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 kingdoms 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 sign-post. 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 débris 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 t
hat 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 manœuvres. 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.
“Quarito 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.
Twilight in Italy Page 18
