WHEN THEY HAD TIED Tom Trivet firmly to the ladder which Pasquale had found, Angelo and Pasquale lifted it to their shoulders, inserting their heads between convenient rungs at either extremity, and began their night-march, led by Simon some forty yards in front of them. Good fortune and their choice of the most arduous route enabled them to avoid the Germans, but nothing could mitigate the burden of Tom Trivet. They had to carry him up steep hill-paths to lofty starlit ridges, where a boisterous wind assaulted them, and down again by tortuous rocky trails. They followed sheep-tracks across ground so perilously aslant that Angelo often feared they would lose their footing and go tumbling and rolling into unseen depths; and they forced their way through thickets of tall bracken. The poles of the ladder pressed deeper and deeper into their aching shoulders, or leaned horribly against their necks when they walked upon a slope. Whenever they were climbing, Tom Trivet’s weight hung backward so that they were in danger of being garrotted, and when they went downhill their heads were bowed in agonizing obeisance. Long before midnight Angelo began to suspect that a wounded giant lay on the ladder. By two o’clock in the morning the giant had acquired some uncommonly heavy luggage: his tombstone, perhaps, the field-gun that he used for a fowling-piece, two thousand demijohns of the local wine, and so forth. A couple of hours later, pain had created a fantasy more malignant still, and the giant was an ogre whose monstrous thumbs were pressing Angelo and Pasquale, like drawing-pins into a board, deep into the resistant earth. Angelo wept and prayed, Pasquale groaned and swore. Tom Trivet was silent, for he was unconscious again. And Simon, with no mercy for himself or them, still sought improbable paths and compelled them to follow.
When daylight came they were some three hundred feet below the crest of a great green hill, at the upper corner of a straggling wood that climbed its southern slope, and there was nothing to be seen of the enemy, nothing of the English army. Simon at last gave the order to halt and rest, and Angelo, so weary that he could no longer bear even the sight of other men, staggered a little farther downhill, a hundred yards or more, and falling into a clump of ferns at the edge of the wood was sound asleep within the instant.
He was awakened, when the sun stood overhead, by the iron growl and screech of approaching tanks, and immediately was seized with a fear of their crushing him where he lay hidden among the ferns; but as he did not know whether they were British or German he dared not get up and run away, lest he expose himself to the enemy. The leading tank halted not far from him, and a little while later Angelo heard men’s voices. He held his breath to listen, and then had to bite his fingers to keep his teeth from chattering. It was not English they were speaking.
‘En wat is daar nou te doen noudat ons hier aangeland het?’ said one of the invisible soldiers.
‘Ons Kan die natuurskoon bewonder,’ replied another. ‘Daar is, goddank, niks anders om te doen nie.’
There was a pleasant tune in their voices that was certainly not German, but the words were more like German than anything else, and Angelo was well aware that the enemy had recruited foreign legions who spoke in many tongues. He lay still for three minutes more, tormented by doubt as well as fear, and then, with relief that merged quickly into gratitude and pure happiness, heard other voices and words – familiar English words – that now seemed inexpressibly kind and comforting.
‘Shock me,’ exclaimed a hoarse and breathless Cockney, ‘if ever I want to see a shocking mountain again! It’s like that shocking old nursery rhyme, this shocking war is:
The good old Duke of York,
He had a thousand men,
He marched ’em up to the shocking top of a shocking hill,
And shocking well marched ’em down again.
I’m browned off, I am, and my shocking feet are on fire.’
How sweetly they fell upon his ears, the homely English syllables! He was free, he must be free, in the company of these good fellows who spoke the tongue that Shakespeare spake; and crawling softly through the fern he saw presently some half-a-dozen tall soldiers, wiping their sweaty brows, of the Grenadier Guards, and with them the crews of two tanks of the South African Division. They appeared to be on terms of the warmest friendship, and the voices that had lately been speaking Afrikaans now joined with Cockney in genial debate. Angelo, not yet revealing himself, watched them and listened with the greatest pleasure until a Guardsman, coming into the fern on business of his own, tripped and fell on him. This caused some confusion, and Angelo for a moment or two was in near danger of his life, but saved it by his own command of English.
‘I am not a shocking spy!’ he exclaimed indignantly. ‘I am a shocking co-belligerent!’
They listened to him then, both Englishmen and South Africans, with a proper respect, and readily went with him to look for Simon and Pasquale and Corporal Trivet.
Simon, they discovered, had already met the Grenadiers and was talking to one of their officers who happened to be an old friend of his. Tom Trivet had been carried away and put in the doctor’s care, and Pasquale, who had never before seen tanks on a mountain-top, was patting their steel flanks with admiring hands, as though they had been fat cattle.
For a little while, in this small segment of it, the war had the innocent look of some old pastoral foray. The day was fine, and the great shoulders of the green Chianti hills showed firm and muscular beneath a tall blue sky. A gentle wind rustled the bracken and whispered in the branches of some lonely trees. Two officers with field-glasses, patient and quiet as deerstalkers in a Highland forest, searched the opposing mountainside for a possible head; and the Guardsmen and the South Africans – the sons of Queen Victoria’s infantry and of Kruger’s long-sighted riflemen – lay gossiping together and drinking tea.
A tank moved slowly forward, and its gun was depressed till its barrel lay on a downward slant like the slope of the hill. Three shots were fired, and from the wall of a farmhouse in the valley below floated small clouds of dust. A man, crouching, ran from the farm into a copse behind it, and in the flat fields to the east little khaki figures could be seen advancing. Three aeroplanes, circling their target, stooped like hawks upon it, and as they climbed again tall plumes of smoke rose behind them. The sound of distant machine-gun fire mingled with the stridulation of grasshoppers.
Angelo and Pasquale ate some bread and bully, and went to sleep again. Then Simon sent for them, and they found him, half a mile downhill, sitting with a Guardsman in a borrowed jeep. They had no difficulty in returning to Pontefiore, for the curving front of battle was now several miles to the north of it, and peace, with a look of stunned surprise, lay upon the ruined village. In the castle they found Fest drinking white wine with the Countess.
Simon’s manner, when they met, was cold and constrained, but Fest was bland and smiling, and the Countess took such obvious pleasure in his company that Simon had to master his feelings and assume a friendlier air than he had any mind to. What would otherwise have been an acrimonious discussion became in fact, at the Countess’s table, a protracted dinner-party with Fest, on her right, playing the part of the distinguished guest, accomplished in conversation, until they retired to her drawing-room, where the Countess herself kept the talk going with anecdotes of her early life.
Angelo, in the meantime, had found Lucrezia, proposed immediate marriage to her, and been accepted. Lucrezia’s objections to a wedding in war-time had seemingly vanished, and though Angelo warned her that he would certainly have to leave her again, she made no reference to the sad plight and many difficulties of a young wife, married one week and left alone the next, which had been the mainstay of her argument the year before. She had responded, indeed, with such a melting warmth as Angelo had never seen in her. She had hung upon his neck as though in utter abandonment to his will or care, and lying in his arms had looked up at him with eyes so lovely in their trust and gratitude that Angelo, at one moment ravished with delight, was at the next intoxicated with the pride of his triumphant manhood.
He was, however, somewhat taken aback by the coolness with which she listened to the tale of Tom Trivet’s heroism and the wounds he had received. She made no concealment of her agitation when Angelo spoke of the danger that he himself had been in, when he found himself on the wrong side of the road; but the news of Tom Trivet’s wounding did not affect her in the least.
‘He is all right now?’ she asked, with plain indifference in her voice.
‘By no means!’ said Angelo indignantly. ‘He was hit in two places and it will be a long time before he is all right again. He will recover, certainly, but at this moment, I suppose, he is lying in great pain; while I, who owe everything to him, am alive and well and supremely happy.’
‘Oh darling, how glad I am that you are alive, and very, very glad that you are happy!’
‘But we must also think about Corporal Trivet –’
‘Let us think about him some other time. Just now it is enough to think only about ourselves.’
On subsequent reflection he admitted that her loss of interest in Tom Trivet would be a decided advantage to their married state; but he was surprised, and dubiously hurt, and even alarmed a little by the completeness of her unconcern. That Tom had jilted her could not be denied, and to get a girl with child and then desert her was something, of course, quite unforgivable. But even so, the spectacle of unforgiveness was a trifle shocking; or so it appeared to Angelo.
He was, however, far too happy in his possession of Lucrezia to waste time in fault-finding, and early the next morning he sought the village priest and told him that he wanted to be married as soon as possible.
The village church and the village priest had both suffered badly in the bombing of Pontefiore. The church, with its west wall blown down and most of the roof gone, stood wide open to the sun and the rain, and the priest, having lost the placid view of life that had protected him for half a century, now seemed equally exposed to the elements. He shivered in the noonday heat, he was frightened of the dark, and when Angelo said firmly that the day after tomorrow would be most suitable for a wedding, he at once agreed. The sacraments, he said, were always available for those who needed them, and marriage was a sacrament like baptism and penance. ‘Though indeed,’ he said, ‘I should not be happy if you had to be carried to it, as you were to your baptism, or returned for it again and again, as undoubtedly you will in penitence. Oh no! One marriage is enough for anyone, and you’ll come to it on your own legs or not at all. – Bless you, my child. Our poor church is draughty now, but I dare say it will serve.’
All the villagers were delighted by the prospect of a wedding, for they saw in it a brave assertion that life must continue in its ordinary way, despite the outrages of war; and Lucrezia’s mother laughed and wept alternately for the better pan of a whole day, while the Countess with a stern and furrowed brow went to and fro to see what could be provided for a marriage feast. She found little enough, for the Germans had taken with them everything they could carry, and the general feeling of elation was quickly followed by a widespread gloom when it became apparent that the celebrations would be dulled by hunger.
Angelo was further depressed by a conversation he had with Simon. ‘I have been thinking about your future,’ said Simon.
‘I am going to be very happy,’ said Angelo.
‘Yes, I hope you will be. But I think you should know that I’ve recommended you and Pasquale for transfer to one of the new Italian Brigades that are being formed. I’m going to one of them myself, as a liaison officer.’
‘And what shall I have to do there?’ asked Angelo.
‘Training, to begin with. We’re starting to train and equip a large number of Italian troops, so that by next year they’ll be able to take their place in the line along with us and the Americans.’
‘By next year? Is the war going to last as long as that?’
‘Nobody knows how long it’s going to last, but obviously we must be prepared for the worst.’
‘I don’t think I could live,’ said Angelo, ‘if I were truly prepared for the worst. Why should I, indeed? Why should anyone?’
‘Now you’re being obstructive. You are talking for the sake of talking, and that won’t do you any good at all. What I mean is that we must face facts.’
‘In an infantry regiment?’ asked Angelo sadly.
‘Yes, you’re pretty certain to be posted to the infantry.’
‘But why, why! Why must I go and spend month after month being drilled, and running to and fro carrying very heavy weights, and firing rifles and mortars and machine-guns, and throwing bombs of which I am extremely frightened, and lying out all night in the cold, and marching hundreds of miles without going anywhere in particular – and all to be killed in the most unpleasant manner by a total stranger in some part of the country that I have no wish to visit?’
‘I think it is the proper thing for you to do,’ said Simon stiffly.
‘Oh my God,’ said Angelo, ‘now I am doomed indeed!’ – For he knew that when the English say It is the proper thing to do, the inexorable laws of nature are supplemented by another that they discovered, and only they can understand. Oh, their wild notions of propriety! They are like sunspots, he thought, for they cannot be explained or foretold, and their effects are incalculable. Whether they have indeed certain absolute standards of behaviour, or merely a tribal instinct, or perhaps an hereditary taint – a sort of itch – it is impossible to say. But you can no more argue with them than you can dispute the law of gravity. – Yes, he admitted, I am doomed, and there is no escape.
‘Lucrezia,’ he said, ‘will not be pleased when she hears that I am to become a soldier in the infantry again. It will be very difficult to say goodbye to her.’
‘Well,’ said Simon, ‘that sort of thing is always difficult. But it has to be done, of course.’
Always difficult! thought Angelo in a sudden wordless rage. Always difficult indeed! He wanted to ask Simon – but dared not, for he knew it would be improper – he wanted to ask him how often he had bidden goodbye to a woman who loved him, and broken her heart, and comforted himself with the cold reflection that it had to be done, of course. Oh, they were insufferable, these Englishmen! They made life impossible – and the expectation of it highly improbable.
But he knew that he must hide his feelings, for though he had come near to losing his temper, he retained his manners; and the English, as he had learnt, disliked above all things a display of feeling. So with a stiffness like Simon’s own he said, ‘I shall do whatever you think it befits me to do. You can be sure of that.’
‘That’s good,’ said Simon warmly. ‘You’re a good fellow, Angelo, though you talk a lot of nonsense, and I knew I could rely on you.’
Walking by himself, with desolated spirit, Angelo pondered this last remark and could not decide whether he had been flattered or insulted by it. Simon relied on him to do something which was quite unnatural for a man to do; something to which he was wholly disinclined; something that could only be justified by Simon’s ridiculous notions of propriety. And Simon was clearly wrong in some of his ideas, for it was absurd to pretend that people should always be prepared for the worst. Shadowed by such a future, the present would be intolerable. To make the most of the present one should be prepared for the best, and risk a little disappointment. Yes, Simon was wrong in that, and so he might also be wrong in his expectation of a long war. The war might be over tomorrow, or next week, or at any rate before he had to return to the penal servitude of infantry training.
Hope crept into his mind, rosy-fingered as the dawn, and like the quick-rising sun swelled in imagination’s sky to golden confidence. He was going to be married: that was the main thing, and nothing could prevent it now. As for the future, it was unpredictable. There might be fair weather or foul, but no one knew which till it began to blow. ‘And if it is the former,’ said Angelo, ‘I shall enjoy it; if the latter, I must endure it. But what folly to start shivering now!’
On his wedding-morning he dressed himself carefully in a borrowed blue suit, that was somewhat tight over the chest and a little short in the leg, but looked smart enough with a clean shirt and a white tie and a flower in the buttonhole. Pasquale accompanied him to the church, where they arrived an hour and a half before anyone else appeared, and spent the time in trying to re-assemble the pieces of a ruined fresco, of the Flight into Egypt, that lay scattered on the floor of the north aisle.
In the midst of destruction the painted walls of the church were incongruously gay. The frescoes that covered them were cracked and torn, but their faded colours were brightened by the sun, and Saints and Martyrs, Shepherds and Madonnas and Patriarchs, all seemed to be in festival attire for their first sight of the outer world.
Angelo found the ears of the Ass, and said, ‘It was Gozzoli who painted this.’
‘They were good little animals that that fellow had on the road over by Vallombrosa the other day,’ said Pasquale ‘It was a pity we had to leave them behind.’
‘Gozzoli was an extraordinarily industrious painter,’ said Angelo.
‘It’s a disease,’ said Pasquale, ‘Now what do you make of this? Will it be the Ass’s tail or the half of St. Joseph’s beard?’
‘It fits this piece here. – Do you really think that to be industrious is a disease?’
‘I never caught it myself, but my poor wife died of it. – Put all these blue bits together.’
‘I hope Lucrezia will be a good worker,’ said Angelo.
‘It’s useful,’ said Pasquale, ‘but they’re apt to be shrewish, those who are. And those who won’t work are sluts, and that’s worse.’
‘Here’s part of the halo,’ said Angelo. ‘I suppose you never get perfection in a woman?’
‘I never heard of it. But you’re sure to get surprises, so you might be lucky.’
‘This, I think, is the Ass’s tail.’
‘Some of them change their character over night,’ said Pasquale. ‘You take what you think is the mildest and softest little creature you ever saw, and you give her a house of her own and a husband of her own, and as like as not she turns into a regular tyrant.’
‘I think I’ll go and sit in the shade,’ said Angelo. ‘The sun is hot this morning.’
Pasquale followed him and they sat on the pavement under a badly scarred representation of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon.
‘There are things that go on in the mind of a woman,’ said Pasquale, ‘that no man can ever guess at. And because of that there are things that happen in married life that you’ve got to experience before you can believe in them.’
‘What sort of things?’ asked Angelo nervously.
‘Injustice,’ said Pasquale in a graveyard voice, ‘is one of the worst. They’ve got a longer memory than we have, and your own words will be used against you.’
‘But surely, with a little patience and common sense, you can easily put right small misunderstandings of that kind?’
‘No,’ said Pasquale. ‘There’s something in women that can’t ever be put right. You can’t do anything about it. You’ve just got to suffer.’
‘What, what is the time?’ stammered Angelo.
‘They ought to be here in about ten minutes now.’
‘I think I’ll go for a little walk first.’
‘Don’t go too far,’ said Pasquale. ‘It won’t help you if you make a bad start by being late. That’s the sort of thing they never forget.’
‘O God!’ said Angelo, walking very rapidly. ‘Please give me courage! I mustn’t run away now. I really mustn’t. But oh, how I wish I hadn’t been so impulsive! There was no need for me to get married – not yet – and though I do love Lucrezia, it may not suit either of us to be tied together for ever and ever. And she has such a strong character. I’m sure she can never be cured of that. Oh, I do wish I could have another chance.’
He was walking quite aimlessly, and only recognized the lane he was in when he was startled by a furious female voice, and, looking up, saw a figure in white running towards him, her dress furled high to the knees, and fifty yards in front of her a small child making what haste it could in the tumbling gait of a two-year-old. The child ran into a garden, and Angelo perceived that it was the garden where, so short a time before, he had heard Lucrezia’s confession of infidelity. He also perceived that the figure in white was Lucrezia herself, and the child was Tommaso.
The need for action drove out fear. He too began to run and entered the garden side by side with Lucrezia, who in a voice breathless with anger and exertion told him how Tommaso, freshly clad in new clothes for the church, had at the last moment escaped her vigilance, and disappeared on some purpose of his own. A moment or two later his purpose became apparent: it was to look for the frog that croaked so loudly in the garden pool. They heard him smacking the water with a stick, and then they heard a louder splash. Tommaso had fallen in again.
Angelo pulled him out, and Lucrezia boxed his ears. Gasping and whimpering, he promptly attacked her, and Lucrezia pushed him away, fearful lest her white dress be soiled. Tommaso then began to cry in earnest, and went on crying with the implacable resolution of which only a simple child is capable. Two or three of Lucrezia’s sisters arrived. They too were dressed in wedding finery, and Tommaso in a berserk rage assaulted them in turn. They screamed, and pulled their frocks away from his wet hands. Angelo picked him up and held him, dripping, at arm’s length. Tommaso’s anger subsided a little and his cries diminished to a small braying noise.
‘What are we going to do with him?’ asked one of the sisters.
‘Do with him?’ demanded Lucrezia. ‘We must take him with us, naturally. There is no one else to look after him, and if we leave him alone he will drown himself. But he is going to be a good boy now. Put him down, Angelo, and he will walk with me.’
As soon as Tommaso’s feet touched the ground he began to cry again with alarming vigour. He would have nothing to do with Lucrezia or her sisters, but clung passionately to Angelo’s leg.
‘Angelo knows how to manage him,’ said one of the sisters.
‘He would be quite good if Angelo carried him,’ said another.
‘He is going to spoil everything,’ cried Lucrezia, on the verge of tears. ‘It is my wedding day, and everything is going wrong. Look at my shoes. They are quite dirty already, and it is getting late. Oh, Angelo, what shall we do?’
‘If you want me to,’ said Angelo unhappily, ‘I suppose I can carry him.’
Lucrezia with a radiant smile whispered in his ear and called him a darling. The sisters clapped their hands, and Angelo lifted the soaking Tommaso to his shoulder. Tommaso sat there with a look of grave satisfaction, and they set off for the church.
The whole village was assembled, either within the gaping building or among the adjacent ruins, and a murmur of sympathetic pleasure rose from the spectators when they saw that the wedding had already become a family occasion. Angelo tried again to set Tommaso down, but a piercing howl was the immediate response, and Lucrezia once more showed signs of the most painful agitation.
Angelo by now was nearly as wet as the child. He shivered a little, straightened his tie, and hoisted Tommaso to the other shoulder. They walked up the open nave to a little chapel that had not suffered greatly, where the priest was waiting with the Countess and Simon Telfer and Lucrezia’s parents.
The poor bomb-shocked priest was quite bewildered by the appearance of the dripping child, and to everyone’s surprise he began to recite the service for public baptism. When the Countess informed him of his mistake, however, he showed no ill-will but proceeded to marry Angelo and Lucrezia with the utmost kindliness, and manifestly in a great hurry lest he go wrong again.
Tommaso sat solemnly on the bridegroom’s left shoulder, little runlets of water trickled down the bridegroom’s neck, and Lucrezia, gravely beautiful, put her hand in his. The cloudless sun lighted the ancient frescoes, and the Madonnas and the Saints, the Patriarchs and Angels that the industrious Gozzoli, and Pinturicchio, and Lippo Memmi had painted long centuries before, looked down in mild benignity. On the one side of them Saint Sebastian endured his martyrdom with astonishing equanimity, and on the other Noah discovered the secret of making wine with pious gratitude. Rubble from the broken walls was crumbled by restless feet, and as soon as the ceremony was over the villagers surrounded Angelo and Lucrezia in warm congratulation. Tommaso allowed himself to be transferred to the shoulders of Pasquale.
After that nobody quite knew what to do, and all stood talking in little groups among the shattered masonry, under the heat of the bright sky, hoping to hear some good suggestion for enjoyment of the day, but what they chiefly heard was the hunger rumbling in their bellies. The Countess’s intention to offer a wedding-feast to the whole village had come to nothing, for the simple reason that there was nothing to eat. Or very little. Far too little to feed the assembled men, women, and children of Pontefiore. They were all aware of this, but still they waited with a lingering hope in their minds, their ears alert for better news, and their eyes turning wistfully in the direction of the Countess and her foreign guest.
She, for the third or fourth time, was telling Angelo of her failure and her disappointment, and her reluctance to sit down with a small party to the small meal that was all she had been able to provide, when the great majority must remain unfed.
‘But what else can I do?’ she asked. ‘I can’t work miracles and I don’t know anyone who can, more’s the pity. I could give them something to drink, for there’s wine in plenty, but when you pour wine into empty stomachs you don’t know what may happen, though you can make a good guess. And we’ve had trouble enough in Pontefiore without that. No, I’ll just have to tell them all to go home, if they’ve got homes to go to, and wait for better times. It’s cold comfort and I don’t like the sound of it; but I can think of nothing else.’
Twice while she was talking Angelo heard the noise of a motor-horn some distance away, and now it sounded insistently. Some of the villagers were already moving in idle curiosity towards the ruined bridge, with children running ahead of them. The harsh irregular voice of the horn seemed increasingly to demand attention. The drifting movement of the crowd became a purposive current as more and more people joined it. The horn grew louder: a rasping noise with occasionally a fierce warbling note to break its monotony. Angelo and Lucrezia, Pasquale and the Countess and Simon Telfer and Lucrezia’s parents, all followed the crowd. Everyone hurried towards the bridge.
The children who had led the way came running back, chattering excitedly. Their words were repeated, incredulously at first, and then in triumph, and became a noisy chorus. ‘Il Signore!’ shouted the crowd. ‘Il nostro caro Signore!’
On the road, on the far side of the broken bridge, stood a six-wheeled canvas-roofed military lorry with an American star painted on the bonnet. An American soldier sat in the cab and another, a huge fat man, stood beside it. As the crowd gathered about the near abutment a slim and handsome figure, slightly flushed by exertion, came climbing out of the ravine. It was Don Agesilas.
‘Ben arrivato!’ shouted the villagers. ‘Ben arrivato!’
The Countess pushed her way through the excited people and Don Agesilas, kissing first her hand and then her cheek, exclaimed, ‘My dear! How long since we have met! Far, far too long. But how well you look, and younger than ever. I am devoted to you.’
‘What’s in that lorry?’ she asked.
‘It is what is called, I believe, a mixed cargo.’
‘Is there any food?’
‘It is full of food.’
‘You’ve come just in time,’ said the Countess. ‘We’re going to have a feast.’