“Ah, poor little ones!” she cried. Then, to the old man, in tones of indignation: “These flies will eat up your oxen.”
“Yes — their wicked little mouths,” he agreed.
“Cannot you prevent them?” she asked.
“They are everywhere,” he answered, and he smacked a fly on his hand.
“But you can do something,” she persisted.
“You could write a card and stick it between their horns, ‘Settling of flies strictly forbidden here,’ “ I said.
“ ‘Streng verboten,’ “ he repeated as he laughed.
Johanna looked daggers at me.
“Thank you, young fellow,” she said sarcastically. I stuck leafy branches in the head-harness of the cattle. The old man thanked me with much gratitude.
“It is hot weather!” I remarked.
“It will be a thunderstorm, I believe,” he answered.
“At six o’clock?” cried Johanna.
But I was along the path.
We went gaily through the woods and open places, and had nearly come to Numbrecht, when we met a very old man, coming very slowly up the hill with a splendid young bull, of buff-colour and white, which, in its majestic and leisurely way, was dragging a harrow that rode on sledges.
“Fine weather,” I remarked, forgetting.
“Jawohl!” he answered. “But there will be a thunderstorm.”
“And I knew it,” said Johanna.
But we were at Niimbrecht. Johanna drank her mineral water and raspberry juice. It was ten minutes to six.
“It is getting dark,” remarked Johanna.
“There is no railway here?” I asked.
“Not for six miles,” she replied pointedly.
The landlord was a very handsome man.
“It is getting dark,” said Johanna to him.
“There will be a thunderstorm, Madame,” he replied with beautiful grace. “Madame is walking?”
“From Waldbrol,” she replied. By this time she was statuesque. The landlord went to the door. Girls were leading home the cows.
“It is coming,” he said, and immediately there was a rumbling of thunder.
Johanna went to the door.
“An enormous black cloud. The sky is black,” she announced. I followed to her side. It was so.
“The barber — ” I said.
“Must you live by the word of the barber?” said Johanna.
The landlord retired indoors. He was a very handsome man, all the hair was positively shaved from his head. And I knew Johanna liked the style.
I fled to Stollwerck’s chocolate machine, and spent a few anxious moments extracting burnt almonds. The landlord reappeared.
“There is an omnibus goes to Waldbrol for the station and the east. It passes the door in ten minutes,” he said gracefully. No English landlord could have equalled him. I thanked him with all my heart.
The omnibus was an old brown cab — a growler. Its only occupant was a brown-paper parcel for Frau — .
“You don’t mind riding?” I said tenderly to Johanna.
“I had rather we were at home. I am terribly afraid of thunderstorms,” she answered.
We drove on. A young man in black stopped the omnibus. He bowed to us, then mounted the box with the driver.
“It is Thienes, the Bretzel baker,” she said. Bretzel is a very twisty little cake like Kringel.
I do not know why, but after this Johanna and I sat side by side in tense silence. I felt very queerly.
“There, the rain!” she suddenly cried.
“Never mind,” I pleaded.
“Oh, I like riding in here,” she said.
My heart beat, and I put my hand over hers. She pretended not to notice, which made my heart beat more. I don’t know how it would have ended. Suddenly there was such a rattle outside, and something pounding on me. Johanna cried out. It was a great hailstorm — the air was a moving white storm — enormous balls of ice, big as marbles, then bigger, like balls of white carbon that housewives use against moths, came striking in. I put up the window. It was immediately cracked, so I put it down again. A hailstone as big as a pigeon-egg struck me on the knee, hurt me, and bounced against Johanna’s arm. She cried out with pain. The horses stood still and would not move. There was a roar of hail. All round, on the road balls of ice were bouncing viciously up again. We could not see six yards out of the carriage.
Suddenly the door opened, and Thienes, excusing himself, appeared. I dragged him in. He was a fresh young man, with naive, wide eyes. And his best suit of lustrous black was shining now with wet.
“Had you no cover?” we said.
He showed his split umbrella, and burst into a torrent of speech. The hail drummed bruisingly outside.
It had come like horse-chestnuts of ice, he said.
The fury of the storm lasted for five minutes, all of which time the horses stood stock still. The hailstones shot like great white bullets into the carriage. Johanna clung to me in fear. There was a solid sheet of falling ice outside.
At last the horses moved on. I sat eating large balls of ice and realizing myself. When at last the fall ceased Thienes would get out on tq the box again. I liked him; I wanted him to stay. But he would not.
The country was a sight. All over the road, and fallen thick in the ruts, were balls of ice, pure white, as big as very large marbles, and some as big as bantam-eggs. The ditches looked as if stones and stones weight of loaf sugar had been emptied into them — white balls and cubes of ice everywhere. Then the sun came out, and under the brilliant green birches a thick white mist, only a foot high, sucked at the fall of ice. It was very cold. I shuddered.
“I was only flirting with Johanna,” I said to myself. “But, by Jove, I was nearly dished.”
The carriage crunched over the hail. All the road was thick with twigs, as green as spring. It made me think of the roads strewed for the Entry to Jerusalem. Here it was cherry boughs and twigs and tiny fruits, a thick carpet; next, brilliant green beech; next, pine- brushes, very beautiful, with their creamy pollen cones, making the road into a green bed; then fir twigs, with pretty emerald new shoots like stars, and dark sprigs over the hailstones. Then we passed two small dead birds, fearfully beaten. Johanna began to cry. But we were near a tiny, lonely inn, where the carriage stopped. I said I must give Thienes a Schnapps, and I jumped out. The old lady was sweeping away a thick fall of ice-stones from the doorway.
When I next got into the carriage, I suppose I smelled of Schnapps, and was not lovable. Johanna stared out of the window, away from me. The lovely dandelion bubbles were gone, there was a thicket of stripped stalks, all broken. The corn was broken down, the road was matted with fruit twigs. Over the Rhineland was a grey, desolate mist, very cold.
At the next stopping place, where the driver had to deliver a parcel, a young man passed with a very gaudily apparelled horse, great red trappings. He was a striking young fellow. Johanna watched him. She was not really in earnest with me. We might have both made ourselves unhappy for life, but for this storm. A middle-aged man, very brown and sinewy with work, came to the door. He was rugged, and I liked him. He showed me his hand. The back was bruised, and swollen, and already going discoloured. It made me wince. But he laughed rather winsomely, even as if he were glad.
“A hailstone!” he said, proudly.
We watched the acres of ice-balls slowly pass by, in silence. Neither of us spoke. At last we came to the tiny station, at home. There was the station-master, and, of all people, the barber.
“I can remember fifty-five years,” said the station-master, “but nothing like this.”
“Not round, but squares, two inches across, of ice,” added the barber, with gusto.
“At the shop they have sold out of tiles, so many smashed,” said the station-master.
“And in the green-house roofs, at the Asylum, not a shred of glass,” sang the barber.
“The windows at the station smashed — ” “And a man” — I missed the
name — ”hurt quite badly by — ” rattled the barber.
“But,” I interrupted, “you said it would be fine.”
“And,” added Johanna, “we went on the strength of it.” It is queer, how sarcastic she can be, without saying anything really meaningful.
We were four dumb people. But I had a narrow escape, and Johanna had a narrow escape, and we both know it, and thank the terrific hail-storm, though at present she is angry — vanity, I suppose.
CHRISTS IN THE TIROL
The real Tirol does not seem to extend far south of the Brenner, and northward it goes right to the Starnberger See. Even at Sterzing tiie rather gloomy atmosphere of the Tirolese Alps is being dispersed by the approach of the South. And, strangely enough, the roadside crucifixes become less and less interesting after Sterzing. Walking down from Munich to Italy, I have stood in front of hundreds of Martertafeln; and now I miss them; these painted shrines by the Garda See are not the same.
I, who see a tragedy in every cow, began by suffering from the Secession pictures in Munich. All these new paintings seemed so shrill and restless. Those that were meant for joy shrieked and pranced for joy, and sorrow was a sensation to be relished, curiously; as if we were epicures in suffering, keen on a new flavour. I thought with kindliness of England, whose artists so often suck their sadness like a lollipop, mournfully, and comfortably.
Then one must walk, as it seems, for miles and endless miles past crucifixes, avenues of them. At first they were mostly factory made, so that I did not notice them, any more than I noticed the boards with warnings, except just to observe they were there. But coming among the Christs carved in wood by the peasant artists, I began to feel them. Now, it seems to me, they create almost an atmosphere over the northern Tirol, an atmosphere of pain.
I was going along a marshy place at the foot of the mountains, at evening, when the sky was a pale, dead colour and the hills were nearly black. At a meeting of the paths was a crucifix, and between the feet of the Christ a little red patch of dead poppies. So I looked at him. It was an old shrine, and the Christus was nearly like a man. He seemed to me to be real. In front of me hung a Bavarian peasant, a Christus, staring across at the evening and the black hills. He had broad cheek-bones and sturdy limbs, and he hung doggedly on the cross, hating it. He reminded me of a peasant farmer, fighting slowly and meanly, but not giving in. His plain, rudimentary face stared stubbornly at the hills, and his neck was stiffened, as if even yet he were struggling away from the cross he resented. He would not yield to it. I stood in front of him, and realized him. He might have said, “Yes, here I am, and it’s bad enough, and it’s suffering, and it doesn’t come to an end. Perhaps something will happen, will help. If it doesn’t, I s’ll have to go on with it.” He seemed stubborn and struggling from the root of his soul, his human soul. No God- ship had been thrust upon him. He was human clay, a peasant Prometheus-Christ, his poor soul bound in him, blind, but struggling stubbornly against the fact of the nails. And I looked across at the tiny square of orange light, the window of a farmhouse on the marsh. And, thinking of the other little farms, of how the man and his wife and his children worked on till dark, intent and silent, carrying the hay in their arms out of the streaming thunder-rain which soaked them through, I understood how the Christus was made.
And after him, when I saw the Christs posing on the Cross, a la Guido Reni, I recognized them as the mere conventional symbol, meaning no more Christ than St. George and the Dragon on a five-shilling-piece means England.
There are so many Christs carved by men who have carved to get at the meaning of their own soul’s anguish. Often, I can distinguish one man’s work in a district. In the Zemm valley, right in the middle of the Tirol, there are some half-dozen crucifixes by the same worker, who has whittled away in torment to see himself emerge out of the piece of timber, so that he can understand his own suffering, and see it take on itself the distinctness of an eternal thing, so that he can go on further, leaving it. The chief of these crucifixes is a very large one, deep in the Klamm, where it is always gloomy and damp. The river roars below, the rock wall opposite reaches high overhead, pushing back the sky. And by the track where the pack-horses go, in the cold gloom, hangs the large, pale Christ. He has fallen forward, just dead, and the weight of his full-grown, mature body is on the nails of the hands. So he drops, as if his hands would tear away, and he would fall to earth. The face is strangely brutal, and is set with an ache of weariness and pain and bitterness, and his rather ugly, passionate mouth is shut with bitter despair. After all, he had wanted to live and to enjoy his manhood. But fools had ruined his body, and thrown his life away, when he wanted it. No one had helped. His youth and health and vigour, all his life, and himself, were just thrown away as waste. He had died in bitterness. It is sombre and damp, silent save for the roar of water. There hangs the falling body of the man who had died in bitterness of spirit, and the driver of the pack-horses takes off his hat, cringing in his sturdy cheerfulness as he goes beneath.
He is afraid. I think of the carver of the crucifix. He also was more or less afraid. They all, when they carved or erected these crucifixes, had fear at the bottom of their hearts. And so the monuments to physical pain are found everywhere in the mountain gloom. By the same hand that carved the big, pale Christ I found another crucifix, a little one, at the end of a bridge. This Christ had a fair beard instead of a black one, and his body was hanging differently. But there was about him the same bitterness, the same despair, even a touch of cynicism. Evidently the artist could not get beyond the tragedy that tormented him. No wonder the peasants are afraid, as they take off their hats in passing up the valley.
They are afraid of physical pain. It terrifies them. Then they raise, in their startled helplessness of suffering, these Christs, these human attempts at deciphering the riddle of pain. In the same- way they paint the humorous little pictures of some calamity — a man drowned in a stream or killed by a falling tree — and nail it up near the scene of the accident. “Memento mori,” they say everywhere. And so they try to get used to the idea of death and suffering, to rid themselves of some of the fear thereof. And all tragic art is part of the same attempt.
But some of the Christs are quaint. One I know is very elegant, brushed and combed. “I’m glad I am no lady,” I say to him. For he is a pure lady-killer. But he ignores me utterly, the exquisite. The man who made him must have been dying to become a gentleman.
And a fair number are miserable fellows. They put up their eyebrows plaintively, and pull down the corners of their mouths. Sometimes they gaze heavenwards. They are quite sorry for themselves.
“Never mind,” I say to them. ‘ It’ll be worse yet, before you’ve done.”
Some of them look pale and done-for. They didn’t make much fight; they hadn’t much pluck in them. They make me sorry.
“It’s a pity you hadn’t got a bit more kick in you,” I say to them. And I wonder why in England one sees always this pale, pitiful Christ with no “go” in him. Is it because our national brutality is so strong and deep that we must create for ourselves an anaemic Christus, for ever on the whine; either that, or one of those strange neutrals with long hair, that are supposed to represent to our children the Jesus of the New Testament.
In a tiny glass case beside the high-road where the lsar is a very small stream, sits another Christ that makes me want to laugh, and makes me want to weep also. His little head rests on his hand, his elbow on his knee, and he meditates, half-wearily. I am strongly reminded of Walther von der Vogelweide and the German medieval spirit. Detached, he sits, and dreams, and broods, in his little golden crown of thorns, and his little cloak of red flannel, that some peasant woman has stitched for him.
“Couvre-toi de gloire, Tartarin-couvre-toi de flanelle,” I think to myself.
But he sits, a queer little man, fretted, plunged in anxiety of thought, and yet dreaming rather pleasantly at the same time. I think he is the forefather of the warm-hearted German philosophe
r and professor.
He is the last of the remarkable Christs of the peasants that I have seen. Beyond the Brenner an element of unreality seems to creep in. The Christs are given great gashes in the breast and knees, and from the brow and breast and hands and knees streams of blood trickle down, so that one sees a weird striped thing in red and white that is not at all a Christus. And the same red that is used for the blood serves also to mark the path, so that one comes to associate the Martertafeln and their mess of red stripes with the stones smeared with scarlet paint for guidance. The wayside chapels, going south, become fearfully florid and ornate, though still one finds in them the little wooden limbs, arms and legs and feet, and little wooden cows or horses, hung up by the altar, to signify a cure in these parts. But there is a tendency for the Christs themselves to become either neuter or else sensational. In a chapel near St. Jakob, a long way from the railway, sat the most ghastly Christus I can imagine. He is seated, after the crucifixion. His eyes, which are turned slightly to look at you, are bloodshot till they glisten scarlet, and even the iris seems purpled. And the misery, the almost criminal look of hate and misery on the bloody, disfigured face is shocking. I was amazed at the ghastly thing: moreover, it was fairly new.
South of the Brenner again, in the Austrian Tirol, I have not seen anyone salute the Christus: not even the guides. As one goes higher the crucifixes get smaller and smaller. The wind blows the snow under the tiny shed of a tiny Christ: the guides tramp stolidly by, ignoring the holy thing. That surprised me. But perhaps these were particularly unholy men. One does not expect a great deal of an Austrian, except real pleasantness.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1002
