by Ursula Bloom
‘Thank God we are not going on to Milan,’ said Eva, as after an unconscionable delay the rapide ‒ which was not rapide at all ‒ snorted out of the station. ‘Milan is the hottest place I know. It is exactly like sitting in a frying-pan at the station and every train waits there for an hour.’
‘Isn’t it hot in the Dolomites?’
Somehow at sea it had never been too hot, because they had made their own draught, but here for the first time she found the air fetid; she found her fellow travellers large and ponderous, with a tendency to demand closed windows.
‘In the Dolomites,’ said Eva, ‘it is delicious.’
III
Morning at the inn.
Ann had forgotten the journey, the heat bearing down in the humid night, the exploration of Verona, and the subsequent missing of the correct train and coming on here by the next, a poor affair of inadequate accommodation and stuffy carriages.
Here was a new country, something she had never dreamt about. They had stayed a few hours at Bolzano with its deep arcades, and the ancient fountains which played like musical instruments harmoniously tuned in. They had sat down and had an alfresco meal in the cool beer gardens lying under plane trees, green and freshly inviting. Ann had a vivid memory of it, plane trees, red striped umbrellas, and grinning porters in green baize aprons.
Then they had climbed higher, and had eventually come to this isolated inn in the forest of fir trees. The inn had been a miraculous discovery of Eva’s one holiday two years ago when the economical situation had threatened to become embarrassing. She had hired a tin car in the village and had come to the inn quite by accident, with the idea of painting the blue mountain which rose opposite to it. Far beneath a little village curled into the shadow of the mountain. She had fallen in love with the spot. Ann fell in love with it too. The firs grew right to the very door and whispered the secrets of their green hearts each to the other. In early spring a cherry tree scattered its snow of blossom about the threshold. Already the first little hard green fruit was showing, hanging in clusters among the thin leaves. The house was built almost entirely of wood; it was rather like a Swiss chalet, sweet-smelling as though the timbers still carried some half-forgotten memory of their happier days when they were living trees and lifted delicately flowering branches fragrantly each to the other. The one great salon opened on to a veranda where red and white lilies were in flower. Inside there was a steam-heating stove which seemed to occupy rather clumsily most of the space. One corner was dedicated obviously to the necessities of ‘essen und trinken’ and it was filled by trestle tables and a weird pattern of chairs, which had never any possible relationship one to the other. A winding wooden stair curled fanwise up to the top floor.
On the walls were antlers and horns, a jumble of trophies, and here and there a stuffed deer’s head, staring down with timidly reproachful glass eyes, as though in death he were regretful that he was forced to continue the farce of pretending to live. But everywhere there was the keen clear air, hot and sweet, yet with the hint of snow in its breath from the cold bosom of the Marmolada Glacier.
Everywhere was the pungent tang of fir forest and of fragrant boughs clustering round the kind old house which gave them guest-room. The charges were absurdly small. ‘At this rate,’ thought Ann, ‘I can stay for months.’ Then she wondered what Mr. Robert would have to say about it. After all, some explanation was due to Mr. Robert. He could not give her indefinite leave of absence. Almost at once she met the other people who were installed in the inn, and they put the bothersome anxiety of Mr. Robert out of her head.
Mein Herr and the Frau. Mein Herr was large and fattish; he would not see forty again; the Frau was large and comfortable too. She had not a mind beyond Suppe and Brötchen. She occupied herself entirely with the creature comforts. The Frau in her full skirt, and her fitted bodice which revealed the ample curves of her voluminous bust, was a worthy woman. She did not believe in physical attractions, and she devoted herself to making as little of that body that God had given her as was possible. She wore heavy boots, and chaste stuff frocks. She braided back her fair hair, bleached by the sun, which had once been so lustrous.
Mein Herr was less pure. He had his little peccadilloes with the serving-maids. Just now it was Sophie (it had been Irmingarde before, but the Frau had expostulated, and Irmingarde had gone off post-haste). Sophie was not likely to go so suddenly. Irmingarde had gone, sent off to one of the pleasant inns at Pordoijoch as more suitable to her particular capabilities. Mein Herr had cursed all women, and had got very drunk on beer, and had had a bad headache and a worse stomach-ache after. Then Sophie had come along and he had found her agreeable. Kind too, not stingy. She was young and slender as yet, and he appreciated die Backfische. It was an ill wind, thought mein Herr, when he had got over the effects of the beer orgy.
In the hostelry was Pablo.
Pablo had been a student; he had come from Budapesth University, where his health had broken down as a result of over-study and wild living.
‘It ees sad,’ said mein Herr, ‘to see so fine a man so seeck.’
But Pablo was not seeck now. He was twenty-three, he was tall and dark with the figure of a young god, and the eyes of an old devil. His hair, grown long, curled lightly as a boy’s about his head and slender neck. His mouth was whimsical.
Ann, coming to the hostelry, saw Pablo standing on the veranda cutting himself a new stick and shaping it with a clasp-knife, and singing to himself one of those intriguing Teuton songs which seem to go on echoing through your heart long after the singer has become silent.
‘O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,
Wie grün sind deine Blätter!
Du grünst nicht nur sur Sommerszeit,
Nein, auch im Winter, wenn es schneit.
O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,
Wie grün sind deine Blätter!’
Ann stopped dead. All around was the scent of the Tannenbaum, faintly resinous; the green arms, almost blue in places, a delicate dark lace of fronds which were like ferns, and opposite to them the mountain with the village at its foot.
Pablo turned. ‘You the new come?’ he asked, and he smiled. ‘English? Nein?’ There was the flash of teeth between his lips; she took it as a welcome.
‘I’ve just arrived from Venice.’
‘Venice. A city what you call dream. Much love. Much linger,’ and he laughed.
Somehow here she was not shy or afraid or even conventional any more. She was not herself. It was as though the hostelry were swung between two worlds; nothing outside it mattered.
They were entities, not people.
He straddled the low rail which ran round the veranda, and glanced at her. Perhaps in his dark eyes she saw something keenly alive and alluring. Perhaps he saw something vivid in her fairness and Saxon colouring, and the linen frock which she had put on after the journey, disclosing slight outline and firm white skin.
‘What were you singing? Please go on?’ she said.
‘I was singing of … what you call ’eem? … the fir tree.’
She dropped into a chair, and listened. Pablo did not demur. It was enough that anyone wanted him to sing. He went on in that untrained, natural voice that was so pleasing.
‘Du grünst nicht nur sur Sommerszeit,
Nein, auch im Winter, wenn es schneit.’
It seemed to Ann that a spell was cast upon her. The spell of the fir forest, of the lonely hostel, and of Pablo sitting there singing.
After, in her own room, she was ashamed. She sat down on the single iron bed and gave herself a talking to. ‘I’m impressionable, and I must be fast. I never knew it before, but since I left England, just look what has happened to me!’
Youth had come, chance and opportunity, and they might never occur again. She must grasp them on the instant and hold them fast.
She went to the window, high and narrow, opening it with difficulty, for mein Herr and the Frau were in truth terrified of fresh air, although they urged it as so bene
ficial for medicinal purposes. Outside there was a little wooden balcony which did not look as though it would bear her. And down beneath her, stretching in waves like a great green sea, the fir forest. Right down into the valley it ran, in among the clustering roofs of some small town, with here or there the darting silver of a river. It was like some lovely painting, and it stirred her in the same way. It stirred her so that she told herself, ‘This is my chance and I am taking it. What does it matter what comes afterwards? One is old such a long long time,’ and she stood there drinking it in until it half intoxicated her.
IV
At dinner-time they all met.
There was another woman artist staying at the inn with her husband. She was a large, rather strident woman, and he was a small man ‒ French ‒ who wore extraordinary clothes, and wore them in a very extraordinary way. Although Madame Heriot and Eva Temple seemed eager to compare work, it struck Ann that before long there might be jealousy. Madame Heriot was of the impressionist school, while Eva disliked modern art.
But over the strange meal in the one big sitting-room, with the stuffed animals hung around them, they discussed their art as though they had a fellow-feeling about it.
Ann thought it was one of the strangest meals she had ever eaten. Veal cut in a new way, cooked in butter, with long thin slices of beans on either side of it. Cheese made from goat’s milk by the Frau, green figs clustering together in a hand-made basket. There was Pilsener in long, slender, horn-shaped glasses, and beer frothing out of tankards. Ann asked for water and was told that it was not procurable. ‘Eet is nicht gut,’ said mein Herr.
So she drank Pilsener, which tasted bitter, and which she did not like but conformed to, as being better than typhoid. Cuthbert would of course have considered a serious illness to be far preferable to such sin as strong drink, but still … and after all, she wondered, was Pilsener quite strong drink? Everybody seemed to take it.
Mein Herr waited on them all, running to and fro with quick, short steps, and carrying on an agitated and guttural conversation with the Frau through the kitchen door. And every time the door opened there came the hot savage odour of veal mingling with the resinous fir forest, the green tender essence of Pablo’s Tannenbaum.
Afterwards they drank coffee, thick café-au-lait, set before them in wide bowls with double handles. Ann, still remembering the nursery tuition that it was rude to use both hands when drinking, stooped over hers a little nervously. Then she saw Pablo across the table, his hands set on either side the bowl, his lips to the crude thick china, his eyes challenging hers across the rim. (What was it the old hag in the Alameda had said? ‘Make much of life while you are still young. Look at me.’)
Only now she was not looking at the old wizened face, but at the young attractive face of Pablo. The eyes that were lit by flame, the high cheek-bones, the laughing audacious mouth.
‘Afterwards let me show you the forest, ya?’ he asked.
‘Please,’ she said.
That night she went to bed and she could not sleep, for such thoughts pursued her. ‘I’m old enough to be his mother,’ she kept telling herself, but in her heart she knew that she was not. Mothers of twelve are not abundant. Last thing of all, she heard the sound of the trees whispering together, and a little laugh from the kitchen where mein Herr, the toils of the day over and the Frau safely asleep, was occupying himself with Sophie. And she heard Pablo singing tenderly. These sounds were her lullaby.
V
The next afternoon they walked out into the heat. All around them it was fiercely hot, yet under the trees it was cool. Pablo had said that it would be like that. He showed her the path which led down to the valley, with the dwarf rhododendrons in rosy profusion, and through the moss and tattered grasses of the undergrowth orchids and columbines and large gentians spearing up into the light.
‘There are much flowers here,’ he said, and then quickly, ‘you like flower?’ and he stooped and gathered some of the columbines, pale mauve and pink and amber, and bringing them to her tied them into the little scarf on her frock. She felt his fingers lightly against her skin, something impish about it, faunish, something that fascinated.
‘It is seldom someone young come here,’ he said, ‘all are so old, and so ugly.’
‘But I’m not young.’
‘So?’ and he laughed, adding gallantly, ‘in Venice all are old or young. You are of my age.’
She had not the heart to tell him that she was not his age. It was a pleasant dream, a sweet delusion, let it last while it would.
‘I shall be glad when my luggage comes,’ she said, ‘you see I was on a cruise, and the ship went on without me. My luggage has to come here all the way from Ragusa.’
‘What?’ he demanded, ‘the Customs? The frontiers? That will take beeg time.’
‘Don’t say that, these are all I have got.’
‘Then,’ he said, ‘we go to the village and buy clothes. Beeg clothes.’ He laughed and made a gesture of flowing skirts from the hips, of full bust, of great sleeves and a snug waist.
‘You mean national dress?’
‘But it is very become,’ he said. ‘We will go to the village, but it not like this. I love not commerce. I love not buy and sell. I love the forest, the Tannenbaum, the quiet.’
As he spoke she found herself glancing at him; his slender hips, and wide shoulders, his long slim line of thigh and leg. She felt different about him. Something she had never felt before about any man, and because of it she was afraid of herself. She wished for a moment that Oliver were here. If he were here with her she would not be so afraid, for whatsoever his faults may have been, he had understood. He was very understanding of emotions and it had helped. Never before had Ann been attracted by the physical loveliness of a man, but Pablo was very beautiful. He was, she felt, irresistible.
They were two people standing alone and staring down into the world, where in the valley below the village lay. It was a kaleidoscope beneath them, unimportant and matterless, for it was the other people’s world, and this green forest was their very own.
‘You’ve been here long?’ she asked.
‘Some time. I come here from Budapesth. Over-study, the doctor say. I come here to be quiet. No study. No wine. No women. No music.’
‘And you like the hostel?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Peoples come, and peoples go. Now you come.’
It seemed to her that she had been here for an age. The ship was already a mere phantom. Venice was disappearing into its own blue mist. The station at Verona with its unappetizing food, and now only this forest of the moment, and this young man. He turned abruptly. ‘We will go back now.’
She felt as though she had failed him at a critical moment. As though she had suddenly and unforgivably disappointed him, and she herself was at a loss, for she had no idea what he had expected of her.
They came out of the forest to where the hotel stood vivid in the light. Mein Herr was singing as he chopped wood at the corner of the house. At this time of day the Frau slept, and often Sophie (who did not sleep) came creeping out for a word. He sang to her so that she should know that he was alone, and ready for a little of that flirten over which the Frau was so frugal. He sang for very gladness of heart, for if the affair with Irmingarde had been discovered and torn up, there was Sophie to take her place; and if Sophie went, there would perhaps be somebody else; some Minna or Gretchen or Luisa. There was the pleasant ringing sound of his axe against the logs, and his voice, deeply bass, singing one of the Volkslied and echoing far.
‘Bald gras ich am Neckar
Bald gras ich am Rhein.’
Ann sank down into the chair on the veranda. ‘Oh, I am so hungry. I want my tea so much.’
Pablo stood looking at her. ‘You English pine much for the tea. We drink it not. But wait …’ He went into the house and he came out again carrying two bowls of coffee. ‘Mahlzeit,’ he said graciously.
She had no idea what it meant.
It
was a meal remotely different from the office tea. She thought of that by contrast. Whose turn would it be to buy the biscuits? Whose turn to wash up? The tea that would slop into the saucer when she took it in to Mr. Robert! The little festa which was Bourbon biscuits, the everyday affairs of Osbornes!
‘I wish life could stay still here and now,’ she said suddenly.
‘Well, and why not? There is only the moment. Now is the only time. Why not make much of it?’
She watched him as he sat there. A young man with his shirt open at the throat, rolled up above the elbows; the old pair of flannel trousers was girded about his slight hips by a faded leather thong. He was looking at her with dark eyes which reminded her of something vividly alive. She did not know when she had ever seen anyone so much alive before.
‘Time must go on,’ she said.
‘But not for us.’ He leaned closer. ‘Shall I tell you what will happen to you? Shall I …?’
But Eva Temple came out of the house.
VI
Ann did not know if the hours stood still, or if they went on. She saw nothing of Eva, for she had entered into a competition with Madame Heriot. On the face of it, it was quite friendly, but underneath lay a streak of enmity. Eva secretly thought that Madame Heriot’s work was ‘quite dreadful’, Madame Heriot thought that Eva’s was too dull for words.
Ann was alone ‒ yet beautifully accompanied by Pablo ‒ only she felt that she wanted her clothes. Surely they should have come by now? Surely something might have been arranged? Never before had she realized the extreme difficulty of having only what you stood up in.
The Frau was obliging, and she was very courteous over the linen frock, and the first evening all the underclothing was laundered and brought up with the Frühstück the next morning. For only the first day in Venice had Ann sinned in coming downstairs for Frühstück. She had become quite accustomed to some beaming male (it was never a woman) coming into her room, bearing the tray, and depositing it upon the bed. There was a luxurious joy about drinking the coffee and eating the roll, which was invariably hollow. She was fascinated by the laziness of it, the lack of hurry, and the un-English atmosphere.
