‘What do I matter? I am thinking about you, Lucrezia. Oh, come back! Come back before it is too late.’
‘I am thinking about Lucia,’ she said, but walked closer to him and took him tightly by the hand.
Slower and slower became their pace, but both were breathing as deeply as if they had been climbing a mountain at utmost speed. Nervously they peered ahead, and furtively from side to side. Where the path ran bare beneath the sun they felt as though a thousand eyes were watching them, and when they walked beneath overarching trees they dreaded instant capture. But still, with faltering steps, they went on.
The guns were no longer firing, and the silence of a summer afternoon lay heavy on the little hill. Then suddenly, as if the silence were a curtain caught in a madman’s hand, it was torn again and again by frightened screams.
‘Oh, Lucia!’ cried Lucrezia.
‘But that was a man’s voice,’ said Angelo.
White and trembling, they stood and stared at each other. ‘Take this,’ said Lucrezia, and gave him the pistol.
‘It is not loaded,’ said Angelo.
‘Then load it, for God’s sake load it!’
With nerveless fingers he fumbled at the stiff button of his cartridge-pouch, but before he could unfasten it Lucrezia uttered a shuddering cry and fell in a dead faint at his feet. Two yards away a man rose from behind a bush, a man who wore a grey woollen cloak striped thinly with bearish brown. His black eyes glittered like a hawk’s, his nose had a hawkish curve. His cheeks were rather grey than brown, and the downward crescent of his narrow moustache was like a dreadful grin.
‘Good afternoon,’ stammered Angelo, and let his empty pistol fall. He bent to retrieve it, and with the speed of a stooping hawk the Goum leapt forward and struck him on the back of his head with a heavy cudgel.
The pain of the blow was so momentary that Angelo hardly felt it until he began to recover consciousness, and when that returned he grew aware of a further unhappiness that divided his mind evenly between it and his aching skull. The sun was now at tree-top height, and the guns were firing again. The explosions struck his sore head like little blows, and every movement he made brought a gyre of giddiness. He longed to lie still, to remain quiet and undiscovered in the cool shadow, but his fearful anxiety for Lucrezia gave him the resolution and the strength to get up.
He found her a few yards away, and the sight of her distress came near to banishing his own. Kneeling beside her, he undid the strips of her dress with which her hands had been tied and her mouth gagged, and taking her into his arms he held her for a long time until her sobbing stopped, and she lay so quietly that he thought she must be sleeping. But presently, without raising her head, she spoke to him. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘you will never marry me.’
He held her more tightly, but did not answer, and a little while later she said again, ‘You will not want to marry me now. You could not, Angelo, could you?’
‘Darling Lucrezia,’ he said, ‘in the hope that you may find comfort in another’s misfortune, I think I should tell you that I am in somewhat the same plight as yourself. For I also have been humiliated. But there is nothing to be gained by going into mourning for misfortunes that come to us through no fault of our own. True, I forgot to load my revolver, and that was negligence, but even had it been loaded in all chambers my hand was so tremulous that I could not have fired to any purpose; so I do not think my negligence mattered very much. No, Lucrezia, we are not to blame, so the best we can do is to let bygones be bygones, and thank God we are still alive.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EMILIA BIGI’S HOUSE was not very far away, and Emilia and Lucia, who was still there, did everything that was possible to solace and comfort them. Emilia, an angular woman of nearly fifty, was indeed somewhat tiresomely complacent about her own escape from calamity, and perplexed them by her frequent exclamations in praise of boiling water. It was boiling water that had saved her and Lucia from the attentions of the other Goum, for there happened to be a pan of it on the stove when he came in, and Emilia had promptly thrown it in his face, scalding him so severely that he ran away making a noise, she boasted, of great lamentation.
When Angelo and Lucrezia congratulated her on her enterprise, she told them, with a mingling in her voice of pride and bashfulness, that it was not the first time she had preserved her virtue in such a way, for when she was sixteen a friend of her eldest brother had made her both frightened and angry, and without a moment’s reflection – for luckily she was in her mother’s kitchen at the time – she had rebuked him with a saucepan from the fire. ‘And ever since then,’ she continued, ‘I’ve kept a pot boiling, and more than once, while I was still young and tender, I just grabbed it in time! Oh, I wouldn’t be without boiling water for anything! I don’t often leave home nowadays, just for that reason, because it’s difficult to carry with you. But so long as I stay within a few yards of the stove, I’m as happy as a woman can be.’
Both Lucrezia and Lucia were unwilling to return to the house of the Noble Lady of Rocca Pipirozzi while the countryside was so unsettled, but in the evening of the following day Lucrezia decided that she must return immediately to Pontefiore. She would give no explanation of this strange resolve, and though the others all tried to dissuade her from so rash a project, they did not care to oppose her too roughly, for she was still in a condition of some nervousness, and prone to tears. Pontefiore, indeed, was little more than ten miles away, but who might be moving in the space between?
‘I think,’ said Angelo, ‘that we are on the right flank of the French troops, with whom the Goums are serving, and on the left flank of the British, and perhaps there is a little space between them. But we cannot be sure of that. The nearest British troops, it may be, are Indians.’
‘O God!’ cried Lucrezia, ‘they will be as bad as the Marocchini!’
‘Not at all,’ said Angelo. ‘In battle the Indians fight with the greatest bravery you can imagine, but out of battle they are extremely gentle. Many of them are vegetarians, and their religion forbids them to kill any living creature except their fellow-men; and that they only do when commanded to by the English. There are no soldiers in the world who have better manners.’
‘It is good treatment that begets good manners,’ said Emilia Bigi. ‘India must be a happy country.’
‘I have heard different opinions about that,’ Angelo replied, ‘and I cannot tell you the truth of it. But I promise you that if we meet any Indian soldiers, they will behave with perfect courtesy.’
‘Then let us go at once!’ cried Lucrezia. ‘I cannot bear to stay here any longer. I want to be in Pontefiore.’
‘It would be wiser,’ said Angelo, ‘to wait and see whether Pontefiore is going to be liberated, or lucky enough to be ignored.’
‘Are you not eager for it to be liberated?’ asked Lucia.
‘It is sometimes necessary to go to the dentist,’ said Angelo, ‘but I have never seen anyone eager to go; and this is a more serious operation than the pulling of a tooth. In the first place, before a town or village can be liberated it must be occupied by the Germans, and the Germans will rob it of everything they can find; but that is of no importance, that is merely the Overture. Liberation really begins when the Allied Air Forces bomb the town: that is the First Movement, Allegro, so to speak. The Second Movement is often quite leisurely but full of caprice: it occurs when the Allied artillery opens fire to knock down what the bombers have missed, and may be called Andante Capriccioso. After that has gone on for some time the liberating infantry will rush in, that is the Third Movement, the Scherzo, and though the Allied soldiers do not loot, of course, they will find a number of things, such as geese and hens and wine, that apparently belong to no one – for the local inhabitants have taken to the hills or are hiding in their cellars – and to prevent the wine and the geese from being wasted, the soldiers will naturally take care of them. Then comes the Last Movement, when the officials of the Allied Military Government arrive and
say to the inhabitants, “No, you cannot do that, you must not go there, you are not allowed to sell this, and you are forbidden to buy that. If you want to live here you must apply for our permission, and it is against the law for you to be domiciled anywhere else.” Yes, that is the Finale, and then you may say that the process of liberation is complete.’
None of them believed a word he was saying, but Lucia and Emilia Bigi listened indulgently, as they would have listened to any young man of good appearance who chose to exercise his wit on great affairs. Lucrezia, however, grew more and more impatient, and he had scarcely finished before she said again, with great vehemence, ‘I must go to Pontefiore! Will you take me, Angelo, or shall I go alone?’
Angelo sighed deeply and tried to explain the peril of moving in what might already be, or quickly become, a battle-field. He did not know how far the Allied soldiers had advanced in the last few days, nor in what parts of the country the Germans were retreating. The line of battle curved and recurved across the country, here reaching forward like a long nose, there leaning back like a receding chin. They were, perhaps, in some no-man’s-land between the armies into which both sides would presently charge with the most savage intention. Or, he admitted, because the roads in their immediate neighbourhood were neither good in themselves nor led anywhere in particular, it was just possible that neither army would come that way at all.
‘Why, then, do we not go at once?’ asked Lucrezia.
‘There will, of course, be patrols moving here and there, and if we encounter the Goums again –’
‘Bullets never strike the same place twice,’ said Lucrezia.
‘That may be the rule,’ said Angelo, ‘but can we be sure that the Goums will obey it?’
‘Do you wish to drive me mad?’ she inquired; whereupon Angelo, forsaking all other argument, pointed to the time and said, ‘It will be quite dark in an hour, and though I know the way to Pontefiore, by an unfrequented path, it will be difficult to follow it at night. But if we wait till about three o’clock in the morning the last of the moon will be in the sky, giving a little light, and if we start then we should arrive, with good fortune, about sunrise or not long after. Go to bed now, Lucrezia, and rest yourself; and I shall wake you at three.’
The others agreed that this was the best plan, and Lucrezia allowed herself to be persuaded. She and Lucia slept in one bed, Angelo in an adjoining room; but Emilia Bigi stayed in the kitchen, and from time to time replenished the pan of water that bubbled all night upon the fire.
The air of early morning was cold, and the moon no brighter than a candle when they went out. But innumerable stars shone from a clear dark sky, and soon, when they could more easily distinguish substance from the shade, they walked with a firmer step. But in the sombre stillness they felt lonely, and clung together, and made slower progress than they had expected. A dozen times they threw themselves down, quivering with excitement, and hid behind a rock or a bush until the soldiers they had seen turned out to be merely another rock, or the stump of a tree. It began to grow light when they were still three or four miles from Pontefiore, and then they walked more quickly. They met no one on the way and heard nothing but occasionally the distant rattle of a machine-gun firing, and before sunrise, during the morning chorus of the birds, a loud explosion that rumbled and re-echoed through the quailing air.
They halted on a wooded slope from which they could look across a valley at the road leading to Pontefiore, and at Pontefiore on its cleft hill. Lucrezia was impatient to go on, but Angelo said they must wait for a little while to see if there was any movement of troops on the road, and if so, whether they were friendly or hostile troops. They lay for five minutes and saw no one stirring. Lucrezia said again, ‘There is no purpose in waiting here,’ but Angelo caught her by the wrist as she was going to rise, and said, ‘I think it is safe enough, but let us stay a little longer and make sure.’ They could not see the bridge from where they lay.
Then they heard – faintly at first, but quickly it grew louder – a noise that was more like a sensation of feeling than of hearing; for it rubbed upon their ears. Gleaming like beads of ice, with the morning sun upon them, the bombers looked very pretty under the tall arch of the sky.
It was unfortunate that the pilots’ information was not up to date. They knew that the Germans had occupied Pontefiore, but no one had told them that the Germans had left it. Their bombs, that fell with great accuracy on the chosen targets, were in fact wasted; and so indeed was Pontefiore. A thunderstorm seemed to break upon the little town, and from it rose fountains of rubble that smeared the pale blue sky with grey dust. In the lower darkness of the storm red flames began to leap, and here and there a wooden beam or a large piece of masonry was thrown far above the general upheaval. The roar of the bombers, fretting eardrums, persisted through the thunder.
Shocked and dismayed by the spectacle, Angelo and Lucrezia rose and stood speechless for a little while, hand clasped in hand. Then Lucrezia began to moan, very quietly, and went slowly down the hill towards her home. Angelo seemed scarcely to notice that she had left him. But of a sudden he uttered a little cry of pain, and followed her.
Both were unsteady in their gait, stumbling from time to time as if they were drunk or very tired, and neither seemed aware of the other’s presence. The storm was nearly over when they reached the floor of the valley, and between the last few claps of thunder there were long intervals. A solitary dark spout of smoke and ruin burst from the castle, and spread against the sky, and slowly subsided as the noise of the bombers diminished. They were returning to their base, their mission completed.
When they had climbed the opposite slope and were on the road to Pontefiore, Angelo and Lucrezia began to run, but quickly were stopped by the destruction of the bridge. Between broken parapets the road crumbled into the gulf below, and at the bottom of the ravine lay a mass of shattered masonry. The bridge, their beautiful and famous bridge, had fallen down! The discovery appalled them, for the bridge had been so old that it had seemed as much a part of nature as the hill itself, and in their lives it had been something so important that neither, for a moment, could think of anything more important. Here on the bridge they had met with quickening hearts in the dusk of evening, and the bridge was their way to the world, and the way home again. And now it was gone, it lay broken before them, and the ravine – though in fact it was not very deep – seemed an impassable gulf between them and everything with which they were familiar.
But smoke was rising from a dozen places in the ruins beyond, and when they had recovered sufficiently to notice it, they remembered their separate purposes and saw that it was easy enough to climb down into the ravine and up again on the other side. Lucrezia never gave a thought to Angelo as she reached the farther edge, but with the smell of burning rafters in her nostrils ran desperately, crying ‘Tommaso! Tommaso! Where are you?’
Angelo, for a moment only, wondered if he should follow her, but then, with tightened lips and fear in his eyes, began to climb the nearest pile of rubble, that blocked the main street of Pontefiore, and ran faster still towards the castle. He was sickened by the sour stink of the crumbled houses, and once he stopped to help a woman who was crawling out of a cellar, and again he had to scramble across a rampart of crumbled stone; but with a single thought in his mind he hurried on.
The main door of the castle hung aslant from broken hinges, so that was no obstacle. A small fire was burning in a corner of the hall, but he hardly noticed it. A passage on the storey above was blocked by a room that seemed to have burst over it, but he clambered across the wreckage and made his way on yielding boards to a door that opened into a narrow corridor.
In the inner room he found the Adoration of Piero della Francesca lying face down upon the floor, and when he lifted it the near end broke off with a crack along a line of bullet-holes. More carefully he raised the larger fragment, and turned it over. Bullet-holes ran across it too, and the shepherds had suffered irreparable damage from some bl
unter assault; perhaps of a boot. But the head of the Madonna 0on the panel, and the punctured lines enclosed her head.
Angelo sat on the floor, and his mind fell captive again to the pale brow and the gravity of the eyes. The coif about her head was white with starch, and through its transparency – what a miracle of painting was there! – the different whiteness of the forehead was stretched upon the bone that shaped it. The stillness of the face was something caught in the midst of movement, but the movement had never been swift or ungainly. Her peace was native to her, and the composure of her beauty was the reward of perfection. How strong were the cheekbones, how delicate the nostrils!
To Angelo’s nose came faintly the smell of burning, but rapt in his admiration he thought nothing of it. He had found what he had run so far to look for, he was satisfied, and being satisfied had no attention to spare for anything else. The ruin of the picture as a whole, the excoriation of the shepherds, meant little to him, for his relief at finding the Madonna’s head unspoilt had been so great that he had instantly accepted their loss as the reasonable price of her preservation. It was she whom he adored: she who was the product of Piero’s paint and Piero’s genius at work on some forgotten but immortal model. Angelo had fallen in love with her when he was sixteen, within a few days of his falling in love with Lucrezia, who was then a plump and vivacious child of twelve. Which had been the first to rouse his emotion he could not remember, but they had shared his thoughts and his fidelity – the ideal and the real – in the happiest division. He had never analysed his feelings for them, but had given to each the sort of devotion to which she was entitled, and for this simplicity had been repaid by complementary emotions. His twin attachment had contented him, and sooner or later the one side of it always reminded him of the other, because Piero had given to his Madonna lips that were remarkably the same shape as Lucrezia’s; though Lucrezia’s were the redder.
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