They arrived in Trento — by train — to find all at once that no one understood them. It was really the southern slope now. From the train they had watched the grapes hanging so black under the leaves, and women and men among the vines looking up. Vintage had begun. The world had changed.
One felt it immediately. The station at Trento was still Austrian — there one was still on Germanic ground. But the moment one was outside, in the piazza with its gaudy flowers, and in the streets of the town, one knew one had passed the mysterious dividing line. It was a sunny afternoon. But the streets had that dark, furtive air, as if everybody were watching like suspicious animals from the depths of cavernous houses. The shops indeed were open: but seemed to be abandoned, neglected. That secret, forlorn, suspicious atmosphere that pervades all southern towns the moment one leaves the main street was very evident in Trento. Gilbert and Johanna both felt it for the first time. And Gilbert was thrilled, and Johanna all at once felt homeless, like a waif.
They had not much money, and they wanted to eat, having had no midday meal. So they entered a small, simple-looking cafe, and asked for eggs and milk. The man looked at them with a negative look and answered:
“Non parliamo tedesco.”
Johanna repeated her question in German.
“Non si capisce. Non facciamo mangiare.”
The man shook his head, and stood there blank, neuter, negative: a hostile cypher in the atmosphere.
Neither Gilbert nor Johanna understood one single word of Italian. The waiter made not the faintest attempt to understand or to cope with them. He just presented a dead negation of anything they might be or request. Which so bewildered them that they sat at a little table.
“Che cosa desidera?” said the neutral native, in a way that would put you off desiring anything.
Johanna tried French, and asked for milk. Was there milk? And since no Italian could be considered anything but a perfect Frenchman as far as the sister language is concerned, the native replied:
“Oui, il y est du lait.”
Whereupon Johanna ordered two glasses of milk — which came. Then she proceeded to eggs — there were no eggs: — bread — there was no bread. The waiter brought two biscuits each. So the pair of finches sat in perfect bewilderment and ate this most unsatisfactory lunch.
“What do they mean by it?” cried Johanna. “It’s an Austrian town.”
“They don’t want to understand,” said Gilbert, who remembered the black, big-nosed French inn-keeper at the village outside Detsch.
“But how monstrous!” cried Johanna. “One must eat.”
They set out to try again: a rather superior cafe this time, with a clean German fresh-air look about it. Here there must be something. In they went.
The first waiter, a boy, mumbled something in Italian: the marble-topped tables looked arid: was the scene going to repeat itself. But no: a clean little man in a white jacket, and what did they want? To eat. He was sorry, but there was nothing to eat. Not even eggs and bread? He was sorry, but they didn’t have eggs, and the morning bread was finished, and the afternoon bread had not come yet. — Could one then get nothing to eat in this holy town of Trento? — Yes, one must go to the large restaurant there — there — he pointed to the corner. Danke schon! and Bitte! — and they departed again.
“Anyhow he was nice,” said Johanna.
“Oh yes!” said Gilbert.
Strange and silent and empty the town seemed in the sunny afternoon — a new, strange, dead-seeming atmosphere. Rather panic-stricken at having to go to the huge-looking restaurant — which for sure would cost huge sums — and yet of necessity driven to eat, — they entered the place. Innumerable void tables — everybody had eaten long ago. But a grubby waiter in a grubby evening suit that bagged greenly wherever it could bag. A German-Austrian, however. Quite plain sailing.
And at last the food came — rather cold. Johanna ate eagerly, and they drank beer with relish.
“So this is Trento!” said she. “I’d heard of it — but I never thought I should find it like this.”
“No — ” he said. “I rather like it.”
“Ye-es — ” she said, very doubtfully.
To tell the truth, the warm, half-desolate, half-furtive indifference of the first southern town he had ever known appealed to him. The indefinable slackness, the sense that nobody is on the spot, and nobody cares, and life trails on, nobody ever taking it in hand, was rather fascinating to him. He could feel the curious half-listless indifference of the south — and through it all something pagan, only half moral, not alert. To Johanna it was a new experience: but she recoiled.
It was three o’clock by the time they had eaten. They went out and rather aimlessly trailed the streets of the town. There seemed to be absolutely nothing to look at — except a few shops. A few quite good, modern shops — and the rest the repelling-looking Italian frowstiness. The only thing they bought was a German-Italian dictionary: one of those little red objects. They sat among the trees and shrubs of the public gardens to study this awhile. Then they set off once more to look round.
“We’ll see if we can find a furnished apartment — either today or tomorrow,” he said.
“We will,” replied Johanna, with a sinking heart.
They climbed up the narrow, steep streets, upwards, till they could emerge and look out. This was what Gilbert wanted. And when they emerged, they were more or less above the town, which lay on the side of a hill like an amphitheatre — or a section of an amphitheatre. Beyond was the country — rather like a low, stony, dreary amphitheatre. It was autumnal, buff-coloured, and looked dry, with that curious ancient dryness of bygone civilisations.
“The Romans! Doesn’t one feel the Romans!” said Gilbert, spell-bound.
“One does!” said Johanna, grimly. To her fresh, northern, forest-leaved soul it was indescribably hideous, the dry vineyards on their terraced hills, the low, bare, treeless slopes.
“We’ll look for rooms in the morning,” he said.
She did not answer for a moment.
“Where are we going to sleep tonight?” she said.
It was the old problem. So they went down and wandered the terribly unpromising streets of Trento. There was nothing they dare tackle — not even the large hotel with innumerable pale-blue, elegant, plump, femalish Austrian officers. So they went back to the restaurant — and could they have a room. Yes, certainly.
They followed the green-mossed waiter through endless passages and stairs, of an evidently huge house. And they came to a large, very lofty bedroom with two beds and monumental furniture which looked as if it had stood there and never been looked at for centuries, and wall-paper with nasty smears on it, and a rather sticky tiled floor. Very well — that would do — repugnant though it was.
They went to the station where they had deposited their knapsacks, and felt relieved that there was a place where they might sit alone. Night came — and they hung in the windows, looking into the street far below. There were innumerable soldiers: German-Austrians, friendly, lively, and noisy in an alien land. They all seemed to appear towards nightfall. In the day they must have been out marching or exercising.
The barracks was across the road, a little further down the street. Johanna and Gilbert watched the soldiers at the windows. They shouted and sang. And somebody on a cornet played yip-i-addy! with terrible eclat. Strange the American noise sounded, ripping out like bright brass on the darkness of this far-off, world-lost, meaningless barren town. Then at nine o’clock came the imperious bugle-call to turn in. The whole town seemed to ring with military bugles.
In the morning Gilbert and Johanna woke at five, to another bugle-call. They lay and dozed uneasily, aware of the great noise of soldiers. Then more bugles, and more noise of soldiers. And the sun coming up warm. They got up and looked out at the soldiers.
It was decided that after breakfast they would go out and look for an apartment: look for an apartment in Trento! First, however, look for the privy. Gilbert was sent to scout. He found a large, high apartment — a long room. It had a stone floor, that was most unsavourily wet — and along the wall ran a low stone trough, about a foot high. Whoever liked used this trough — who didn’t, used the floor. Do not, gentle reader, attempt to imagine this privy. Gilbert reported it to Johanna as impossible. And as he took a handkerchief out of his knapsack he saw a bug slowly walking up the wall of their bedroom. So they put their knapsacks on their backs, went downstairs and paid the bill: not very dear.
The first thing was to deposit their knapsacks at the station once more. For sanitary arrangements the station was just a horror. Then into the town to look for rooms. They had learnt two words of Italian for the purpose: camera, a room, and affitare, to let. And so they hunted up the chaos of streets jammed dark and unsavoury on the hill side. They saw a notice — and they climbed a dark stair. But evidendy lots of people lived up this stair, in the ancient warren of a narrow house.
Gilbert, as usual, flatly refused to commit himself to the act of asking. Johanna took her courage, and knocked at one of the old doors: and knocked again. From the inner darkness appeared a yellow, evil old crone.
“Er — er — camera — affitare — affitarsi — ” stammered poor Johanna.
The old crone mumbled something vindictive and completely unintelligible, and shut the door in Johanna’s face with a clap. Our pair of finches slunk down that vile stair. They had not imagined they could feel so diminished. Still they persisted for some time in the jumbled, gutter-like streets. And then they descended into the more wholesome town, into the open.
They sat in the Piazza di Dante and surveyed the new statue of that uncongenial poet, and the trees and plots of grass. And Johanna in her old panama that was hopelessly and forever streaked with dye that had run out of the cherry ribbon; in a burberry that sagged at the sides like a tramp- woman’s; and in a weary battered frock of dark cotton voile; poor Johanna sat on a seat in the Piazza di Dante, in that ghastly town of Trento, and sobbed bitterly.
“There’s nothing to cry for!” said Gilbert. “You needn’t cry. There’s no harm done. We’ll go somewhere else.”
But to his bewilderment, she just sat and sobbed. He thought she would ride cheerfully over everything, and was quite bewildered and infinitely troubled to see her sobbing and saying nothing there on the bench in the Piazza di Dante, in the sunshine, where women and soldiers and officers were passing between the grass-plots, and two workmen, gardeners, were busy near some shrubs.
“Let us go to the station and look,” he said. “Don’t cry. It’s no use crying. Why do you cry? There’s nothing to cry for. It’s all right. Everything is all right.”
But sanitary arrangements and one thing and another had unnerved her. However, at length she blew her nose and wiped her eyes and accompanied him rather disconsolately to the station — to look.
Looking, they saw a poster showing the Lake of Garda, with Riva, at the head of the lake, described as a glowing autumn resort.
“Shall we go to Riva?” said Gilbert.
“Yes!” said Johanna, once more joyfully. “There will be a lake, and lovely water. I think it’s so horrible and waterless here. It will be lovely, lovely, lovely! I adored Lake Maggiore. I know I shall love it.”
When was there a train? There was a train then due: and a crowd of peasants, thick, solid, round the ticket office. Gilbert got the knapsacks from the deposit, and entered the fringe of the crowd. The crowd of peasants — all men — pressed tighter, more madly on the ticket office. Many were workmen going down the line — who the others were, heaven knows. The bell rang — the train was coming — and still that mad wedge of angry peasants and laborers at the ticket office. More bells rang — somebody shouted that the train was in sight. Somebody went into the ticket office. A clerk appeared in the doorway, and beckoned Gilbert in. Like a lord, Gilbert followed into the privacy of the ticket office. The train thundered in meanwhile. Our hero asked for two third-class to Riva. The great train stood hissing in the station, Johanna stood frenzied by the footboard. Then up dashed Gilbert, with his tickets and his change and his knapsack, and they climbed into their carriage. And the great train rolled on — towards Verona, which was not far off.
Ah, it seemed so pleasant in that airy third-class carriage, with the yellow wooden seats and the open space all down.
The sun was shining brightly outside, from a blue sky. Innumerable clusters of black grapes — miles and miles — dangled under leaves of the vines, and men in broad straw hats, and women with their heads bound in coloured kerchiefs looked up at the train. The other passengers were poor people — pleasant, simple, and excited at being in the express train. Ah it was all so nice, so pleasant! The two knapsacks sat on the rack, next to the big, blue-check peasant bundles. What an escape from hell into a sort of sweet, sunny, roaming heaven.
They changed from the big train before reaching the frontier, and got into a side train. Strange the scenery was. There were vineyards — and then patches of tall maize, very tall, and sere yellow — and then groves of mulberry trees — and then water, and tall high reeds, like bamboo, tall canes leaning in dishevel — and odd pink villages, all sunny — and odd clusters of cypress trees — and then craggy rocks and juniper slopes — and then dark rocks and a water-fall — and a few bunches of dark orange trees.
It all seemed so luxuriant, almost tropical — and all so sun- tissued. The leaves, the earth, the plant-stems, all seemed rather like heat-fabrications: whereas in England and Germany all nature is built of water, transfigured water. But no — here already Gilbert saw, as by an inspiration, the magic of tigerish heat-substance, sharp leaves and blades built of heat, and black, black, impenetrably dark grapes, and pale grapes like drops of slow, stealthy light dripping. He loved it, and they were both inordinately happy. He imagined rice- fields on a flat piece of plain.
So Riva: and there the lake-head glittering in the sun. They left their knapsacks at the station and set off along the white, hot, dusty road to the little town, which was near. Carriages were rolling along, containing, like flowers in a flower-bowl, an inevitable plump sky-blue officer with a rose- red sash and white cap, and a lady with an enormous enormous hat with feathers, and a decollete bosom with necklaces. Under the trees of the avenue other little officers were strolling alert, all beautiful and sky-blue, with sashes and glitter, all plump, and with very tight military trousers of thin fine cloth, making the virility of the plump, brisk captains almost unnecessarily conspicuous.
Poor Johanna — forced to keep on that hideous dark green burberry with its drooping sides, because her dress beneath was not much better than a tatter: forced to wear that drooping, drip-stained, weather-battered panama: and accompanied perforce by Gilbert, whose travel-worn trousers had frayed at the heel, and whose hat was all that remained of it. Poor Johanna! Those were the days of huge huge hats and satin walking-out dresses. It was a hot September afternoon — officers were strolling or more often driving out with these gorgeous ladies. And poor Johanna trailed round the length of the avenue from the station, to the quay of the lake, and into the town for food. In a thick, heavy dark burberry all fallen out of shape, and a panama hat likewise.
Gilbert was fortunately oblivious of her distress. To him Riva was lovely. In the first place, near the quay of the lake rose the wide ancient tower with its great blue clock-face that showed the hours up to twenty-four. There was the rippling, living lake, with its darkish, black-blue pellucid water, so alive. And there were boats with vivid yellow sails, and red-and- orange sails, and boats with two white sails crossed like sharp white wings. And there was a friendliness, a glitter, an easiness that was delightful beyond words, southern in its easiness, and northern in its alert charm.
Ah charming plump officers of the Austrian army, whoever found fault with you, with your uniforms of exquisite fine blue cloth, fitting like a skin, and your virility so amiably in evidence, and your peacocking so inoffensive and good- humoured. What a genial, cosy, elegant holiday-feeling you created, you and your cocottes! — So different from those Prussian wasps of Detsch.
If Johanna had not been extinguished in that burberry she would have been blissfully happy. Gilbert was blissfully happy. They ate in a lovely inn-garden, and it did not seem expensive.
When Gilbert had paid for the dinner he had left one English sovereign and a few Austrian Heller. Just a little over a pound, in all the world.
“We can always pawn my watch or your rings,” he said, “if nothing comes.”
“Of course we can,” she said easily.
“But something will come.”
Remained, however, the eternal problem: to find a room in which they could live, and where they could make their own meals. They set out on the vague search, wandering on a wide road out of the little town. And fortune led them, as fortune always led them when they were happy. They came, after five minutes, to a nice-looking square villa behind a high garden- wall. The villa had blue decorations inserted over the windows. It was called Villa Florian. And it said, in French, Apartment to Let.
Would it be too expensive! Heaven save it would not. In trepidation they rang. Johanna was thinking of their appearance — with horror! and he was thinking, with fear, of the scornful people turning them away because the price was too much for them.
A gentle little Italian old maid, so fluttered that she spoke only Italian. And she would bring her sister. An inevitable old-maid sister who has importantly to be “fetched.” The important sister of the two. But a lady, and still gentle, with Venetian delicate breeding. And yes — there was a room: such a sunny room with three windows: and when Johanna asked, trembling, how much, it was only three and sixpence a day. Johanna looked at Gilbert.
“Alors — ” the conversation had lapsed from the little lady’s excruciated German.
“Combien?” said Gilbert — oh vile word.
And with joy they stayed. And Johanna explained to the two little elderly sisters — the Miss Florians. And they were grave and delightful, and treated Johanna like the baroness she had been brought up as, so she was mollified and happy.
When the little ladies had left them, they looked round their room with perfect joy. So clean, so fresh, so airy and sweet, so northern in all this. And then a lovely medallion of flowers on the ceiling just over the beds. This was the real Italy. To be sure, the political border was about five miles off, down the lake. Nevertheless, they had reached the land of painted ceilings, and they hailed it with joy, little knowing the horrors that would accumulate overhead, thicker and thicker, as they went further south. This painted ceiling was nothing but charming. It had only a band and lines of delicate colour round the edges, and this medallion of flowers, a pink rose and blue plumbago flowers and white jasmine packed together, just over Gilbert’s bed. He lay and looked at it and felt very happy indeed, that first sunny morning.
Outside in the garden were fig-trees and vines and dark, shady trees. And before Johanna was dressed, the maid had tapped, and would they care for figs. And there was a beautiful plate of golden figs, those little, soft, deep-yellow figs that burst and have a pellucid gold twilight inside. All nicely piled on vine-leaves. A gift from the little ladies. What could be more charming, to our doubtful and impoverished finches.
They were really happy in Riva: rather guilty feeling in the bedroom when they made their own tea and boiled their own egg for breakfast. For surely the little ladies might expect to send in coffee and milk. But no — oh precious economy. The fugitives could make tea and buy their own food for a mere trifle. And when you haven’t more than twenty-five shillings in the world! Gilbert had written to England.
Carefully they cleared up their crumbs and tidied the bedroom. And the little ladies didn’t mind in the least, though Gilbert always felt sure they did.
Johanna’s one grief was that she had no clothes. The luggage had been left at Bozen, and would take a couple of days. However, she got her frock ironed, and she bought a new ribbon for that hat, and some of the fringe was clipped from Gilbert’s frayed trouser-bottoms. Moreover everybody treated them with respect, everybody was charming in Riva. Perhaps it was because they were happy, but at any rate things seemed to go well.
They loved the place: the old clock-tower, the massive dark waters of the lake, the gorgeous sails that were bright as flowers, the hot September sun, and the profusion of fruit. Black grapes, white grapes, muscatel grapes, black figs, yellow figs, pears, apples, pomegranates — an overwhelming abundance of fruit everywhere, for twopence or threepence a pound. Gilbert and Johanna would buy lunch, and go into the old grove of olives above the shore, and there they would boil their eggs and make their tea and eat their fruit, and sit in the hot September afternoon watching the lake glitter, and feeling the mellowness of the world, the rich, ripe beauty of this Italian, sub-Alpine world, its remoteness and its big indifference. Why have problems!
And for some time there was no problem: except that poor Johanna, suddenly, had a touch of autumn colic. And she who had a passion for figs, and adored muscatel grapes, must see all Pomona’s profusion around her yet not dare to taste. Gilbert selfishly bought his basketfuls, and ate them alone. Judge that this was a grief to Madame Johanna. It was her only real grief in Riva.
In Riva too something seemed to come loose in Gilbert’s soul, quite suddenly. Quite suddenly, in the night one night he touched Johanna as she lay asleep with her back to him, touching him, and something broke alive in his soul that had been dead before. A sudden shock of new experience. Ach sweetness, the intolerable sensual sweetness, the silken, fruitlike sweetness of her loins that touched him, as she lay with her back to him — his soul broke like a dry rock that breaks and gushes into life. Ach richness — unspeakable and untellable richness. Ach bliss — deep, sensual, silken bliss! It was as if the old sky cracked, curled, and peeled away, leaving a great new sky, a great new pellucid empyrean that had never been breathed before. Exquisite deep possibilities of life, magnificent life which had not been life before. Loveliness which made his arms live with delight, and made his knees seem to blossom with unfolded delight. Now all his life he had been accustomed to know his arms and knees as mere limbs and joints for use. Now suddenly like bare branches that burst into blossom they seemed to be quivering with flowers of exquisite appreciation, exquisite, exquisite appreciation of her. He had never known that one could enjoy the most exquisite appreciation of the warm, silken woman, not in one’s mind or breast, but deep in one’s limbs and loins.
Behold a new Gilbert. Once the old skies have shrivelled, useless to try and retain their ancient, withered significance. Useless to try and have the old values. They have gone.
So it is with man, gende reader. There are worlds within worlds within worlds of unknown life and joy inside him. But every time, it needs a sort of cataclysm to get out of the old world into the new. It needs a very painful shedding of an old skin. It needs a fight with the matrix of the old era, a bitter struggle to the death with the old, warm, well-known mother of our days. Fight the old, enclosing mother of our days — fight her to the death — and defeat her — and then we shall burst out into a new heaven and a new earth, delicious. But it won’t come out of lovey-doveyness. It will come out of the sheer, pure, consummated fight, where the soul fights blindly for air, for life, a new space. The matrix of the old mother-days and mother-idea is hell beyond hell at last: that which nourished us and our race becomes the intolerable dry prison of our death. Which is the history of man.
And once it has become an intolerable prison, it is no use presuming what is outside. We don’t know what is outside — we can never know till we get out. We have therefore got to fight and fight and fight ourselves sick, to get out. Hence the Germans really made a right move, when they made the war. Death to the old enshrouding body politic, the old womb-idea of our era!
Master Gilbert could never have known what lay outside his rather dry, restless life-mode. From his Emmies and so on he could never have deduced it. If he had married some really nice woman: for of course, gentle reader, we have decided long ago that none of my heroines are really nice women; then he would never have broken out of the dry integument that enclosed him. He would have withered with the really nice woman inside the enclosure. For the act of birth, dear reader, really is not and cannot be a really nice business. It is a bloody and horrid and gruesome affair. And that is what we must face.
Whatever Master Gilbert had set himself to postulate, as the new world he was seeking, he would never have been able to hit upon this new, profound bliss in a dawning sensual soul. He would not have conceived, as you cannot conceive, gentle reader, that a man should possibly have a sensual soul. A sensual soul. Are not the two words just contradictory?
Ah no, gentle reader, once your ideal sky has withered and shown you a much vaster universe, a much wider world, a wonderful, unbreathed firmament. When that has happened you will realise that the ideal sky of our day is a horrible low ceiling under which we stifle to death. To you it is the sky, the infinite, the all-beautiful, the ne plus ultra. To Master Gilbert, after his sudden seeing-forth, it was a painted ceiling of the most detestable stifling plaster-and-distemper stuff. To be sure the painted ceiling of the old ideal doesn’t fall all in one smash. It first gives a little crack, yielding to pressure. And through that little crack one has one’s first glimpse, as Gilbert had his first sudden newness of experience and life- comprehension in Riva. Afterwards one loses the crack, and sits just as tight under the painted ceiling. Even one chants the praise of the ideal, the infinite, the spiritual. But one will come to the crack again, and madly fight to get a further glimpse, madly and frenziedly struggle with the dear old infinite. And thus rip just a little wider gap in it, just a little wider: after tearing oneself considerably.
Do not imagine, ungentle reader, that by just chasing women you will ever get anywhere. Gilbert might have had a thousand Emmies, and even a thousand really nice women, and yet never have cracked the womb. It needed the incalculable fight such as he fought, unconscious and willy-nilly, with his German Johanna: and such as I fight with you, oh gentle but rather cowardly and imbecile reader: for such, really, I find you.
For the time, in Riva, he was not only happy but he was a new creature in a new world. And at such times, as usual, nice things happened. The first was that one morning, again before they were up, a knock and the maid with a large hat- box for the Signora: addressed to Frau Johanna Noon, from Vienna. Johanna was nowadays Mrs Noon by name if not by nature.
“My sister Lotte!” cried Johanna in excitement, leaping out of bed to undo the hat-box.
Behold then — an enormous black hat of chiffon velvet and black plumes — huge: a smaller hat of silky woven straw, very soft: a complicated Paquin dress of frail, dark-blue, stone- blue silky velvet and purplish heavy embroidery, for evening wear: a complicated whitey-blue petticoat of very soft silk: a voluminous dressing-gown wrap of thin silk and endless lace:
a chemise of more lace than linen: two pairs of high laced shoes, of greeny grey thin kid with black patent golosh
The manuscript ends here