When Gilbert and Johanna woke it was a lovely sunny morning.
“Have they gone, I wonder,” said Gilbert.
“Yes,” said Johanna. “I heard them.”
“Did you? Did you hear them go out?”
“Yes. I heard the alarum, and I heard them go past our door: ever so quietly.”
“Isn’t it queer to be without them!” said he.
“Quite. — Yes, it’s awfully queer. I miss them, don’t you? I like them awfully. Do you? Do you like Stanley?” asked Johanna.
“I like him even better than Terry. He’s more real.”
“Yes, that’s what I feel. I think he’s amazingly attractive. Now why doesn’t a young man like that do something with his life — something that matters — I’m sure he could,” said she.
“Oh yes,” he answered. “I believe he could too — if he ever got started.”
“Of course!” she cried. “What he wants is a woman behind him. What good are his silly little Katinkas to him? And really, his mother must be awful for him.”
“Yes,” said Gilbert.
It was true, he missed the two young men, particularly Stanley. He missed him almost acutely — missed the sort of heightening of life that the American youth had brought, the thrill, the excitation. It was as if Stanley’s presence sent little thrills through the air, as electricity thrills through water. And this acted as a stimulant, almost like a drug on the nerves of the pair of finches. And now it was taken away, they felt an emptiness, a wanting.
But the morning was lovely. They had coffee in the little arbour of the small garden of the inn, just across the road from the house itself. Roses were blooming on the lattice, and deep purple and crimson convolvulus, like wine-stains. Lovely to sit in the sun in the stillness. They both felt tired. The excitement gone, their energy seemed to collapse.
So they walked rather slowly, rather with difficulty, to the old town of Sterzing, where they arrived in the afternoon. The old, picturesque street, the handsome old tower, the mediaeval houses made Gilbert think again of the emperors of the Middle Ages. Sterzing is on the old imperial road. And in the sunshine, with people going lazily, and women sitting in the street under their green umbrellas selling black grapes and white grapes, and pears and peaches, and the old pointed houses rearing above the narrow, sunny flagged street, and the great tower rearing up to look, like some burly but competent feudal baron, and the shadows falling so dark and the sun so very bright — why, it all had that unspeakable charm of the real old Germany, before science came, and the horrible German theorising. The lovely old Germany that roamed along, so individualistic and vigorous under its lords, but so careless, so deep with life force. Alas and alas for Prussian officialdom — horrible scientific rectitude.
Gilbert felt rather in an alas-and-alas mood. His spirits had all gone flat. And Johanna complained of being tired — she was tired, she wanted to rest. They bought grapes in the street, and looked for a house. They soon found one: an old house in the High Street, with a thin, peeping old woman. Yes, she had a room: it cost two and six a day. Yes, they could have it for a day or two.
So they installed themselves, and Johanna lay on the bed, and he sat and looked out of the window. Then he walked again in the town, to buy food. There was such a charm about the High Street itself — the meandering, magical charm of the Middle Ages, when the world was still full of unknown potencies and undiscovered worlds and undefined deities. But alas — Gilbert looked at it all through the greenish glass of spirits gone flat and meagre. — Also here was the first ripening touch of the south — Italy, the warring Italy of Popes and Emperors. He felt how glamorous, how blood-rich it had been. — But alas, walk towards the station you saw the new, thin-spirited scientific world: the big new tenement buildings, the gasometers, the factory. You felt the North German with his inhuman cold-blooded theorising and mechanising.
They stayed their few days in Sterzing: never very happy. Johanna was disinclined to move — and Gilbert went mad if he had to sit long in the bedroom. It was clean and pleasant. But the sense of the dark, unknown house all around him, with its lurking inmates of whom he saw nothing, its unreveal- ing silence and its truly mediaeval gloom, its passages, its formlessness, all this he could not bear. At least he could not bear to be shut up in it.
Most typical was the privy: one could not call it a W.C. This was a little cupboard on the same floor as the bedrooms, right in the centre of the house. It had absolutely no communication with the air outside, and at midday was completely dark, so that one must take a candle. It was very like those stair-cupboards on the landing under the stairs of the upper floor, where the dirty linen basket stands: so dark, so shut in. But it was not under any stairs. Heaven knows how it was let in between the bedroom walls. But there it was. It had no water — nothing: but consisted simply of a long shaft which descended into unknown and unknowable depths. And most peculiar was the smell. It was not so ordinarily offensive. It was rather such an acute ammonia as to make one catch the breath — like breathing smelling-salts. Gilbert always felt that it really might explode if one went in with a light: and how go in without a light.
This privy was typical of the Tyrol, in so far as it consisted of a long dark pit-shaft from the upper floor down to unknown depths. But its absolute buried darkness in the core of the house was a more city-like, and perhaps mediaeval feature. Anyhow our friends never forgot it.
Do not grumble, gentle reader, at this description. Don’t talk to me about bad taste. You will only reveal your own. Strange are the ways of men. And since these are the ways we have to follow, why make any pretence.
As much as possible Gilbert and Johanna went out into the country. It was queer, rather formless country, among mountains that seemed suddenly to have become low. And there were one or two factories — and great new macadamised roads — and further out, a big sanatorium among woods and among giant rhododendron bushes. Sterzing too seemed to lie in a wide, shallow round pot. Far off, one could see pine- forests on the up-slope, and white roads, far off, trailing upwards and into the unknown.
After a few days they set off again with their knapsacks on their backs. They were recovering, and instead of half-faint reelings of spirit, backward towards Munich and Stanley and England, they set their breasts forward towards the unknown.
Gilbert did not want to follow the modern road to Bozen. Neither did he want to take the great high-road to Meran. He made out a path up a long valley, and decided that in one long day’s walk they could do the twenty-five miles to the rest-house on top of the Neering pass. Then from the summit of the pass down to Meran.
It was Sunday, and the bells were ringing for Mass in the fresh morning when they set out. They took a path across the water-meadows, past a strange old ruined church — then the high-road by the river, on till they came to a Sunday-morning village. The women were at the water-fountain with their brass pails, the men were in their black Sunday clothes. Men were out with guns and dogs.
Then they left the high-road and took the bridle-path. It climbed under trees from one side to the other of the valley. By midday they found themselves fairly high up. Shy, wildish, wondering mountain peasants went along the road, queer thin men. High up on the opposite mountain flank, beyond the trees, they could see a little village clustered like stones, with broad roofs on which large stones rested. So they continued, always following the same stream, apparently, through the afternoon. The air became wilder, the mountain hamlets more desolate: just little bunches of houses set down among manure heaps and grassy springs and stones, without any semblance of street, any unity. And the peasants up here — always tall, thin, somewhat bird-like, inhuman creatures, stared hard at our two travellers, and gave no greeting. Johanna felt rather frightened. Nobody wore Sunday clothes. It was like a weekday, save for a certain Sabbath emptiness of feeling — work being half-gripped.
By five o’clock they had passed the last hamlet, and seemed to be nearing the end of the valley. The stream had petered out into thin channels among marsh and stones. The path had become almost indistinct. The valley had widened into a desolate sort of bay. In the bed of this bay went the path, between huge rolled-down rocks, and over the stream again and again, and beside the last marsh. There a youth and a ragged girl were driving home two cows: the tong-tong of the melancholy cow-bells. Away in front could be seen the cliffs and inaccessible slopes that closed in the valley. Shadows seemed to be gathering. Johanna was frightened.
She asked the youth if this was the path up to the Neering hut. With great difficulty she got an answer. Which way did the path go up? — At last he waved his hand vaguely to the right. How far was the hut from the top of the path? — Perhaps an hour.
“An hour from the top!” cried Johanna. “I am dead already.”
“Probably it isn’t,” said Gilbert. “The map gives it about a quarter of a mile.”
They went on — the youth and the cows clambered up the slope towards the last hamlet: five forlorn, squalid houses which Gilbert and Johanna had seen above them perched on a little table, half an hour ago.
So they plunged on and on, across the desolate, end-of- the-world valley-head, towards the cliffs and the shutting-in slopes. It was evening, and the air was thin and cold, making the heart beat. The track, instead of swerving to the right, swerved to the left, and over a water-fall. There was the hoarse noise of water among vast, loose stones, in the pale, colourless evening. Gilbert pressed forward, Johanna began to lose her nerve.
“I shall never get up there,” she said, eyeing the rock- slopes. “How do we get out?”
“The path will take us.”
The path veered to the right, and began to climb with a vengeance. It was as Johanna had said — this was no mule- track. One had to clamber in foot-holes up rocks like the side of a house. And Johanna kept repeating:
“I shall never get up here. I tell you I’m too tired. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.”
Gilbert took her knapsack and clambered up the next piece.
“Come. You must come,” he said, standing there and looking at her.
“I can’t.”
“Very well then, I shall just go on without you.”
For as a matter of fact it was not at all dangerous or even difficult. Only, with the high thin air, and the fatigue, it was terribly strenuous, the heart beat wildly, and the cold made them feel faint. Gilbert stood half-way up the slope — they had perhaps climbed the most jagged piece. The path looked plainer above.
But the moonless night was really falling. It was already dusk. And the world was desert, a cold desert of rock. He looked back, from the cliff-face on which he stood, over the stony bay of the valley-head just beneath, on towards the dim bush-scrub, into the dark valley mouth. Not a sound save water. Not a sign of life. Nothing, but the bareness of rock masses, and a sort of savage world away below. Above, the slope going up like a great bastion, a sky-line dark against a darkening sky, with the first stars.
“I can’t come. Oh I can’t come any further. I can’t come any further!” she cried like a child below, bursting into tears.
“You can come perfecdy easily. Good God, what a mardy baby. I’m going now without you.”
And he turned to clamber still up.
“Wait! Wait for me!” she wailed. And up she came, regaining her composure as she did so.
As she drew nearer, he moved on ahead.
“Wait for me. Wait for me!” she cried imperiously. “Wait! I want to tell you something.”
He stood on the stony-rocky little path on the slope-face, with the black mass of the valley-head curving round, and the gulf of the darkening valley away below. Already stars were out. But he thought he could see on the sky-line the depression where the path would emerge, over a sort of rock-studded shoulder. So he waited for her, wondering what would be over the top.
“Listen,” she said. “I want to tell you something. I want to tell you.”
“What?” said he.
“I want to tell you. Stanley had me the night before last.”
Everything went vague around them.
“Where?”
“The evening when we slept at the Gemserjoch hut.”
The vagueness deepened. Night, loneliness, danger, all merged.
“But when?”
“When we went for a walk — and you went with Terry. He had me in the hay-hut — he told me he wanted me so badly — .”
He looked at her as she stood a little below him in the dusk of that Sunday evening, there in the coldness on the face of the valley-head. She was vague in the darkening twilight. And it was such a surprise to him, that he did not know what to feel, or if he felt anything at all. It was such a complete and unexpected statement that it had not really any meaning for him. He turned vaguely and went clambering up the path, while she followed in silence behind. And so they climbed for some time.
Suddenly he turned to her — she was close behind him. He dropped her knapsack and threw his arms around her.
“Never mind, my love,” he said. “Never mind. Never mind. We do things we don’t know we’re doing.”
And he kissed her and clung to her passionately in a sudden passion of self-annihilation. His soul opened, and he gave himself up. He rose above the new thrust on wings of death. He kissed her and kissed her, and kept on saying:
“We do things we don’t know we are doing. And they don’t signify. They don’t signify really, do they? They don’t really mean anything, do they? I love you — and so what does it matter!”
“No, it doesn’t matter,” said Johanna a little testily. She was quite mute and unresponsive under his kisses, and quite unyielding under his embrace as he clasped her to his bosom.
Johanna did not at all care for the conclusion “that it did not matter.” Those marvellous pearls of spiritual love. “I love you — and so what does it matter!” fell on completely stony ground. She felt rather caught-out by his passionate spiritual forgiveness: put in a falser position than ever. So she took up her own knapsack, and they resumed their scramble up the hill-face. It really was not very far now. In about ten minutes they wound their way out on to the shoulder, between wild rocks. It was quite dark, save for the stars. And perfectly silent and summit-stern. And very cold, extremely cold.
But he could still make out the path. So he pushed on, and in a few minutes, to his great relief, saw a yellow light shining in the darkness ahead.
“There — that’s it,” he said.
And his chief anxiety fell away from him.
“Thank God,” said Johanna.
It was nearly nine o’clock when they reached the wooden rest-house. They ate and went to bed in the ice-cold bedroom. And there he loved her with a wild self-abandon. But she kept something hard against him in the middle of her heart. She could not forgive him for his forgiveness of her. After all, forgiveness is a humiliating thing to the one forgiven. And she did not choose such humiliation. Moreover she did not like his convulsion of selflessness by means of which he soared above a fact which she faced him with: thereby leaving her still saddled with the self-same burdening fact. He seemed to have put her more in the wrong, and assumed a further innocent glory himself. She could not sleep, because her brain was hard.
He however slept the sleep of the innocent and the exalted. He woke rather late, feeling still exalted. It was another sunny morning. He thought of Johanna’s piece of news, but still did not have any clear feelings about it. He did not attempt to realise it imaginatively. On the contrary, he left it as a mere statement, without real emotional force. And he liked Stanley — he had liked him all along: so why pretend to hate him now? And he believed people must do what they want to do. And he knew that Johanna believed in much love, a la Magdalen. “For she hath loved much.” And he himself, Gilbert, he could stand aside for a moment.
“Didn’t you know? Didn’t you suspect anything?” said Johanna, rather gloomy.
“No,” he answered, with his strange clear face of innocence. “No — never. It wouldn’t have occurred to me.”
And half she felt enmeshed, even a little fascinated by his clear, strange, beautiful look of innocent exaltation. And half she hated him for it. It seemed so false and unmanly. Hateful unmanly unsubstantial look of beauty!
“Well,” she said. “It wasn’t much, anyhow. It meant nothing to me. I believe he was impotent.”
Gilbert looked at her. This brought him to earth a little. And for the first time he felt a pang of hate and contempt for Stanley.
“It meant nothing to me,” she said gloomily.
He did not answer. The words fell into the deep geysers of his soul, leaving it apparently untroubled. But in the end the irritable waters would boil up over this same business.
They decided to take the high-road to Meran. There it ran, the looping white mountain high-road, in a loop past the hut. It was the Meran road. Gilbert looked back over the path they had come last night. It was a sort of moor-track between low heath and great standing boulders. It came from over the brow of nowhere.
So they took the high-road in the opposite direction. It looped and looped across the broad slope of the pass-head. And in one place there was a little, wind-withered crucifix. And one leg of the grey old wood had broken at the knee, and hung swinging in the wind from its nail. Funny the Christ looked, like a one-legged soldier: but pitiful, forlorn, the ancient, snow-harried little crucifix, all falling to bits, standing back among moor-like heath from the road.
As the day went on, as they wound and wound round the long, many loops of the road, seeing the sun-dim country away below, with its valley and other hills, a certain heaviness, darkness came over Gilbert. As a heaviness and an inert darkness follows most exaltations. He felt he could not see the world. His soul was rather dreary and hard. And he wished he could get back his own real, genuine self.
So they tramped on the whole day. He watched for newnesses in the landscape. The one pleasure still was the new world ahead. He liked the southern plumage of the trees, the feeling of sun and luxuriance.
But about four in the afternoon he suddenly stopped. They had come to a river side — and in front was a forge where a cart was standing. The river was pale-green and full.
“Why!” he said, and his heart fell bang down into his boots. She looked at him.
“Haven’t we come back to Sterzing?” he said.
“No! How can we! How can we!”
But they had. They walked along the road — and they were made certain. They reached the woods, and the place where yesterday’s bridle-path branched off. They had come back to Sterzing.
In the overclouded evening, grey and dismal, they trudged back the long familiar mile-and-a-half into the familiar town. It was really a bitter blow — really a bitter blow . With shame and ignominy Gilbert crept along the High Street, and past their lodging-house. He had a horror lest the landlady should see them.
“Well,” said Johanna. “We’d better go back to our old room.”
“I couldn’t stop in Sterzing,” he said, with that peculiar pallid finality there was no answering.
“What will you do then?”
“Take the train to Bozen.”
So they passed through the town and along the embankment to the station. There was a train at half-past six. He bought second class tickets, because they were both so tired. And soon they sat in the warm, brilliant, beautifully-appointed train — it was the Rome express, running swiftly and smoothly south.
But Gilbert’s soul was full of bitterness. Not the news of Johanna, but the taking the wrong road, the finding himself back on his own traces was bitter to him. He felt, somehow, foiled, cast back, thrown down again. He would never walk from the Neering pass to Meran — he would never see Meran — there was some part of his life lost to him. There was some part of his life lost to him. There was some part of his life lost to him. He felt it with hateful fatality. Because he had taken the wrong road. He had made a mistake. He hated now, with deep, acid hatred, to think of the scene on the path of the pass-head: Johanna’s confession and his passionate getting over it. He hated to think of it. His soul was all gone acid and hard.
Johanna was hungry, and insisted on having dinner on the train. So they sat amid smart people, who eyed them in their shabbiness. And they ate their swaying soup on the luxurious train. And Gilbert paid, and begrudged the money, and begrudged the tip he had to leave for the superior waiter.
For the joint stock of money was getting low — it was getting seriously low. And here was another thing that tightened his nerves and irritated his spirit. They had hardly any money — and yet they were spinning south in a luxurious dining car — whither — and why, God alone knew.
Bozen was quite dark. They found themselves walking under huge high walls — railway embankment walls, or something like that. But enormous, stupendous walls in the darkness, under which they crept.
They came into the streets. Question of finding a room. This, in a town, was always a great bugbear to both of them. Each hated asking: simply hated it. And yet they had to look for a room in a house. If they went to hotels, their money would fizzle into nothing.
This night Gilbert had one of his paralysed stupid fits. He would not, could not ask. Behold then Johanna going into a sort of public-house, and asking the old harridan. Four shillings. — ”But that is too much,” said Johanna.
“Go and find something cheaper,” yelled the old harridan, while the drinking men laughed.
Nice recollections of Bozen.
However, after three shots they found a room — more or less all right — for three shillings. How much better and cleaner, besides infinitely cheaper, rooms were before the war!