a fine covered bridge, very dark. I went to the middle and
+looked through the opening at the dark water below, at the façade of
+square lights, the tall village-front towering remote and silent above
+the river. The hill rose on either side the flood; down here was a
+small, forgotten, wonderful world that belonged to the date of isolated
+village communities and wandering minstrels.
+
+So I went back to the inn of The Golden Stag, and, climbing some steps,
+I made a loud noise. A woman came, and I asked for food. She led me
+through a room where were enormous barrels, ten feet in diameter, lying
+fatly on their sides; then through a large stone-clean kitchen, with
+bright pans, ancient as the Meistersinger; then up some steps and into
+the long guest-room, where a few tables were laid for supper.
+
+A few people were eating. I asked for Abendessen, and sat by the window
+looking at the darkness of the river below, the covered bridge, the dark
+hill opposite, crested with its few lights.
+
+Then I ate a very large quantity of knoedel soup and bread, and drank
+beer, and was very sleepy. Only one or two village men came in, and
+these soon went again; the place was dead still. Only at a long table on
+the opposite side of the room were seated seven or eight men, ragged,
+disreputable, some impudent--another came in late; the landlady gave
+them all thick soup with dumplings and bread and meat, serving them in a
+sort of brief disapprobation. They sat at the long table, eight or nine
+tramps and beggars and wanderers out of work and they ate with a sort of
+cheerful callousness and brutality for the most part, and as if
+ravenously, looking round and grinning sometimes, subdued, cowed, like
+prisoners, and yet impudent. At the end one shouted to know where he was
+to sleep. The landlady called to the young serving-woman, and in a
+classic German severity of disapprobation they were led up the stone
+stairs to their room. They tramped off in threes and twos, making a bad,
+mean, humiliated exit. It was not yet eight o'clock. The landlady sat
+talking to one bearded man, staid and severe, whilst, with her work on
+the table, she sewed steadily.
+
+As the beggars and wanderers went slinking out of the room, some called
+impudently, cheerfully:
+
+'_Nacht, Frau Wirtin--G'Nacht, Wirtin--'te Nacht, Frau_,' to all of
+which the hostess answered a stereotyped '_Gute Nacht_,' never turning
+her head from her sewing, or indicating by the faintest movement that
+she was addressing the men who were filing raggedly to the doorway.
+
+So the room was empty, save for the landlady and her sewing, the staid,
+elderly villager to whom she was talking in the unbeautiful dialect, and
+the young serving-woman who was clearing away the plates and basins of
+the tramps and beggars.
+
+Then the villager also went.
+
+'_Gute Nacht, Frau Seidl_,' to the landlady; '_Gute Nacht_,' at random,
+to me.
+
+So I looked at the newspaper. Then I asked the landlady for a cigarette,
+not knowing how else to begin. So she came to my table, and we talked.
+
+It pleased me to take upon myself a sort of romantic, wandering
+character; she said my German was '_schön_'; a little goes a long way.
+
+So I asked her who were the men who had sat at the long table. She
+became rather stiff and curt.
+
+'They are the men looking for work,' she said, as if the subject were
+disagreeable.
+
+'But why do they come here, so many?' I asked.
+
+Then she told me that they were going out of the country: this was
+almost the last village of the border: that the relieving officer in
+each village was empowered to give to every vagrant a ticket entitling
+the holder to an evening meal, bed, and bread in the morning, at a
+certain inn. This was the inn for the vagrants coming to this village.
+The landlady received fourpence per head, I believe it was, for each of
+these wanderers.
+
+'Little enough,' I said.
+
+'Nothing,' she replied.
+
+She did not like the subject at all. Only her respect for me made her
+answer.
+
+'_Bettler, Lumpen, und Taugenichtse!_' I said cheerfully.
+
+'And men who are out of work, and are going back to their own parish,'
+she said stiffly.
+
+So we talked a little, and I too went to bed.
+
+'_Gute Nacht, Frau Wirtin._'
+
+'_Gute Nacht, mein Herr._'
+
+So I went up more and more stone stairs, attended by the young woman. It
+was a great, lofty, old deserted house, with many drab doors.
+
+At last, in the distant topmost floor, I had my bedroom, with two beds
+and bare floor and scant furniture. I looked down at the river far
+below, at the covered bridge, at the far lights on the hill above,
+opposite. Strange to be here in this lost, forgotten place, sleeping
+under the roof with tramps and beggars. I debated whether they would
+steal my boots if I put them out. But I risked it. The door-latch made a
+loud noise on the deserted landing, everywhere felt abandoned,
+forgotten. I wondered where the eight tramps and beggars were asleep.
+There was no way of securing the door. But somehow I felt that, if I
+were destined to be robbed or murdered, it would not be by tramps and
+beggars. So I blew out the candle and lay under the big feather bed,
+listening to the running and whispering of the medieval Rhine.
+
+And when I waked up again it was sunny, it was morning on the hill
+opposite, though the river deep below ran in shadow.
+
+The tramps and beggars were all gone: they must be cleared out by seven
+o'clock in the morning. So I had the inn to myself, I, and the landlady,
+and the serving-woman. Everywhere was very clean, full of the German
+morning energy and brightness, which is so different from the Latin
+morning. The Italians are dead and torpid first thing, the Germans are
+energetic and cheerful.
+
+It was cheerful in the sunny morning, looking down on the swift river,
+the covered, picturesque bridge, the bank and the hill opposite. Then
+down the curving road of the facing hill the Swiss cavalry came riding,
+men in blue uniforms. I went out to watch them. They came thundering
+romantically through the dark cavern of the roofed-in bridge, and they
+dismounted at the entrance to the village. There was a fresh
+morning-cheerful newness everywhere, in the arrival of the troops, in
+the welcome of the villagers.
+
+The Swiss do not look very military, neither in accoutrement nor
+bearing. This little squad of cavalry seemed more like a party of common
+men riding out in some business of their own than like an army. They
+were very republican and very free. The officer who commanded them was
+one of themselves, his authority was by consent.
+
+It was all very pleasant and genuine; there was a sense of ease and
+peacefulness, quite different from the mechanical, slightly sullen
+manoeuvring of the Germans.
+
+The village baker and his assistant came hot and floury from the
+bakehouse, bearing between them a great basket of fresh bread. The
+cavalry were all dismounted by the bridge-head, eating and drinking like
+business men. Villagers came to greet their friends: one soldier kissed
+his father, who came wearing a leathern apron. The school bell
+tang-tang-tanged from above, school children merged timidly through the
+grouped horses, up the narrow street, passing unwillingly with their
+books. The river ran swiftly, the soldiers, very haphazard and slack in
+uniform, real shack-bags, chewed their bread in large mouthfuls; the
+young lieutenant, who seemed to be an officer only by consent of the
+men, stood apart by the bridge-head, gravely. They were all serious and
+self-contented, very unglamorous. It was like a business excursion on
+horseback, harmless and uninspiring. The uniforms were almost ludicrous,
+so ill-fitting and casual.
+
+So I shouldered my own pack and set off, through the bridge over the
+Rhine, and up the hill opposite.
+
+There is something very dead about this country. I remember I picked
+apples from the grass by the roadside, and some were very sweet. But for
+the rest, there was mile after mile of dead, uninspired
+country--uninspired, so neutral and ordinary that it was almost
+destructive.
+
+One gets this feeling always in Switzerland, except high up: this
+feeling of average, of utter soulless ordinariness, something
+intolerable. Mile after mile, to Zurich, it was just the same. It was
+just the same in the tram-car going into Zurich; it was just the same in
+the town, in the shops, in the restaurant. All was the utmost level of
+ordinariness and well-being, but so ordinary that it was like a blight.
+All the picturesqueness of the town is nothing, it is like a most
+ordinary, average, usual person in an old costume. The place was
+soul-killing.
+
+So after two hours' rest, eating in a restaurant, wandering by the quay
+and through the market, and sitting on a seat by the lake, I found a
+steamer that would take me away. That is how I always feel in
+Switzerland: the only possible living sensation is the sensation of
+relief in going away, always going away. The horrible average
+ordinariness of it all, something utterly without flower or soul or
+transcendence, the horrible vigorous ordinariness, is too much.
+
+So I went on a steamer down the long lake, surrounded by low grey hills.
+It was Saturday afternoon. A thin rain came on. I thought I would rather
+be in fiery Hell than in this dead level of average life.
+
+I landed somewhere on the right bank, about three-quarters of the way
+down the lake. It was almost dark. Yet I must walk away. I climbed a
+long hill from the lake, came to the crest, looked down the darkness of
+the valley, and descended into the deep gloom, down into a
+soulless village.
+
+But it was eight o'clock, and I had had enough. One might as well sleep.
+I found the Gasthaus zur Post.
+
+It was a small, very rough inn, having only one common room, with bare
+tables, and a short, stout, grim, rather surly landlady, and a landlord
+whose hair stood up on end, and who was trembling on the edge of
+delirium tremens.
+
+They could only give me boiled ham: so I ate boiled ham and drank beer,
+and tried to digest the utter cold materialism of Switzerland.
+
+As I sat with my back to the wall, staring blankly at the trembling
+landlord, who was ready at any moment to foam at the mouth, and at the
+dour landlady, who was quite capable of keeping him in order, there came
+in one of those dark, showy Italian girls with a man. She wore a blouse
+and skirt, and no hat. Her hair was perfectly dressed. It was really
+Italy. The man was soft, dark, he would get stout later, _trapu_, he
+would have somewhat the figure of Caruso. But as yet he was soft,
+sensuous, young, handsome.
+
+They sat at the long side-table with their beer, and created another
+country at once within the room. Another Italian came, fair and fat and
+slow, one from the Venetian province; then another, a little thin young
+man, who might have been a Swiss save for his vivid movement.
+
+This last was the first to speak to the Germans. The others had just
+said '_Bier._' But the little newcomer entered into a conversation with
+the landlady.
+
+At last there were six Italians sitting talking loudly and warmly at the
+side-table. The slow, cold German-Swiss at the other tables looked at
+them occasionally. The landlord, with his crazed, stretched eyes, glared
+at them with hatred. But they fetched their beer from the bar with easy
+familiarity, and sat at their table, creating a bonfire of life in the
+callousness of the inn.
+
+At last they finished their beer and trooped off down the passage. The
+room was painfully empty. I did not know what to do.
+
+Then I heard the landlord yelling and screeching and snarling from the
+kitchen at the back, for all the world like a mad dog. But the Swiss
+Saturday evening customers at the other tables smoked on and talked in
+their ugly dialect, without trouble. Then the landlady came in, and soon
+after the landlord, he collarless, with his waistcoat unbuttoned,
+showing his loose throat, and accentuating his round pot-belly. His
+limbs were thin and feverish, the skin of his face hung loose, his eyes
+glaring, his hands trembled. Then he sat down to talk to a crony. His
+terrible appearance was a fiasco; nobody heeded him at all, only the
+landlady was surly.
+
+From the back came loud noises of pleasure and excitement and banging
+about. When the room door was opened I could see down the dark passage
+opposite another lighted door. Then the fat, fair Italian came in for
+more beer.
+
+'What is all the noise?' I asked the landlady at last.
+
+'It is the Italians,' she said.
+
+'What are they doing?'
+
+'They are doing a play.'
+
+'Where?'
+
+She jerked her head: 'In the room at the back.'
+
+'Can I go and look at them?'
+
+'I should think so.'
+
+The landlord glaringly watched me go out. I went down the stone passage
+and found a great, half-lighted room that might be used to hold
+meetings, with forms piled at the side. At one end was raised platform
+or stage. And on this stage was a table and a lamp, and the Italians
+grouped round the light, gesticulating and laughing. Their beer mugs
+were on the table and on the floor of the stage; the little sharp youth
+was intently looking over some papers, the others were bending over the
+table with him.
+
+They looked up as I entered from the distance, looked at me in the
+distant twilight of the dusky room, as if I were an intruder, as if I
+should go away when I had seen them. But I said in German:
+
+'May I look?'
+
+They were still unwilling to see or to hear me.
+
+'What do you say?' the small one asked in reply.
+
+The others stood and watched, slightly at bay, like suspicious animals.
+
+'If I might come and look,' I said in German; then, feeling very
+uncomfortable, in Italian: 'You are doing a drama, the landlady
+told me.'
+
+The big empty room was behind me, dark, the little company of Italians
+stood above me in the light of the lamp which was on the table. They all
+watched with unseeing, unwilling looks: I was merely an intrusion.
+
+'We are only learning it,' said the small youth.
+
+They wanted me to go away. But I wanted to stay.
+
+'May I listen?' I said. 'I don't want to stay in there.' And I
+indicated, with a movement of the head, the inn-room beyond.
+
+'Yes,' said the young intelligent man. 'But we are only reading our
+parts.'
+
+They had all become more friendly to me, they accepted me.
+
+'You are a German?' asked one youth.
+
+'No--English.'
+
+'English? But do you live in Switzerland?'
+
+'No--I am walking to Italy.'
+
+'On foot?'
+
+They looked with wakened eyes.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+So I told them about my journey. They were puzzled. They did not quite
+understand why I wanted to walk. But they were delighted with the idea
+of going to Lugano and Como and then to Milan.
+
+'Where do you come from?' I asked them.
+
+They were all from the villages between Verona and Venice. They had seen
+the Garda. I told them of my living there.
+
+'Those peasants of the mountains,' they said at once, 'they are people
+of little education. Rather wild folk.'
+
+And they spoke with good-humoured contempt.
+
+I thought of Paolo, and Il Duro, and the Signor Pietro, our padrone, and
+I resented these factory-hands for criticizing them.
+
+So I sat on the edge of the stage whilst they rehearsed their parts. The
+little thin intelligent fellow, Giuseppino, was the leader. The others
+read their parts in the laborious, disjointed fashion of the peasant,
+who can only see one word at a time, and has then to put the words
+together, afterwards, to make sense. The play was an amateur melodrama,
+printed in little penny booklets, for carnival production. This was only
+the second reading they had given it, and the handsome, dark fellow, who
+was roused and displaying himself before the girl, a hard, erect piece
+of callousness, laughed and flushed and stumbled, and understood nothing
+till it was transferred into him direct through Giuseppino. The fat,
+fair, slow man was more conscientious. He laboured through his part. The
+other two men were in the background more or less.
+
+The most confidential was the fat, fair, slow man, who was called
+Alberto. His part was not very important, so he could sit by me and
+talk to me.
+
+He said they were all workers in the factory--silk, I think it was--in
+the village. They were a whole colony of Italians, thirty or more
+families. They had all come at different times.
+
+Giuseppino had been longest in the village. He had come when he was
+eleven, with his parents, and had attended the Swiss school. So he spoke
+perfect German. He was a clever man, was married, and had two children.
+
+He himself, Alberto, had been seven years in the valley; the girl, la
+Maddelena, had been here ten years; the dark man, Alfredo, who was
+flushed with excitement of her, had been in the village about nine
+years--he alone of all men was not married.
+
+The others had all married Italian wives, and they lived in the great
+dwelling whose windows shone yellow by the rattling factory. They lived
+entirely among themselves; none of them could speak German, more than a
+few words, except the Giuseppino, who was like a native here.
+
+It was very strange being among these Italians exiled in Switzerland.
+Alfredo, the dark one, the unmarried, was in the old tradition. Yet even
+he was curiously subject to a new purpose, as if there were some greater
+new will that included him, sensuous, mindless as he was. He seemed to
+give his consent to something beyond himself. In this he was different
+from Il Duro, in that he had put himself under the control of the
+outside conception.
+
+It was strange to watch them on the stage, the Italians all lambent,
+soft, warm, sensuous, yet moving subject round Giuseppino, who was
+always quiet, always ready, always impersonal. There was a look of
+purpose, almost of devotion on his face, that singled him out and made
+him seem the one stable, eternal being among them. They quarrelled, and
+he let them quarrel up to a certain point; then he called them back. He
+let them do as they liked so long as they adhered more or less to the
+central purpose, so long as they got on in some measure with the play.
+
+All the while they were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The
+Alberto was barman: he went out continually with the glasses. The
+Maddelena had a small glass. In the lamplight of the stage the little
+party read and smoked and practised, exposed to the empty darkness of
+the big room. Queer and isolated it seemed, a tiny, pathetic magicland
+far away from the barrenness of Switzerland. I could believe in the old
+fairy-tales where, when the rock was opened, a magic underworld
+was revealed.
+
+The Alfredo, flushed, roused, handsome, but very soft and enveloping in
+his heat, laughed and threw himself into his pose, laughed foolishly,
+and then gave himself up to his part. The Alberto, slow and laborious,
+yet with a spark of vividness and natural intensity flashing through,
+replied and gesticulated; the Maddelena laid her head on the bosom of
+Alfredo, the other men started into action, and the play proceeded
+intently for half an hour.
+
+Quick, vivid, and sharp, the little Giuseppino was always central. But
+he seemed almost invisible. When I think back, I can scarcely see him, I
+can only see the others, the lamplight on their faces and on their full
+gesticulating limbs. I can see--the Maddelena, rather coarse and hard
+and repellent, declaiming her words in a loud, half-cynical voice,
+falling on the breast of the Alfredo, who was soft and sensuous, more
+like a female, flushing, with his mouth getting wet, his eyes moist, as
+he was roused. I can see the Alberto, slow, laboured, yet with a kind of
+pristine simplicity in all his movements, that touched his fat
+commonplaceness with beauty. Then there were the two other men, shy,
+inflammable, unintelligent, with their sudden Italian rushes of hot
+feeling. All their faces are distinct in the lamplight, all their bodies
+ate palpable and dramatic.
+
+But the face of the Giuseppino is like a pale luminousness, a sort of
+gleam among all the ruddy glow, his body is evanescent, like a shadow.
+And his being seemed to cast its influence over all the others, except
+perhaps the woman, who was hard and resistant. The other men seemed all
+overcast, mitigated, in part transfigured by the will of the little
+leader. But they were very soft stuff, if inflammable.
+
+The young woman of the inn, niece of the landlady, came down and called
+out across the room.
+
+'We will go away from here now,' said the Giuseppino to me. 'They close
+at eleven. But we have another inn in the next parish that is open all
+night. Come with us and drink some wine.'
+
+'But,' I said, 'you would rather be alone.'
+
+No; they pressed me to go, they wanted me to go with them, they were
+eager, they wanted to entertain me. Alfredo, flushed, wet-mouthed, warm,
+protested I must drink wine, the real Italian red wine, from their own
+village at home. They would have no nay.
+
+So I told the landlady. She said I must be back by twelve o'clock.
+
+The night was very dark. Below the road the stream was rushing; there
+was a great factory on the other side of the water, making faint
+quivering lights of reflection, and one could see the working of
+machinery shadowy through the lighted windows. Near by was the tall
+tenement where the Italians lived.
+
+We went on through the straggling, raw village, deep beside the stream,
+then over the small bridge, and up the steep hill down which I had come
+earlier in the evening.
+
+So we arrived at the café. It was so different inside from the German
+inn, yet it was not like an Italian café either. It was brilliantly
+lighted, clean, new, and there were red-and-white cloths on the tables.
+The host was in the room, and his daughter, a beautiful red-haired girl.
+
+Greetings were exchanged with the quick, intimate directness of Italy.
+But there was another note also, a faint echo of reserve, as though they
+reserved themselves from the outer world, making a special inner
+community.
+
+Alfredo was hot: he took off his coat. We all sat freely at a long
+table, whilst the red-haired girl brought a quart of red wine. At other
+tables men were playing cards, with the odd Neapolitan cards. They too
+were talking Italian. It was a warm, ruddy bit of Italy within the cold
+darkness of Switzerland.
+
+'When you come to Italy,' they said to me, 'salute it from us, salute
+the sun, and the earth, _l'Italia_.'
+
+So we drank in salute of Italy. They sent their greeting by me.
+
+'You know in Italy there is the sun, the sun,' said Alfredo to me,
+profoundly moved, wet-mouthed, tipsy.
+
+I was reminded of Enrico Persevalli and his terrifying cry at the end of
+_Ghosts_:
+
+'_Il sole, il sole!_'
+
+So we talked for a while of Italy. They had a pained tenderness for it,
+sad, reserved.
+
+'Don't you want to go back?' I said, pressing them to tell me
+definitely. 'Won't you go back some time?'
+
+'Yes,' they said, 'we will go back.'
+
+But they spoke reservedly, without freedom. We talked about Italy, about
+songs, and Carnival; about the food, polenta, and salt. They laughed at
+my pretending to cut the slabs of polenta with a string: that rejoiced
+them all: it took them back to the Italian mezzo-giorno, the bells
+jangling in the campanile, the eating after the heavy work on the land.
+
+But they laughed with the slight pain and contempt and fondness which
+every man feels towards his past, when he has struggled away from that
+past, from the conditions which made it.
+
+They loved Italy passionately; but they would not go back. All their
+blood, all their senses were Italian, needed the Italian sky, the
+speech, the sensuous life. They could hardly live except through the
+senses. Their minds were not developed, mentally they were children,
+lovable, naïve, almost fragile children. But sensually they were men:
+sensually they were accomplished.
+
+Yet a new tiny flower was struggling to open in them, the flower of a
+new spirit. The substratum of Italy has always been pagan, sensuous, the
+most potent symbol the sexual symbol. The child is really a
+non-Christian symbol: it is the symbol of mans's triumph of eternal life
+in procreation. The worship of the Cross never really held good in
+Italy. The Christianity of Northern Europe has never had any
+place there.
+
+And now, when Northern Europe is turning back on its own Christianity,
+denying it all, the Italians are struggling with might and main against
+the sensuous spirit which still dominates them. When Northern Europe,
+whether it hates Nietzsche or not, is crying out for the Dionysic
+ecstasy, practising on itself the Dionysic ecstasy, Southern Europe is
+breaking free from Dionysus, from the triumphal affirmation of life over
+death, immortality through procreation.
+
+I could see these sons of Italy would never go back. Men like Paolo and
+Il Duro broke away only to return. The dominance of the old form was too
+strong for them. Call it love of country or love of the village,
+campanilismo, or what not, it was the dominance of the old pagan form,
+the old affirmation of immortality through procreation, as opposed to
+the Christian affirmation of immortality through self-death and
+social love.
+
+But 'John' and these Italians in Switzerland were a generation younger,
+and they would not go back, at least not to the old Italy. Suffer as
+they might, and they did suffer, wincing in every nerve and fibre from
+the cold material insentience of the northern countries and of America,
+still they would endure this for the sake of something else they wanted.
+They would suffer a death in the flesh, as 'John' had suffered in
+fighting the street crowd, as these men suffered year after year cramped
+in their black gloomy cold Swiss valley, working in the factory. But
+there would come a new spirit out of it.
+
+Even Alfredo was submitted to the new process; though he belonged
+entirely by nature to the sort of Il Duro, he was purely sensuous and
+mindless. But under the influence of Giuseppino he was thrown down, as
+fallow to the new spirit that would come.
+
+And then, when the others were all partially tipsy, the Giuseppino began
+to talk to me. In him was a steady flame burning, burning, burning, a
+flame of the mind, of the spirit, something new and clear, something
+that held even the soft, sensuous Alfredo in submission, besides all the
+others, who had some little development of mind.
+
+'_Sa signore_,' said the Giuseppino to me, quiet, almost invisible or
+inaudible, as it seemed, like a spirit addressing me, '_l'uomo non ha
+patria_--a man has no country. What has the Italian Government to do
+with us. What does a Government mean? It makes us work, it takes part of
+our wages away from us, it makes us soldiers--and what for? What is
+government for?'
+
+'Have you been a soldier?' I interrupted him.
+
+He had not, none of them had: that was why they could not really go back
+to Italy. Now this was out; this explained partly their curious
+reservation in speaking about their beloved country. They had forfeited
+parents as well as homeland.
+
+'What does the Government do? It takes taxes; it has an army and police,
+and it makes roads. But we could do without an army, and we could be our
+own police, and we could make our own roads. What is this Government?
+Who wants it? Only those who are unjust, and want to have advantage over
+somebody else. It is an instrument of injustice and of wrong.
+
+'Why should we have a Government? Here, in this village, there are
+thirty families of Italians. There is no government for them, no Italian
+Government. And we live together better than in Italy. We are richer and
+freer, we have no policemen, no poor laws. We help each other, and there
+are no poor.
+
+'Why are these Governments always doing what we don't want them to do?
+We should not be fighting in the Cirenaica if we were all Italians. It
+is the Government that does it. They talk and talk and do things with
+us: but we don't want them.'
+
+The others, tipsy, sat round the table with the terrified gravity of
+children who are somehow responsible for things they do not understand.
+They stirred in their seats, turning aside, with gestures almost of
+pain, of imprisonment. Only Alfredo, laying his hand on mine, was
+laughing, loosely, floridly. He would upset all the Government with a
+jerk of his well-built shoulder, and then he would have a spree--such a
+spree. He laughed wetly to me.
+
+The Giuseppino waited patiently during this tipsy confidence, but his
+pale clarity and beauty was something constant star-like in comparison
+with the flushed, soft handsomeness of the other. He waited patiently,
+looking at me.
+
+But I did not want him to go on: I did not want to answer. I could feel
+a new spirit in him, something strange and pure and slightly
+frightening. He wanted something which was beyond me. And my soul was
+somewhere in tears, crying helplessly like an infant in the night. I
+could not respond: I could not answer. He seemed to look at me, me, an
+Englishman, an educated man, for corroboration. But I could not
+corroborate him. I knew the purity and new struggling towards birth of a
+true star-like spirit. But I could not confirm him in his utterance: my
+soul could not respond. I did not believe in the perfectibility of man.
+I did not believe in infinite harmony among men. And this was his star,
+this belief.
+
+It was nearly midnight. A Swiss came in and asked for beer. The Italians
+gathered round them a curious darkness of reserve. And then I must go.
+
+They shook hands with me warmly, truthfully, putting a sort of implicit
+belief in me, as representative of some further knowledge. But there was
+a fixed, calm resolve over the face of the Giuseppino, a sort of steady
+faith, even in disappointment. He gave me a copy of a little Anarchist
+paper published in Geneva. _L'Anarchista_, I believe it was called. I
+glanced at it. It was in Italian, naïve, simple, rather rhetorical. So
+they were all Anarchists, these Italians.
+
+I ran down the hill in the thick Swiss darkness to the little bridge,
+and along the uneven cobbled street. I did not want to think, I did not
+want to know. I wanted to arrest my activity, to keep it confined to the
+moment, to the adventure.
+
+When I came to the flight of stone steps which led up to the door of the
+inn, at the side I saw in the darkness two figures. They said a low good
+night and parted; the girl began to knock at the door, the man
+disappeared. It was the niece of the landlady parting from her lover.
+
+We waited outside the locked door, at the top of the stone steps, in the
+darkness of midnight. The stream rustled below. Then came a shouting and
+an insane snarling within the passage; the bolts were not withdrawn.
+
+'It is the gentleman, it is the strange gentleman,' called the girl.
+
+Then came again the furious shouting snarls, and the landlord's mad
+voice:
+
+'Stop out, stop out there. The door won't be opened again.'
+
+'The strange gentleman is here,' repeated the girl.
+
+Then more movement was heard, and the door was suddenly opened, and the
+landlord rushed out upon us, wielding a broom. It was a strange sight,
+in the half-lighted passage. I stared blankly in the doorway. The
+landlord dropped the broom he was waving and collapsed as if by magic,
+looking at me, though he continued to mutter madly, unintelligibly. The
+girl slipped past me, and the landlord snarled. Then he picked up the
+brush, at the same time crying:
+
+'You are late, the door was shut, it will not be opened. We shall have
+the police in the house. We said twelve o'clock; at twelve o'clock the
+door must be shut, and must not be opened again. If you are late you
+stay out--'
+
+So he went snarling, his voice rising higher and higher, away into the
+kitchen.
+
+'You are coming to your room?' the landlady said to me coldly. And she
+led me upstairs.
+
+The room was over the road, clean, but rather ugly, with a large tin,
+that had once contained lard or Swiss-milk, to wash in. But the bed was
+good enough, which was all that mattered.
+
+I heard the landlord yelling, and there was a long and systematic
+thumping somewhere, thump, thump, thump, and banging. I wondered where
+it was. I could not locate it at all, because my room lay beyond another
+large room: I had to go through a large room, by the foot of two beds,
+to get to my door; so I could not quite tell where anything was.
+
+But I went to sleep whilst I was wondering.
+
+I woke in the morning and washed in the tin. I could see a few people in
+the street, walking in the Sunday morning leisure. It felt like Sunday
+in England, and I shrank from it. I could see none of the Italians. The
+factory stood there, raw and large and sombre, by the stream, and the
+drab-coloured stone tenements were close by. Otherwise the village was a
+straggling Swiss street, almost untouched.
+
+The landlord was quiet and reasonable, even friendly, in the morning. He
+wanted to talk to me: where had I bought my boots, was his first
+question. I told him in Munich. And how much had they cost? I told him
+twenty-eight marks. He was much impressed by them: such good boots, of
+such soft, strong, beautiful leather; he had not seen such boots for a
+long time.
+
+Then I knew it was he who had cleaned my boots. I could see him
+fingering them and wondering over them. I rather liked him. I could see
+he had had imagination once, and a certain fineness of nature. Now he
+was corrupted with drink, too far gone to be even a human being. I hated
+the village.
+
+They set bread and butter and a piece of cheese weighing about five
+pounds, and large, fresh, sweet cakes for breakfast. I ate and was
+thankful: the food was good.
+
+A couple of village youths came in, in their Sunday clothes. They had
+the Sunday stiffness. It reminded me of the stiffness and curious
+self-consciousness that comes over life in England on a Sunday. But the
+Landlord sat with his waistcoat hanging open over his shirt,
+pot-bellied, his ruined face leaning forward, talking, always talking,
+wanting to know.
+
+So in a few minutes I was out on the road again, thanking God for the
+blessing of a road that belongs to no man, and travels away from
+all men.
+
+I did not want to see the Italians. Something had got tied up in me, and
+I could not bear to see them again. I liked them so much; but, for some
+reason or other, my mind stopped like clockwork if I wanted to think of
+them and of what their lives would be, their future. It was as if some
+curious negative magnetism arrested my mind, prevented it from working,
+the moment I turned it towards these Italians.
+
+I do not know why it was. But I could never write to them, or think of
+them, or even read the paper they gave me though it lay in my drawer for
+months, in Italy, and I often glanced over six lines of it. And often,
+often my mind went back to the group, the play they were rehearsing, the
+wine in the pleasant café, and the night. But the moment my memory
+touched them, my whole soul stopped and was null; I could not go on.
+Even now I cannot really consider them in thought.
+
+I shrink involuntarily away. I do not know why this is.
+
+
+
+
+_The Return Journey_
+
+
+When one walks, one must travel west or south. If one turns northward or
+eastward it is like walking down a cul-de-sac, to the blind end.
+
+So it has been since the Crusaders came home satiated, and the
+Renaissance saw the western sky as an archway into the future. So it is
+still. We must go westwards and southwards.
+
+It is a sad and gloomy thing to travel even from Italy into France. But
+it is a joyful thing to walk south to Italy, south and west. It is so.
+And there is a certain exaltation in the thought of going west, even to
+Cornwall, to Ireland. It is as if the magnetic poles were south-west and
+north-east, for our spirits, with the south-west, under the sunset, as
+the positive pole. So whilst I walk through Switzerland, though it is a
+valley of gloom and depression, a light seems to flash out under every
+footstep, with the joy of progression.
+
+It was Sunday morning when I left the valley where the Italians lived. I
+went quickly over the stream, heading for Lucerne. It was a good thing
+to be out of doors, with one's pack on one's back, climbing uphill. But
+the trees were thick by the roadside; I was not yet free. It was Sunday
+morning, very still.
+
+In two hours I was at the top of the hill, looking out over the
+intervening valley at the long lake of Zurich, spread there beyond with
+its girdle of low hills, like a relief-map. I could not bear to look at
+it, it was so small and unreal. I had a feeling as if it were false, a
+large relief-map that I was looking down upon, and which I wanted to
+smash. It seemed to intervene between me and some reality. I could not
+believe that that was the real world. It was a figment, a fabrication,
+like a dull landscape painted on a wall, to hide the real landscape.
+
+So I went on, over to the other side of the hill, and I looked out
+again. Again there were the smoky-looking hills and the lake like a
+piece of looking-glass. But the hills were higher: that big one was the
+Rigi. I set off down the hill.
+
+There was fat agricultural land and several villages. And church was
+over. The churchgoers were all coming home: men in black broadcloth and
+old chimney-pot silk hats, carrying their umbrellas; women in ugly
+dresses, carrying books and umbrellas. The streets were dotted with
+these black-clothed men and stiff women, all reduced to a Sunday
+nullity. I hated it. It reminded me of that which I knew in my boyhood,
+that stiff, null 'propriety' which used to come over us, like a sort of
+deliberate and self-inflicted cramp, on Sundays. I hated these elders in
+black broadcloth, with their neutral faces, going home piously to their
+Sunday dinners. I hated the feeling of these villages, comfortable,
+well-to-do, clean, and proper.
+
+And my boot was chafing two of my toes. That always happens. I had come
+down to a wide, shallow valley-bed, marshy. So about a mile out of the
+village I sat down by a stone bridge, by a stream, and tore up my
+handkerchief, and bound up the toes. And as I sat binding my toes, two
+of the elders in black, with umbrellas under their arms, approached from
+the direction of the village.
+
+They made me so furious, I had to hasten to fasten my boot, to hurry on
+again, before they should come near me. I could not bear the way they
+walked and talked, so crambling and material and mealy-mouthed.
+
+Then it did actually begin to rain. I was just going down a short hill.
+So I sat under a bush and watched the trees drip. I was so glad to be
+there, homeless, without place or belonging, crouching under the leaves
+in the copse by the road, that I felt I had, like the meek, inherited
+the earth. Some men went by, with their coat-collars turned up, and the
+rain making still blacker their black broadcloth shoulders. They did not
+see me. I was as safe and separate as a ghost. So I ate the remains of
+my food that I had bought in Zurich, and waited for the rain.
+
+Later, in the wet Sunday afternoon, I went on to the little lake, past
+many inert, neutral, material people, down an ugly road where trams ran.
+The blight of Sunday was almost intolerable near the town.
+
+So on I went, by the side of the steamy, reedy lake, walking the length
+of it. Then suddenly I went in to a little villa by the water for tea.
+In Switzerland every house is a villa.
+
+But this villa, was kept by two old ladies and a delicate dog, who must
+not get his feet wet. I was very happy there. I had good jam and strange
+honey-cakes for tea, that I liked, and the little old ladies pattered
+round in a great stir, always whirling like two dry leaves after the
+restless dog.
+
+'Why must he not go out?' I said.
+
+'Because it is wet,' they answered, 'and he coughs and sneezes.'
+
+'Without a handkerchief, that is not _angenehm_' I said.
+
+So we became bosom friends.
+
+'You are Austrian?' they said to me.
+
+I said I was from Graz; that my father was a doctor in Graz, and that I
+was walking for my pleasure through the countries of Europe.
+
+I said this because I knew a doctor from Graz who was always wandering
+about, and because I did not want to be myself, an Englishman, to these
+two old ladies. I wanted to be something else. So we exchanged
+confidences.
+
+They told me, in their queer, old, toothless fashion, about their
+visitors, a man who used to fish all day, every day for three weeks,
+fish every hour of the day, though many a day he caught nothing--nothing
+at all--still he fished from the boat; and so on, such trivialities.
+Then they told me of a third sister who had died, a third little old
+lady. One could feel the gap in the house. They cried; and I, being an
+Austrian from Graz, to my astonishment felt my tears slip over on to the
+table. I also _was_ sorry, and I would have kissed the little old ladies
+to comfort them.
+
+'Only in heaven it is warm, and it doesn't rain, and no one dies,' I
+said, looking at the wet leaves.
+
+Then I went away. I would have stayed the night at this house: I wanted
+to. But I had developed my Austrian character too far.
+
+So I went on to a detestable brutal inn in the town. And the next day I
+climbed over the back of the detestable Rigi, with its vile hotel, to
+come to Lucerne. There, on the Rigi, I met a lost young Frenchman who
+could speak no German, and who said he could not find people to speak
+French. So we sat on a stone and became close friends, and I promised
+faithfully to go and visit him in his barracks in Algiers: I was to sail
+from Naples to Algiers. He wrote me the address on his card, and told me
+he had friends in the regiment, to whom I should be introduced, and we
+could have a good time, if I would stay a week or two, down there
+in Algiers.
+
+How much more real Algiers was than the rock on the Rigi where we sat,
+or the lake beneath, or the mountains beyond. Algiers is very real,
+though I have never seen it, and my friend is my friend for ever, though
+I have lost his card and forgotten his name. He was a Government clerk
+from Lyons, making this his first foreign tour before he began his
+military service. He showed me his 'circular excursion ticket'. Then at
+last we parted, for he must get to the top of the Rigi, and I must get
+to the bottom.
+
+Lucerne and its lake were as irritating as ever--like the wrapper round
+milk chocolate. I could not sleep even one night there: I took the
+steamer down the lake, to the very last station. There I found a good
+German inn, and was happy.
+
+There was a tall thin young man, whose face was red and inflamed from
+the sun. I thought he was a German tourist. He had just come in; and he
+was eating bread and milk. He and I were alone in the eating-room. He
+was looking at an illustrated paper.
+
+'Does the steamer stop here all night?' I asked him in German, hearing
+the boat bustling and blowing her steam on the water outside, and
+glancing round at her lights, red and white, in the pitch darkness.
+
+He only shook his head over his bread and milk, and did not lift his
+face.
+
+'Are you English, then?' I said.
+
+No one but an Englishman would have hidden his face in a bowl of milk,
+and have shaken his red ears in such painful confusion.
+
+'Yes,' he said, 'I am.'
+
+And I started almost out of my skin at the unexpected London accent. It
+was as if one suddenly found oneself in the Tube.
+
+'So am I,' I said. 'Where have you come from?'
+
+Then he began, like a general explaining his plans, to tell me. He had
+walked round over the Furka Pass, had been on foot four or five days. He
+had walked tremendously. Knowing no German, and nothing of the
+mountains, he had set off alone on this tour: he had a fortnight's
+holiday. So he had come over the Rhône Glacier across the Furka and down
+from Andermatt to the Lake. On this last day he had walked about thirty
+mountain miles.
+
+'But weren't you tired?' I said, aghast.
+
+He was. Under the inflamed redness of his sun- and wind- and snow-burned
+face he was sick with fatigue. He had done over a hundred miles in the
+last four days.
+
+'Did you enjoy it?' I asked.
+
+'Oh yes. I wanted to do it all.' He wanted to do it, and he _had_ done
+it. But God knows what he wanted to do it for. He had now one day at
+Lucerne, one day at Interlaken and Berne, then London.
+
+I was sorry for him in my soul, he was so cruelly tired, so perishingly
+victorious.
+
+'Why did you do so much?' I said. 'Why did you come on foot all down the
+valley when you could have taken the train? Was it worth it?'
+
+'I think so,' he said.
+
+Yet he was sick with fatigue and over-exhaustion. His eyes were quite
+dark, sightless: he seemed to have lost the power of seeing, to be
+virtually blind. He hung his head forward when he had to write a post
+card, as if he felt his way. But he turned his post card so that I
+should not see to whom it was addressed; not that I was interested; only
+I noticed his little, cautious, English movement of privacy.
+
+'What time will you be going on?' I asked.
+
+'When is the first steamer?' he said, and he turned out a guide-book
+with a time-table. He would leave at about seven.
+
+'But why so early?' I said to him.
+
+He must be in Lucerne at a certain hour, and at Interlaken in the
+evening.
+
+'I suppose you will rest when you get to London?' I said.
+
+He looked at me quickly, reservedly.
+
+I was drinking beer: I asked him wouldn't he have something. He thought
+a moment, then said he would have another glass of hot milk. The
+landlord came--'And bread?' he asked.
+
+The Englishman refused. He could not eat, really. Also he was poor; he
+had to husband his money. The landlord brought the milk and asked me,
+when would the gentleman want to go away. So I made arrangements between
+the landlord and the stranger. But the Englishman was slightly
+uncomfortable at my intervention. He did not like me to know what he
+would have for breakfast.
+
+I could feel so well the machine that had him in its grip. He slaved for
+a year, mechanically, in London, riding in the Tube, working in the
+office. Then for a fortnight he was let free. So he rushed to
+Switzerland, with a tour planned out, and with just enough money to see
+him through, and to buy presents at Interlaken: bits of the edelweiss
+pottery: I could see him going home with them.
+
+So he arrived, and with amazing, pathetic courage set forth on foot in a
+strange land, to face strange landlords, with no language but English at
+his command, and his purse definitely limited. Yet he wanted to go among
+the mountains, to cross a glacier. So he had walked on and on, like one
+possessed, ever forward. His name might have been Excelsior, indeed.
+
+But then, when he reached his Furka, only to walk along the ridge and to
+descend on the same side! My God, it was killing to the soul. And here
+he was, down again from the mountains, beginning his journey home again:
+steamer and train and steamer and train and Tube, till he was back in
+the machine.
+
+It hadn't let him go, and he knew it. Hence his cruel self-torture of
+fatigue, his cruel exercise of courage. He who hung his head in his milk
+in torment when I asked him a question in German, what courage had he
+not needed to take this his very first trip out of England, alone,
+on foot!
+
+His eyes were dark and deep with unfathomable courage. Yet he was going
+back in the morning. He was going back. All he had courage for was to go
+back. He would go back, though he died by inches. Why not? It was
+killing him, it was like living loaded with irons. But he had the
+courage to submit, to die that way, since it was the way allotted
+to him.
+
+The way he sank on the table in exhaustion, drinking his milk, his will,
+nevertheless, so perfect and unblemished, triumphant, though his body
+was broken and in anguish, was almost too much to bear. My heart was
+wrung for my countryman, wrung till it bled.
+
+I could not bear to understand my countryman, a man who worked for his
+living, as I had worked, as nearly all my countrymen work. He would not
+give in. On his holiday he would walk, to fulfil his purpose, walk on;
+no matter how cruel the effort were, he would not rest, he would not
+relinquish his purpose nor abate his will, not by one jot or tittle. His
+body must pay whatever his will demanded, though it were torture.
+
+It all seemed to me so foolish. I was almost in tears. He went to bed. I
+walked by the dark lake, and talked to the girl in the inn. She was a
+pleasant girl: it was a pleasant inn, a homely place. One could be
+happy there.
+
+In the morning it was sunny, the lake was blue. By night I should be
+nearly at the crest of my journey. I was glad.
+
+The Englishman had gone. I looked for his name in the book. It was
+written in a fair, clerkly hand. He lived at Streatham. Suddenly I hated
+him. The dogged fool, to keep his nose on the grindstone like that. What
+was all his courage but the very tip-top of cowardice? What a vile
+nature--almost Sadish, proud, like the infamous Red Indians, of being
+able to stand torture.
+
+The landlord came to talk to me. He was fat and comfortable and too
+respectful. But I had to tell him all the Englishman had done, in the
+way of a holiday, just to shame his own fat, ponderous, inn-keeper's
+luxuriousness that was too gross. Then all I got out of his enormous
+comfortableness was:
+
+'Yes, that's a _very_ long step to take.'
+
+So I set off myself, up the valley between the close, snow-topped
+mountains, whose white gleamed above me as I crawled, small as an
+insect, along the dark, cold valley below.
+
+There had been a cattle fair earlier in the morning, so troops of cattle
+were roving down the road, some with bells tang-tanging, all with soft
+faces and startled eyes and a sudden swerving of horns. The grass was
+very green by the roads and by the streams; the shadows of the mountain
+slopes were very dark on either hand overhead, and the sky with snowy
+flanks and tips was high up.
+
+Here, away from the world, the villages were quiet and obscure--left
+behind. They had the same fascinating atmosphere of being forgotten,
+left out of the world, that old English villages have. And buying apples
+and cheese and bread in a little shop that sold everything and smelled
+of everything, I felt at home again.
+
+But climbing gradually higher, mile after mile, always between the
+shadows of the high mountains, I was glad I did not live in the Alps.
+The villages on the slopes, the people there, seemed, as if they _must_
+gradually, bit by bit, slide down and tumble to the water-course, and be
+rolled on away, away to the sea. Straggling, haphazard little villages
+ledged on the slope, high up, beside their wet, green, hanging meadows,
+with pine trees behind and the valley bottom far below, and rocks right
+above, on both sides, seemed like little temporary squattings of outcast
+people. It seemed impossible that they should persist there, with great
+shadows wielded over them, like a menace, and gleams of brief sunshine,
+like a window. There was a sense of momentariness and expectation. It
+seemed as though some dramatic upheaval must take place, the mountains
+fall down into their own shadows. The valley beds were like deep graves,
+the sides of the mountains like the collapsing walls of a grave. The
+very mountain-tops above, bright with transcendent snow, seemed like
+death, eternal death.
+
+There, it seemed, in the glamorous snow, was the source of death, which
+fell down in great waves of shadow and rock, rushing to the level earth.
+And all the people of the mountains, on the slopes, in the valleys,
+seemed to live upon this great, rushing wave of death, of breaking-down,
+of destruction.
+
+The very pure source of breaking-down, decomposition, the very quick of
+cold death, is the snowy mountain-peak above. There, eternally, goes on
+the white foregathering of the crystals, out of the deathly cold of the
+heavens; this is the static nucleus where death meets life in its
+elementality. And thence, from their white, radiant nucleus of death in
+life, flows the great flux downwards, towards life and warmth. And we
+below, we cannot think of the flux upwards, that flows from the
+needle-point of snow to the unutterable cold and death.
+
+The people under the mountains, they seem to live in the flux of death,
+the last, strange, overshadowed units of life. Big shadows wave over
+them, there is the eternal noise of water falling icily downwards from
+the source of death overhead.
+
+And the people under the shadows, dwelling in the tang of snow and the
+noise of icy water, seem dark, almost sordid, brutal. There is no
+flowering or coming to flower, only this persistence, in the ice-touched
+air, of reproductive life.
+
+But it is difficult to get a sense of a native population. Everywhere
+are the hotels and the foreigners, the parasitism. Yet there is, unseen,
+this overshadowed, overhung, sordid mountain population, ledged on the
+slopes and in the crevices. In the wider valleys there is still a sense
+of cowering among the people. But they catch a new tone from their
+contact with the foreigners. And in the towns are nothing but
+tradespeople.
+
+So I climbed slowly up, for a whole day, first along the highroad,
+sometimes above and sometimes below the twisting, serpentine railway,
+then afterwards along a path on the side of the hill--a path that went
+through the crew-yards of isolated farms and even through the garden of
+a village priest. The priest was decorating an archway. He stood on a
+chair in the sunshine, reaching up with a garland, whilst the
+serving-woman stood below, talking loudly.
+
+The valley here seemed wider, the great flanks of the mountains gave
+place, the peaks above were further back. So one was happier. I was
+pleased as I sat by the thin track of single flat stones that dropped
+swiftly downhill.
+
+At the bottom was a little town with a factory or quarry, or a foundry,
+some place with long, smoking chimneys; which made me feel quite at home
+among the mountains.
+
+It is the hideous rawness of the world of men, the horrible, desolating
+harshness of the advance of the industrial world upon the world of
+nature, that is so painful. It looks as though the industrial spread of
+mankind were a sort of dry disintegration advancing and advancing, a
+process of dry disintegration. If only we could learn to take thought
+for the whole world instead of for merely tiny bits of it.
+
+I went through the little, hideous, crude factory-settlement in the high
+valley, where the eternal snows gleamed, past the enormous
+advertisements for chocolate and hotels, up the last steep slope of the
+pass to where the tunnel begins. Göschenen, the village at the mouth of
+the tunnel, is all railway sidings and haphazard villas for tourists,
+post cards, and touts and weedy carriages; disorder and sterile chaos,
+high up. How should any one stay there!
+
+I went on up the pass itself. There were various parties of visitors on
+the roads and tracks, people from towns incongruously walking and
+driving. It was drawing on to evening. I climbed slowly, between the
+great cleft in the rock where are the big iron gates, through which the
+road winds, winds half-way down the narrow gulley of solid, living rock,
+the very throat of the path, where hangs a tablet in memory of many
+Russians killed.
+
+Emerging through the dark rocky throat of the pass I came to the upper
+world, the level upper world. It was evening, livid, cold. On either
+side spread the sort of moorland of the wide pass-head. I drew near
+along the high-road, to Andermatt.
+
+Everywhere were soldiers moving about the livid, desolate waste of this
+upper world. I passed the barracks and the first villas for visitors.
+Darkness was coming on; the straggling, inconclusive street of Andermatt
+looked as if it were some accident--houses, hotels, barracks,
+lodging-places tumbled at random as the caravan of civilization crossed
+this high, cold, arid bridge of the European world.
+
+I bought two post cards and wrote them out of doors in the cold, livid
+twilight. Then I asked a soldier where was the post-office. He directed
+me. It was something like sending post cards from Skegness or Bognor,
+there in the post-office.
+
+I was trying to make myself agree to stay in Andermatt for the night.
+But I could not. The whole place was so terribly raw and flat and
+accidental, as if great pieces of furniture had tumbled out of a
+pantechnicon and lay discarded by the road. I hovered in the street, in
+the twilight, trying to make myself stay. I looked at the announcements
+of lodgings and boarding for visitors. It was no good. I could not go
+into one of these houses.
+
+So I passed on, through the old, low, broad-eaved houses that cringe
+down to the very street, out into the open again. The air was fierce and
+savage. On one side was a moorland, level; on the other a sweep of naked
+hill, curved concave, and sprinkled with snow. I could see how wonderful
+it would all be, under five or six feet of winter snow, skiing and
+tobogganing at Christmas. But it needed the snow. In the summer there is
+to be seen nothing but the winter's broken detritus.
+
+The twilight deepened, though there was still the strange, glassy
+translucency of the snow-lit air. A fragment of moon was in the sky. A
+carriage-load of French tourists passed me. There was the loud noise of
+water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the
+sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a
+second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity,
+this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that
+mocks and destroys our warm being.
+
+So I came, in the early darkness, to the little village with the broken
+castle that stands for ever frozen at the point where the track parts,
+one way continuing along the ridge, to the Furka Pass, the other
+swerving over the hill to the left, over the Gotthardt.
+
+In this village I must stay. I saw a woman looking hastily, furtively
+from a doorway. I knew she was looking for visitors. I went on up the
+hilly street. There were only a few wooden houses and a gaily lighted
+wooden inn, where men were laughing, and strangers, men, standing
+talking loudly in the doorway.
+
+It was very difficult to go to a house this night. I did not want to
+approach any of them. I turned back to the house of the peering woman.
+She had looked hen-like and anxious. She would be glad of a visitor to
+help her pay her rent.
+
+It was a clean, pleasant wooden house, made to keep out the cold. That
+seemed its one function: to defend the inmates from the cold. It was
+furnished like a hut, just tables and chairs and bare wooden walls. One
+felt very close and secure in the room, as in a hut, shut away from the
+outer world.
+
+The hen-like woman came.
+
+'Can I have a bed,' I said, 'for the night?'
+
+'_Abendessen, ja!_' she replied. 'Will you have soup and boiled beef and
+vegetables?'
+
+I said I would, so I sat down to wait, in the utter silence. I could
+scarcely hear the ice-stream, the silence seemed frozen, the house
+empty. The woman seemed to be flitting aimlessly, scurriedly, in reflex
+against the silence. One could almost touch the stillness as one could
+touch the walls, or the stove, or the table with white American
+oil-cloth.
+
+Suddenly she appeared again.
+
+'What will you drink?'
+
+She watched my face anxiously, and her voice was pathetic, slightly
+pleading in its quickness.
+
+'Wine or beer?' she said.
+
+I would not trust the coldness of beer.
+
+'A half of red wine,' I said.
+
+I knew she was going to keep me an indefinite time.
+
+She appeared with the wine and bread.
+
+'Would you like omelette after the beef?' she asked. 'Omelette with
+cognac--I can make it _very_ good.'
+
+I knew I should be spending too much, but I said yes. After all, why
+should I not eat, after the long walk?
+
+So she left me again, whilst I sat in the utter isolation and stillness,
+eating bread and drinking the wine, which was good. And I listened for
+any sound: only the faint noise of the stream. And I wondered, Why am I
+here, on this ridge of the Alps, in the lamp-lit, wooden, close-shut
+room, alone? Why am I here?
+
+Yet somehow I was glad, I was happy even: such splendid silence and
+coldness and clean isolation. It was something eternal, unbroachable: I
+was free, in this heavy, ice-cold air, this upper world, alone. London,
+far away below, beyond, England, Germany, France--they were all so
+unreal in the night. It was a sort of grief that this continent all
+beneath was so unreal, false, non-existent in its activity. Out of the
+silence one looked down on it, and it seemed to have lost all
+importance, all significance. It was so big, yet it had no significance.
+The kingdom of the world had no significance: what could one do but
+wander about?
+
+The woman came with my soup. I asked her, did not many people come in
+the summer. But she was scared away, she did not answer, she went like a
+leaf in the wind. However, the soup was good and plentiful.
+
+She was a long time before she came with the next course. Then she put
+the tray on the table, and looking at me, then looking away,
+shrinking, she said:
+
+'You must excuse me if I don't answer you--I don't hear well--I am
+rather deaf.'
+
+I looked at her, and I winced also. She shrank in such simple pain from
+the fact of her defect. I wondered if she were bullied because of it, or
+only afraid lest visitors would dislike it.
+
+She put the dishes in order, set me my plate, quickly, nervously, and
+was gone again, like a scared chicken. Being tired, I wanted to weep
+over her, the nervous, timid hen, so frightened by her own deafness. The
+house was silent of her, empty. It was perhaps her deafness which
+created this empty soundlessness.
+
+When she came with the omelette, I said to her loudly:
+
+'That was very good, the soup and meat.' So she quivered nervously, and
+said, 'Thank you,' and I managed to talk to her. She was like most deaf
+people, in that her terror of not hearing made her six times worse than
+she actually was.
+
+She spoke with a soft, strange accent, so I thought she was perhaps a
+foreigner. But when I asked her she misunderstood, and I had not the
+heart to correct her. I can only remember she said her house was always
+full in the winter, about Christmas-time. People came for the winter
+sport. There were two young English ladies who always came to her.
+
+She spoke of them warmly. Then, suddenly afraid, she drifted off again.
+I ate the omelette with cognac, which was very good, then I looked in
+the street. It was very dark, with bright stars, and smelled of snow.
+Two village men went by. I was tired, I did not want to go to the inn.
+
+So I went to bed, in the silent, wooden house. I had a small bedroom,
+clean and wooden and very cold. Outside, the stream was rushing. I
+covered myself with a great depth of featherbed, and looked at the
+stars, and the shadowy upper world, and went to sleep.
+
+In the morning I washed in the ice-cold water, and was glad to set out.
+An icy mist was over the noisy stream, there were a few meagre, shredded
+pine-trees. I had breakfast and paid my bill: it was seven francs--more
+than I could afford; but that did not matter, once I was out in the air.
+
+The sky was blue and perfect, it was a ringing morning, the village was
+very still. I went up the hill till I came to the signpost. I looked
+down the direction of the Furka, and thought of my tired Englishman from
+Streatham, who would be on his way home. Thank God I need not go home:
+never, perhaps. I turned up the track to the left, to the Gothard.
+
+Standing looking round at the mountain-tops, at the village and the
+broken castle below me, at the scattered debris of Andermatt on the moor
+in the distance, I was jumping in my soul with delight. Should one ever
+go down to the lower world?
+
+Then I saw another figure striding along, a youth with knee-breeches and
+Alpine hat and braces over his shirt, walking manfully, his coat slung
+in his rucksack behind. I laughed, and waited. He came my way.
+
+'Are you going over the Gothard?' I said.
+
+'Yes,' he replied. 'Are you also?'
+
+'Yes' I said. 'We will go together.'
+
+So we set off, climbing a track up the heathy rocks.
+
+He was a pale, freckled town youth from Basel, seventeen years old. He
+was a clerk in a baggage-transport firm--Gondrand Frères, I believe. He
+had a week's holiday, in which time he was going to make a big circular
+walk, something like the Englishman's. But he was accustomed to this
+mountain walking: he belonged to a Sportverein. Manfully he marched in
+his thick hob-nailed boots, earnestly he scrambled up the rocks.
+
+We were in the crest of the pass. Broad snow-patched slopes came down
+from the pure sky; the defile was full of stones, all bare stones,
+enormous ones as big as a house, and small ones, pebbles. Through these
+the road wound in silence, through this upper, transcendent desolation,
+wherein was only the sound of the stream. Sky and snow-patched slopes,
+then the stony, rocky bed of the defile, full of morning sunshine: this
+was all. We were crossing in silence from the northern world to
+the southern.
+
+But he, Emil, was going to take the train back, through the tunnel, in
+the evening, to resume his circular walk at Göschenen.
+
+I, however, was going on, over the ridge of the world, from the north
+into the south. So I was glad.
+
+We climbed up the gradual incline for a long time. The slopes above
+became lower, they began to recede. The sky was very near, we were
+walking under the sky.
+
+Then the defile widened out, there was an open place before us, the very
+top of the pass. Also there were low barracks, and soldiers. We heard
+firing. Standing still, we saw on the slopes of snow, under the radiant
+blue heaven, tiny puffs of smoke, then some small black figures crossing
+the snow patch, then another rattle of rifle-fire, rattling dry and
+unnatural in the upper, skyey air, between the rocks.
+
+'_Das ist schön_,' said my companion, in his simple admiration.
+
+'_Hübsch_,' I said.
+
+'But that would be splendid, to be firing up there, manoeuvring up in
+the snow.'
+
+And he began to tell me how hard a soldier's life was, how hard the
+soldier was drilled.
+
+'You don't look forward to it?' I said.
+
+'Oh yes, I do. I want to be a soldier, I want to serve my time.'
+
+'Why?'I said.
+
+'For the exercise, the life, the drilling. One becomes strong.'
+
+'Do all the Swiss want to serve their time in the army?' I asked.
+
+'Yes--they all want to. It is good for every man, and it keeps us all
+together. Besides, it is only for a year. For a year it is very good.
+The Germans have three years--that is too long, that is bad.'
+
+I told him how the soldiers in Bavaria hated the military service.
+
+'Yes,' he said, 'that is true of Germans. The system is different. Ours
+is much better; in Switzerland a man enjoys his time as a soldier. I
+want to go.'
+
+So we watched the black dots of soldiers crawling over the high snow,
+listened to the unnatural dry rattle of guns, up there.
+
+Then we were aware of somebody whistling, of soldiers yelling down the
+road. We were to come on, along the level, over the bridge. So we
+marched quickly forward, away from the slopes, towards the hotel, once a
+monastery, that stood in the distance. The light was blue and clear on
+the reedy lakes of this upper place; it was a strange desolation of
+water and bog and rocks and road, hedged by the snowy slopes round the
+rim, under the very sky.
+
+The soldier was yelling again. I could not tell what he said.
+
+'He says if we don't run we can't come at all,' said Emil.
+
+'I won't run,' I said.
+
+So we hurried forwards, over the bridge, where the soldier on guard was
+standing.
+
+'Do you want to be shot?' he said angrily, as we came up.
+
+'No, thanks,' I said.
+
+Emil was very serious.
+
+'How long should we have had to wait if we hadn't got through now?' he
+asked the soldier, when we were safely out of danger.
+
+'Till one o'clock,' was the reply.
+
+'Two hours!' said Emil, strangely elated. 'We should have had to wait
+two hours before we could come on. He was riled that we didn't run,' and
+he laughed with glee.
+
+So we marched over the level to the hotel. We called in for a glass of
+hot milk. I asked in German. But the maid, a pert hussy, elegant and
+superior, was French. She served us with great contempt, as two
+worthless creatures, poverty-stricken. It abashed poor Emil, but we
+managed to laugh at her. This made her very angry. In the smoking-room
+she raised up her voice in French:
+
+'_Du lait chaud pour les chameaux._'
+
+'Some hot milk for the camels, she says,' I translated for Emil. He was
+covered with confusion and youthful anger.
+
+But I called to her, tapped the table and called:
+
+'_Mademoiselle!_'
+
+She appeared flouncingly in the doorway.
+
+'_Encore du lait pour les chameaux_,' I said.
+
+And she whisked our glasses off the table, and flounced out without a
+word.
+
+But she would not come in again with the milk. A German girl brought it.
+We laughed, and she smiled primly.
+
+When we set forth again, Emil rolled up his sleeves and turned back his
+shirt from his neck and breast, to do the thing thoroughly. Besides, it
+was midday, and the sun was hot; and, with his bulky pack on his back,
+he suggested the camel of the French maid more than ever.
+
+We were on the downward slope. Only a short way from the hotel, and
+there was the drop, the great cleft in the mountains running down from
+this shallow pot among the peaks.
+
+The descent on the south side is much more precipitous and wonderful
+than the ascent from the north. On the south, the rocks are craggy and
+stupendous; the little river falls headlong down; it is not a stream, it
+is one broken, panting cascade far away in the gulley below, in
+the darkness.
+
+But on the slopes the sun pours in, the road winds down with its tail in
+its mouth, always in endless loops returning on itself. The mules that
+travel upward seem to be treading in a mill.
+
+Emil took the narrow tracks, and, like the water, we cascaded down,
+leaping from level to level, leaping, running, leaping, descending
+headlong, only resting now and again when we came down on to another
+level of the high-road.
+
+Having begun, we could not help ourselves, we were like two stones
+bouncing down. Emil was highly elated. He waved his thin, bare, white
+arms as he leapt, his chest grew pink with the exercise. Now he felt he
+was doing something that became a member of his Sportverein. Down we
+went, jumping, running, britching.
+
+It was wonderful on this south side, so sunny, with feathery trees and
+deep black shadows. It reminded me of Goethe, of the romantic period:
+
+    _Kennst du das Land, wo die Citronen blühen?_
+
+So we went tumbling down into the south, very swiftly, along with the
+tumbling stream. But it was very tiring. We went at a great pace down
+the gully, between the sheer rocks. Trees grew in the ledges high over
+our heads, trees grew down below. And ever we descended.
+
+Till gradually the gully opened, then opened into a wide valley-head,
+and we saw Airolo away below us, the railway emerging from its hole, the
+whole valley like a cornucopia full of sunshine.
+
+Poor Emil was tired, more tired than I was. And his big boots had hurt
+his feet in the descent. So, having come to the open valley-head, we
+went more gently. He had become rather quiet.
+
+The head of the valley had that half-tamed, ancient aspect that reminded
+me of the Romans. I could only expect the Roman legions to be encamped
+down there; and the white goats feeding on the bushes belonged to a
+Roman camp.
+
+But no, we saw again the barracks of the Swiss soldiery, and again we
+were in the midst of rifle-fire and manoeuvres. But we went evenly,
+tired now, and hungry. We had nothing to eat.
+
+It is strange how different the sun-dried, ancient, southern slopes of
+the world are, from the northern slopes. It is as if the god Pan really
+had his home among these sun-bleached stones and tough, sun-dark trees.
+And one knows it all in one's blood, it is pure, sun-dried memory. So I
+was content, coming down into Airolo.
+
+We found the streets were Italian, the houses sunny outside and dark
+within, like Italy, there were laurels in the road. Poor Emil was a
+foreigner all at once. He rolled down his shirt sleeves and fastened his
+shirt-neck, put on his coat and collar, and became a foreigner in his
+soul, pale and strange.
+
+I saw a shop with vegetables and grapes, a real Italian shop, a dark
+cave.
+
+'_Quanto costa l'uva?_' were my first words in the south.
+
+'_Sessanta al chilo_,' said the girl.
+
+And it was as pleasant as a drink of wine, the Italian.
+
+So Emil and I ate the sweet black grapes as we went to the station.
+
+He was very poor. We went into the third-class restaurant at the
+station. He ordered beer and bread and sausage; I ordered soup and
+boiled beef and vegetables.
+
+They brought me a great quantity, so, whilst the girl was serving
+coffee-with-rum to the men at the bar, I took another spoon and knife
+and fork and plates for Emil, and we had two dinners from my one. When
+the girl--she was a woman of thirty-five--came back, she looked at us
+sharply. I smiled at her coaxingly; so she gave a small, kindly smile
+in reply.
+
+'_Ja, dies ist reizend_,' said Emil, _sotto voce_, exulting. He was very
+shy. But we were curiously happy, in that railway restaurant.
+
+Then we sat very still, on the platform, and waited for the train. It
+was like Italy, pleasant and social to wait in the railway station, all
+the world easy and warm in its activity, with the sun shining.
+
+I decided to take a franc's worth of train-journey. So I chose my
+station. It was one franc twenty, third class. Then my train came, and
+Emil and I parted, he waving to me till I was out of sight. I was sorry
+he had to go back, he did so want to venture forth.
+
+So I slid for a dozen miles or more, sleepily, down the Ticino valley,
+sitting opposite two fat priests in their feminine black.
+
+When I got out at my station I felt for the first time ill at ease. Why
+was I getting out at this wayside place, on to the great, raw high-road?
+I did not know. But I set off walking. It was nearly tea-time.
+
+Nothing in the world is more ghastly than these Italian roads, new,
+mechanical, belonging to a machine life. The old roads are wonderful,
+skilfully aiming their way. But these new great roads are desolating,
+more desolating than all the ruins in the world.
+
+I walked on and on, down the Ticino valley, towards Bellinzona. The
+valley was perhaps beautiful: I don't know. I can only remember the
+road. It was broad and new, and it ran very often beside the railway. It
+ran also by quarries and by occasional factories, also through villages.
+And the quality of its sordidness is something that does not bear
+thinking of, a quality that has entered Italian life now, if it was not
+there before.
+
+Here and there, where there were quarries or industries, great
+lodging-houses stood naked by the road, great, grey, desolate places;
+and squalid children were playing round the steps, and dirty men
+slouched in. Everything seemed under a weight.
+
+Down the road of the Ticino valley I felt again my terror of this new
+world which is coming into being on top of us. One always feels it in a
+suburb, on the edge of a town, where the land is being broken under the
+advance of houses. But this is nothing, in England, to the terror one
+feels on the new Italian roads, where these great blind cubes of
+dwellings rise stark from the destroyed earth, swarming with a sort of
+verminous life, really verminous, purely destructive.
+
+It seems to happen when the peasant suddenly leaves his home and becomes
+a workman. Then an entire change comes over everywhere. Life is now a
+matter of selling oneself to slave-work, building roads or labouring in
+quarries or mines or on the railways, purposeless, meaningless, really
+slave-work, each integer doing his mere labour, and all for no purpose,
+except to have money, and to get away from the old system.
+
+These Italian navvies work all day long, their whole life is engaged in
+the mere brute labour. And they are the navvies of the world. And whilst
+they are navvying, they are almost shockingly indifferent to their
+circumstances, merely callous to the dirt and foulness.
+
+It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human
+element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The
+roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but
+the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and
+caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. So
+that it seems as though we should be left at last with a great system of
+roads and railways and industries, and a world of utter chaos seething
+upon these fabrications: as if we had created a steel framework, and the
+whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between. It is most
+terrifying to realize; and I have always felt this terror upon a new
+Italian high-road--more there than anywhere.
+
+The remembrance of the Ticino valley is a sort of nightmare to me. But
+it was better when at last, in the darkness of night, I got into
+Bellinzona. In the midst of the town one felt the old organism still
+living. It is only at its extremities that it is falling to pieces, as
+in dry rot.
+
+In the morning, leaving Bellinzona, again I went in terror of the new,
+evil high-road, with its skirting of huge cubical houses and its
+seething navvy population. Only the peasants driving in with fruit were
+consoling. But I was afraid of them: the same spirit had set in in them.
+
+I was no longer happy in Switzerland, not even when I was eating great
+blackberries and looking down at the Lago Maggiore, at Locarno, lying by
+the lake; the terror of the callous, disintegrating process was too
+strong in me.
+
+At a little inn a man was very good to me. He went into his garden and
+fetched me the first grapes and apples and peaches, bringing them in
+amongst leaves, and heaping them before me. He was Italian-Swiss; he had
+been in a bank in Bern; now he had retired, had bought his paternal
+home, and was a free man. He was about fifty years old; he spent all his
+time in his garden; his daughter attended to the inn.
+
+He talked to me, as long as I stayed, about Italy and Switzerland and
+work and life. He was retired, he was free. But he was only nominally
+free. He had only achieved freedom from labour. He knew that the system
+he had escaped at last, persisted, and would consume his sons and his
+grandchildren. He himself had more or less escaped back to the old form;
+but as he came with me on to the hillside, looking down the high-road at
+Lugano in the distance, he knew that his old order was collapsing by a
+slow process of disintegration.
+
+Why did he talk to me as if I had any hope, as if I represented any
+positive truth as against this great negative truth that was advancing
+up the hill-side. Again I was afraid. I hastened down the high-road,
+past the houses, the grey, raw crystals of corruption.
+
+I saw a girl with handsome bare legs, ankles shining like brass in the
+sun. She was working in a field, on the edge of a vineyard. I stopped to
+look at her, suddenly fascinated by her handsome naked flesh that shone
+like brass.
+
+Then she called out to me, in a jargon I could not understand, something
+mocking and challenging. And her voice was raucous and challenging; I
+went on, afraid.
+
+In Lugano I stayed at a German hotel. I remember sitting on a seat in
+the darkness by the lake, watching the stream of promenaders patrolling
+the edge of the water, under the trees and the lamps. I can still see
+many of their faces: English, German, Italian, French. And it seemed
+here, here in this holiday-place, was the quick of the disintegration,
+the dry-rot, in this dry, friable flux of people backwards and forwards
+on the edge of the lake, men and women from the big hotels, in evening
+dress, curiously sinister, and ordinary visitors, and tourists, and
+workmen, youths, men of the town, laughing, jeering. It was curiously
+and painfully sinister, almost obscene.
+
+I sat a long time among them, thinking of the girl with her limbs of
+glowing brass. Then at last I went up to the hotel, and sat in the
+lounge looking at the papers. It was the same here as down below, though
+not so intense, the feeling of horror.
+
+So I went to bed. The hotel was on the edge of a steep declivity. I
+wondered why the whole hills did not slide down, in some great natural
+catastrophe.
+
+In the morning I walked along the side of the Lake of Lugano, to where I
+could take a steamer to ferry me down to the end. The lake is not
+beautiful, only picturesque. I liked most to think of the Romans
+coming to it.
+
+So I steamed down to the lower end of the water. When I landed and went
+along by a sort of railway I saw a group of men. Suddenly they began to
+whoop and shout. They were hanging on to an immense pale bullock, which
+was slung up to be shod; and it was lunging and kicking with terrible
+energy. It was strange to see that mass of pale, soft-looking flesh
+working with such violent frenzy, convulsed with violent, active frenzy,
+whilst men and women hung on to it with ropes, hung on and weighed it
+down. But again it scattered some of them in its terrible convulsion.
+Human beings scattered into the road, the whole place was covered with
+hot dung. And when the bullock began to lunge again, the men set up a
+howl, half of triumph, half of derision.
+
+I went on, not wanting to see. I went along a very dusty road. But it
+was not so terrifying, this road. Perhaps it was older.
+
+In dreary little Chiasso I drank coffee, and watched the come and go
+through the Customs. The Swiss and the Italian Customs officials had
+their offices within a few yards of each other, and everybody must stop.
+I went in and showed my rucksack to the Italian, then I mounted a tram,
+and went to the Lake of Como.
+
+In the tram were dressed-up women, fashionable, but business-like. They
+had come by train to Chiasso, or else had been shopping in the town.
+
+When we came to the terminus a young miss, dismounting before me, left
+behind her parasol. I had been conscious of my dusty, grimy appearance
+as I sat in the tram, I knew they thought me a workman on the roads.
+However, I forgot that when it was time to dismount.
+
+'_Pardon, Mademoiselle_,' I said to the young miss. She turned and
+withered me with a rather overdone contempt--'_bourgeoise_,' I said to
+myself, as I looked at her--'_Vous avez laissé votre parasol_.'
+
+She turned, and with a rapacious movement darted upon her parasol. How
+her soul was in her possessions! I stood and watched her. Then she went
+into the road and under the trees, haughty, a demoiselle. She had on
+white kid boots.
+
+I thought of the Lake of Como what I had thought of Lugano: it must have
+been wonderful when the Romans came there. Now it is all villas. I think
+only the sunrise is still wonderful, sometimes.
+
+I took the steamer down to Como, and slept in a vast old stone cavern of
+an inn, a remarkable place, with rather nice people. In the morning I
+went out. The peace and the bygone beauty of the cathedral created the
+glow of the great past. And in the market-place they were selling
+chestnuts wholesale, great heaps of bright, brown chestnuts, and sacks
+of chestnuts, and peasants very eager selling and buying. I thought of
+Como, it must have been wonderful even a hundred years ago. Now it is
+cosmopolitan, the cathedral is like a relic, a museum object, everywhere
+stinks of mechanical money-pleasure. I dared not risk walking to Milan:
+I took a train. And there, in Milan, sitting in the Cathedral Square, on
+Saturday afternoon, drinking Bitter Campari and watching the swarm of
+Italian city-men drink and talk vivaciously, I saw that here the life
+was still vivid, here the process of disintegration was vigorous, and
+centred in a multiplicity of mechanical activities that engage the human
+mind as well as the body. But always there was the same purpose stinking
+in it all, the mechanizing, the perfect mechanizing of human life.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Twilight in Italy, by D.H. Lawrence
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