‘LET US MAINTAIN our good temper,’ said the Count. ‘Let us keep a sense of proportion. There are seven deadly sins and only two redeeming virtues, which are faith and love –’
‘I should include good manners,’ said the Marchesa.
‘So should I, if I had my way,’ the Count agreed. ‘I should include tolerance, a judicious taste in music, a preference for the baroque in architecture, a certain refinement in the apprehension of physical beauty and one’s responses to it, a talent for imparting gaiety to conversation, and so forth. These would all be redeeming virtues if I were the ultimate authority and final court of appeal; but there’s no use pretending that I am any such thing. It has been decided otherwise, and we have to recognize facts. The essential virtues are two, the deadly sins are seven, and therefore the virtues are in a permanent minority and we should not be surprised that sometimes they suffer a heavy defeat. We should not, that is, be so destructively surprised as to fall into a state of wrathful despair before the scene of a human battlefield from which the virtues have fled shrieking in dismay, and on which the triumphant sins for a little season strut and revel, maltreat their captives, and quarrel among themselves. It is tiresome, I admit –’
‘My maid refuses to leave Rome,’ said the Marchesa. ‘The perfume that I have used for ten years is unobtainable in this paltry village, and today the hairdresser, clumsy to begin with, was finally insolent. The few clothes that I was able to bring here now seem like a vulgar admirer whom one has allowed to perform some opportune but regretted service: their excessive familiarity has become revolting. There is, moreover, no company in Montenero, and what is hardest of all to bear, you have turned philosopher.’
‘No, no,’ said the Count. ‘That is too kind of you. I explore the fringes of thought, I contemplate human affairs with a certain interest, but that is all. I am not yet conscious of a complete and orderly system of cognition.’
‘You should be glad of that,’ said the Marchesa, ‘for it is sheer misfortune to be much aware of any system, whether physical, political, or merely plumbing. The plumbing in this house has now finally collapsed, and no one can be unconscious of the fact. And except for a few hours in the middle of the day we live in such gloom as only good eyesight can distinguish from total darkness.’
‘It was the Germans who cut off the electric light,’ said the Count.
‘And an English or an American bomb that cut off the water. If our old friends and our new ones both remain in Italy, we shall soon have nothing left at all.’
‘And then upon the stony soil of our destitution the seven deadly sins may dwindle and faint with hunger, and by strenuous cultivation the redeeming virtues will show their heads again.’
‘Do you look forward to the prospect?’
‘No,’ said the Count, ‘I cannot bear to contemplate it. – I am going for a walk.’
‘I shall not come with you,’ said the Marchesa, ‘for I cannot afford such an expense of shoe-leather.’
The little town of Montenero di Roma, where they had been living in seclusion for several weeks, had formerly been a popular resort of tourists. There were several good churches in it, the largest being that of Santa Maria Maggiore, which had an elaborate façade and contained four large paintings of the Holy Family by Luini. There were also a palace that had once belonged to the Orsini, in which there were frescoes by Ghirlandaio, and two restaurants well-known for their cooking. The municipality had built a new sulphur bath below the ruins of that which had been more splendidly created for Diocletian, and but for a surplus of statuary the public gardens would have been charming. The main street, a narrow thoroughfare smoothly paved, curved like a half-hoop round the hill, and in summer time the houses were decked with red geraniums that grew in little balconies of wrought iron beneath their windows. From many places there were broad views of the Campagna, far below and reaching spaciously to the north, and of St. Peter’s dome, small in the distance, in the flat haze of Rome. The town was built upon a wooded hill-top in a broad bay of the mountains, and above it, on either flank and behind it, rose their wrinkled sides. But the wrinkles were hardly visible in winter, when the snow filled them.
How cold it was! thought the Count. How different from the warm seasons when tourists had filled the streets with their clamorous tongues from Birmingham and Bremen and Minneapolis! Heigh-ho for progress: what a lost beatitude that genial vulgarity now appeared!
The sun shone with a pallid glitter, and the snowy breath of the wind came shrilling down a salita on the right-hand side of the street. The Count turned up the collar of his coat: it was lined with Persian lambskin, tightly curled. Two plump and red-legged girls with scanty dresses ran past him, laughing loudly. An old man stood in the gutter, begging, but seemingly indifferent to the frozen air. A burly fellow with a bare head and his shirt open to the waist stood in the mouth of a lane and shouted to a friend on the other side of the street … There were gradations of sensibility, thought the Count, and no one should generalize on social affairs until everyone had been furnished with an equally efficient circulation of the blood.
The smoothly paved and curving street led to the Piazza Santa Maria where, in the tourist season, a fountain had risen from the triple source of three dolphins’ mouths and splashed the generous forms of two nereids clinging to the knees of a benignly bearded Neptune. There was no fountain now, and the basin was half-full of dirty snow. Printed posters, signed by the German commandant, defaced the columns of Santa Maria Maggiore on the north side of the square. There was a scattering of German soldiers among the idly moving people. – ‘And how superfluous and out of place they are,’ murmured the Count with a sudden distaste for their strong but awkward figures. The Italians, the several score of them who loosely filled the piazza, were doing nothing in particular to justify their existence, but nothing at all to perturb it. They were talking and gesticulating, they were contemplating eternity and abusing the present, they were behaving like the digits and fronds of a great anemone that reasonably filled its own sea-cove; but the Germans were manifestly a foreign growth and stood out like proud flesh.
Their alien condition became still more obvious when a senior officer approached in company with a person in civilian clothes who walked with the self-conscious strut of someone whose importance was considerable, but not long established. His hands were clasped behind his back – though with difficulty, for his arms were so short that his fingers barely met each other – and his head had been characteristically moulded by a Teutonic pelvis. They crossed the square, and with a harsh contraction of their muscles the soldiers stiffened to attention and saluted as they passed. In the north-east corner of the square, near the church, there was a little shop whose proprietor sold silversmith’s work, intaglios, and reputed relics of the Etruscans’ art. The officer and his civilian friend paused for a few seconds to look through the window, then went inside.
The Count knew by sight most of Montenero’s German rulers, but these were strangers, and beneath a small cloud of anxiety he was wondering who and what they might be when he caught a glimpse, in the shadowed portico of the church, of a tall and unforgettable figure. The figure had swiftly vanished, presumably into the church, but the Count had no doubt as to who it was.
It was Fest, his mysterious visitor whom he had not seen since the night when he had been nearly suffocated in the Marchesa’s house above the Piazza di Spagna. – Circling a stolid group of dark-clad peasants, narrowly avoiding a running child, dodging between idle talkers, the Count hurried across the square and ran up the steps of the church. There was no one in the wide porch who looked like Fest. He pushed open a creaking door and went in.
Before one of the side altars a priest in a shabby white chasuble was marrying a thin young man to a plump young woman in the presence of fourteen of their friends and relations. On the steps of another altar a kneeling girl had been so overcome by fear or grief that she crouched like a beaten child, leaning against the wall, her shoulder and her yellow head on the black stone. The Count passed her, then paused and looked discreetly back. She was a pretty girl. Poor creature, he thought, it is the pretty ones who suffer most. But then he caught sight of another woman who was by no means pretty, nor ever had been in all her fifty years of unfulfilment, and on her hatchet face, as she lifted her squinting eyes to the darkness under the roof, there was a misery so forlorn and unrelieved that the Count looked hurriedly away and muttered to himself, ‘No, no, I was wrong, I was very wrong. Dio mio, how unhappy it always makes me to come into a church.’
He walked round again, to make sure that Fest was not there, and while re-passing the wedding-group he observed that the bride, though young, had a hard and greedy look, and the bridegroom, but little older, was nervous and ill-tempered. The walls of the chapel in which the ceremony was taking place had been painted with graceful exuberance to represent the marriage at Cana in Galilee. The principals in the picture, and all their guests, were strikingly handsome. Shrugging his shoulders, the Count bent and whispered to an astonished woman, a cousin of the bridegroom’s father, ‘We must be patient, we must be very patient.’
The creaking door closed behind him, and he breathed more happily the colder air outside. But he wondered, with annoyance at his failure to find him, where Fest had gone. And then he saw him.
He saw a figure come gently but swiftly into sight at the north end of the portico, and flatten itself behind the farthest column. He was about to go forward and claim acquaintance, when the figure withdrew its right hand from its overcoat pocket and swung it slowly back like a man who is about to throw, very carefully, a rubber ball to his little boy. With a sudden pulse beating in his throat the Count looked outward, in the direction of the projected throw, and saw that the German officer and his square-headed civilian friend had newly come out of the shop where intaglios and objects of reputed Etruscan art were sold, and for a moment stood in conversation.
The percussion bomb burst at their feet, and within a second another had followed it. The Germans fell with a curious violence, as if trying to leap away from or over the explosion, and the shattered windows of the shop flung upon them a wild confetti of broken glass. The Count felt a sea-sick rising of his tripes, and in a slow horror looked round again at the figure behind the left-hand column. Fest recognized him and turned so that the Count saw his monocle of clouded tortoiseshell and his smiling lips. With a courteous gesture Fest raised his hat, and then, swift as a sprinter starting his race, vanished round a corner of the church into an alley that steeply descended to the lower parts of the town.
The explosion of the bombs had first thrown the crowd into a wild confusion during which people screamed loudly, ran hither and thither, and waved their arms about in a dark fluttering of limbs and garments that looked like the frightened rising of a cloud of rooks. But soon their panic-movement was seized and held, their legs were haltered and their thoughts captured by overmastering curiosity. With a force like gravity curiosity drew them all, their scattered circumference gathering tightly in, to the bloodstained doorway of the shop that had sold Etruscan statuettes to tourists.
The Count moved slowly at first, yielding reluctantly to a horrible attraction, but when other spectators began to push him aside and unfairly thrust themselves in front of him, he became insistent on his equal rights and struggled for a good place with the best of them. He was entirely taken by surprise when a cry of alarm went up and the crowd again began to run. The Germans had acted promptly, and, now, in a very methodical manner, were dealing roughly with the sight-seeing inhabitants of Montenero. The Count offered no resistance to arrest, but while one German soldier seized him by the arm, another hit him on the head with a rifle-barrel.
He appeared to recover consciousness fairly soon, but for some time took no interest in his surroundings. When he did he found himself, with twenty or thirty other men, in a classroom in an infants’ school. A score of little desks stood on the floor, and the walls were gaily decorated with a fresco of the farmer’s year. On a blackboard, in large white figures, there was a simple sum in addition. Concussion had left him with a headache, but the Count’s mind was now clear, and quickly it filled with apprehension and dismay when he perceived that all his companions – or all but one – were in a state of extreme dejection. Some were quietly weeping, others noisily expostulating to friends who paid no attention, and a few sat on the floor in a silent surrender to grief that reminded him of the girl in church. The one person who retained his composure was an elderly small man with a red nose, a scanty combing of dyed hair across his half-bald head, and a well-worn but decent suit of professional black. The Count knew him slightly. His name was Toselli, and he was a retired school-teacher. The Count beckoned, and Toselli joined him in a corner of the room beside the blackboard.
‘What is the explanation of all this?’ asked the Count. ‘What has happened, and what is going to happen?’
‘Several things and one thing,’ answered Toselli. ‘What has already happened is a tangle of events, what is going to happen is a single event. At six o’clock tomorrow morning we are going to be shot.’
‘But why?’
‘To expiate the murder of two German visitors who seem to have been people of some importance. I have heard many suggestions as to who they were, but none of us really knows. From the behaviour of some German officers, however, which I observed with interest, I think the inference is justified that they were highly regarded by their own people, and I gathered that they had only recently arrived from Berlin.’
‘But the man who murdered them isn’t here,’ said the Count.
‘Oh no,’ said Toselli. ‘They are searching for him, of course, but if they catch him they will certainly not execute him in a hurry, like us. They will examine him, and interrogate him, for days and days. But we are people of no importance. We are no more than those chalk figures on the blackboard. We are merely integers in a German sum, and can be rubbed out as easily. One German life, they say, must be paid for by twelve Italians – so here we are.’
‘There are more than twenty-four people here,’ said the Count.
‘They may have thrown in a few extra for good measure,’ said Toselli carelessly. ‘We were chosen without much consideration. There is little Ercole the boot-black, and there old Bartolomeo who is a great-grandfather. You recognize blind Roberto who begs in the streets, or used to? You, my dear Count, represent the nobility, and I the learned professions – but fortuitously, I assure you. We are a casual collection, and who cares though the sum is not exactly correct?’
‘How can you speak so lightly of this appalling crime?’ demanded the Count. ‘You yourself are going to die; how can you sit and talk with such inhuman composure?’
‘I have for long been indifferent to life,’ answered Toselli. ‘Why should I not be indifferent to death?’
‘Surely they are not identical?’
‘We may be subject to new illusions, or merely cease to be plagued by those with which we have grown familiar. I cannot suppose there is anything else to suffer or worse to fear.’
‘I do not want to die,’ said the Count.
‘Neither do our companions here, yet who among them has had even the illusion of a happy life? They fear to die because they have been taught that life is good, and therefore they are alarmed by the thought of losing it; but if they had never heard such nonsense –’
‘Their senses would have told them so, and reason convinced them.’
‘The human senses are very poor guides to reality, for it is well known that one man’s meat is another’s poison. A Hottentot beauty would excite only derision in Rome, the table delicacies of Tibet would nauseate a French epicure, and where you shivered with the cold an Eskimo would throw off his shirt and complain of the heat. – No, my dear Count, you can repose no great trust in the senses, and as for reason, that is simply a product of time and locality. Reason can prove anything, but it does best of all at turning somersaults.’
The Count was silent for a few minutes, and then he said again, ‘I do not want to die.’
‘It is a word,’ said Toselli, ‘but is it anything more? Death may be only a name-plate on an empty house. Neither of us knows, and I do not care. My master is the philosopher Pyrrho, who was probably the wisest man who ever lived, and he knew nothing and knew that he knew nothing. A friend of his, a Greek of Byzantium, after dining with him one day went home and wrote, proleptically, his epitaph. It may be roughly translated like this:
‘“And oh, dear Pyrrho! Pyrrho, are you dead?”
“Alas, I cannot tell,” dear Pyrrho said.”’
But the Count was no longer listening. He was overcome by a plain and quite intolerable sorrow to think that he must die so soon. The bare and simple fact of living became unutterably dear to him, and the prospect of being shot implied so huge a deprivation that his natural fear was swallowed in a vast engulfing grief.
All the days of his life joined themselves together to make a Chinese scroll of the most rich and delectable entertainment; to tear it would be unforgivable. Yet the scroll did not lie, and many of the pictures, very clearly drawn, showed him haggard with pain. He saw himself swollen with the toothache and badgered by the ear-ache; and he thought of those suffering days, so long ago, with wild regret. In spite of its aches and pains, life was good.
He saw in sharply drawn pictures the countless humiliations to which he had been subjected. Public snubbing and secret rebuff, a friend’s forgetfulness, a girl’s indifference: he had suffered them all and kindred shames beyond counting. Sleep-walking at seven, a clap at college, the piles at forty – he had fallen from his horse in the Pincio, he had choked on a fish-bone when dining with the Colonnas, he had gone to the races with his buttons undone – oh, the stabs of minor misfortune that drove so deep and left so hot a wound! And yet, though they were ten times as many, life would still be good.
He thought of graver torment. He remembered Angelo’s mother, and the liquefaction of his heart when she died. He saw upon the scroll the death of later love and the dull hue of women’s bodies when it was no longer possible to see them in the light of love. What arrant flesh they then became, a something that might be weighed but had no other meaning; and how lonely he used to feel, at such a time, to think he had lain with those cold strangers. But even love in its most melting warmth had never quite dissolved his knowledge of his loneliness, nor hidden totally the outlines of his immanent incommunicable singularity. Every man was alone, born in a caul of solitude that none could tear. He must live in the narrow confinement of himself, and into his cell disaster came to beat him cruelly. Yet life was good.
He wept, and as the tears ran down he remembered that other men had died. He recalled, with a sudden horror, how many and how many had lately died, and all had lost a life as dear to them as his. Chinese and Ethiopians had perished by the thousand, a multitude of Russians and Germans had gone back to clay with Englishmen and Poles, with his own fellow-countrymen, with Norwegians and Frenchmen and Jews – and never had he given a thought to the sad infinity of farewells they spoke, before the bullets parted them from their distracted lives. They had felt as he felt now, and their fate had never troubled him, never touched the hardness of his heart. That was the great vulgar sin of these dishevelled times, hardness of heart. – But he would die as he had lived, he promised himself.
‘Do you believe in honour?’ he asked Toselli.
‘No,’ said Toselli.
The Count dried his eyes. ‘I have just perceived,’ he said, ‘that I am under a certain obligation of decency. During the last few years a vast number of men have died, and I have not pitied them. Therefore it would be indecent and wrong to pity myself. I shall go to my death unweeping.’
‘I see no occasion for tears,’ said Toselli.
‘I do,’ said the Count.
‘Nor, if it comes to that, for refraining from them.’
‘Again I do.’
‘The great world will certainly not weep for us, because it has grown too much accustomed to what was once called tragedy. Though men are still upset by their own misfortunes, they have acquired wisdom enough to be indifferent to others.’
‘That is not wisdom,’ said the Count.
Toselli yawned and lay down, and appeared to sleep. He tied a handkerchief round his eyes, for the room was brightly lit. Throughout the night a dynamo throbbed, and the unshaded lights filled the room with a radiance that threw quivering shadows. The door of the classroom had been taken off its hinges, and two soldiers stood in the opening. Other soldiers in heavy boots passed and re-passed in the corridor. The Germans had commandeered the school to serve as an emergency prison and accommodate some of the additional troops they had brought into Montenero. For most of the night there was a mingled noise of harsh voices, doors slamming, ponderous feet on wooden floors, and occasionally a nightmare scream; but in the harsher coldness before dawn there was comparative silence. Then, with a sudden clamour, the prison woke to a simmering fury and the day’s business began.
New snow had covered the school playground, but so thinly that feet printed it with black. Large flakes of snow were falling from a still darkness. A dozen soldiers with rifles stood at the gate, and there were two motor-lorries on the road outside.
The Italians were marched out in single file. Soldiers were on either side and dragged forward those who hesitated, passing them on as if they were tubs of water to put out a fire. The lorries were filled, and set off slowly through the darkness. In a whisper the Count repeated again and again, ‘I had no pity for others, I owe none to myself.’ He was so intent on believing this that he heard nothing of what the others were saying.
About two miles from Montenero, in the hillside some eighty yards above the road, there was an opening like a long and very shallow arch. It was between five and six feet high in its middle part, and the cave behind it was extensive. There was a little space of flat ground in front of it.
The lorries halted on the road below, and the Italians were dragged or driven up the hill to the narrow level in front of the cave. There were some German soldiers already there, and an officer with a powerful torch whose beam he swung slowly from end to end of the huddled line. Within the cave, shining erratically in its darker gloom, were other lights, and men moving behind them.
‘How many of them are there?’ demanded the officer with the torch.
‘Twenty-eight,’ answered the lieutenant in command of the escort.
‘That’s too many.’
The lieutenant did not reply, and the officer with the torch shouted, ‘That’s more than I want, I tell you!’
The lieutenant approached him, and they argued in low voices. Then he with the torch exclaimed loudly, ‘I must have authority, that’s all. I don’t care how many I take, but I won’t do it without authority. If you say it’s all right –’
‘Then for God’s sake let’s get a move on.’
He began to make a short speech to the Italians, but was interrupted by a fit of coughing. He coughed as if his throat were being torn, and spat in the snow. Then hoarsely went on with his speech. The Germans, he said, had improved the Hebrews’ law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They had put up the price of German eyes, and required a dozen in payment.
At this point the philosopher Toselli, who was standing beside the Count, began to scream; and when a soldier clapped a hand over his mouth he bit it, and hacked the soldier’s shins. In the darkness Toselli had caught a glimpse of reality, and lost on the instant his indifference to life and contempt for death. His example upset the other prisoners, most of whom also began to struggle and scream, and for a minute or two there was wild confusion. When order was restored they all turned their heads to listen to the noise, very loud in the gloom, of a motor-cycle climbing the hill.
The motor-cycle came to a stop beside the lorries, and the officer with the torch sent a soldier to see who had come and ask what he wanted. The soldier quickly returned with a dispatch-rider. The two officers, their shoulders touching, read his message by torchlight, and then the senior fell into another paroxysm of coughing.
When he recovered he announced, as though it were a matter of no importance, ‘Your execution has been postponed. The actual murderer has been captured, and you will be taken back to Montenero to await a final decision as to what is to be done with you.’
He lighted a cigarette, but his throat was sore and he could not smoke it. He threw it away, and little Ercole the boot-black picked it up.
On the way back to Montenero the Count felt that his legs were made of green cheese, but his chest was like a barrel bursting full of new wine, and he could not restrain himself from talking very volubly to all his fellow-travellers, who listened to never a word, for all were talking with an excitement no less than his.
They were taken to the school again, and into the classroom decorated with pictures of the farmer’s year. Shortly after their return the Count saw Fest. With a soldier on either side, and one behind him, he walked past the open door. His head was high, and he seemed quite calm. He still wore his monocle of clouded tortoiseshell.
Later in the day a squadron of Allied bombers attacked some German transport on the road near Montenero. A few of their bombs fell in Montenero itself.