‘HOW EXTRAORDINARY!’ said Angelo, speaking to himself, as he pulled a wallet from the pocket of a dead German and began to count the notes it contained. ‘Three thousand, four thousand, five thousand – he must have robbed somebody – six thousand, seven thousand – oh, but here is a fortune! And how truly astonishing to think that I have killed one of them at last, and I myself am still alive!’
He sat down beside his late enemy, in the comfortable knowledge that the flood-dyke behind him was an adequate protection against most of the missiles of war, and with a feeling of grateful wonder contemplated the scene of battle. It was horrible, of course, and he disliked the cold flat fields of the river-plain; but because he had endured so much in the company of this earth, and helped in the winning of it, he now regarded the drab untidy landscape almost with complacency. To some degree, and after a fashion, it was his.
Another winter had gone, and though every afternoon the bora blew from pale skies like a fluency of melting ice, the ground was dry and the sun rose clear in the morning. The winter had been harsh and wearisome, and the soldiers of the Allied Armies had spent it, in sad persistence and complaining valour, under mountain-snow and mountain-rain. The Germans had entrenched themselves from sea to sea across the Etruscan Apennines, and against their ramparts of concrete and steel and cloud-swept hill there had striven, week by week for the advantage of another mile, the polyglot forces of democracy, born of many lands and bred to divers habits, but all alike in that all could shiver and bleed. On the left of the line, by the western sea, there had been Brazilians and American negroes, and on the right, on the Adriatic shore, Greeks and Poles. In the mountains north of Florence men had given their orders to advance, and others had cursed them, in the accents of New England and the Middle West, in voices from the cornfields of Kansas and the cold plains of Nebraska, from the black soil of the deep South and the arrogant immensity of Texas. Voices from the Transvaal and the Cape had answered them, and to the eastward came a clamour of tongues from Hindustan. Soldiers had died with a sentence, half-spoken, of Urdu on their lips. They had called gently to each other in the night in Gurkhali and Mahratti, and heard the debate of comrades in the broad accent of Yorkshire, the lazy flow of Cotswold villages, the quick traffic of a London borough, and here and there the softness of Gaelic. Christchurch and Dunedin had spoken to Glasgow and Liverpool, Manitoba and Quebec to Warsaw and Athens. Pietermaritzburg had conversed with Little Rock, the Grampians with the Punjab, and tied each other’s wounds. Hardly since the confounding of the people at Babel had such a diversity of tongues been heard, and month by month their hopeful or their weary speech had sounded a little farther to the north, till now, in the cold bright air of spring, the languages and lingos, the argots and parley and paronyms of half the world, to the orchestration of their innumerable artillery, were shouting for the kill.
Since the autumn Angelo had been serving in the Cremona Brigade of the new Italian army. He had been toughened and bored and drilled in the use of strange weapons during long weeks of training in the Marches, and in January his Brigade had gone into the line near Ravenna. Slowly the darkness of winter had grown lighter, April had come at last, and now, in what was to be the Eighth Army’s triumphant last battle, Angelo, a troubled particle of its fame, was fighting among the stiff-sided streams of the valley of the Po. Somewhere not far away, invisible between its tall banks, flowed the Santerno. To his right was the highway that runs from Ravenna through Alfonsine to Ferrara. And beyond the dyke that sheltered him, about two hundred yards away, was a German machine-gunner watchful in his muddy embrasure.
But Angelo, for the present, hardly gave him a thought. He had not become indifferent to danger, nor acquired any surprising degree of courage, but the irritable mysticism of discipline, in this new army, had so deeply infected him that often he did not feel afraid for several hours at a stretch; and now his mind, after travelling a little in space and briefly in time, was occupied with one person only, and she was far away.
Pasquale, stooping cautiously, came to join him and offer a crust of bread and a piece of sausage. Pasquale had done well in the Cremona Brigade and was now a sergeant.
‘I was thinking about Lucrezia,’ said Angelo with his mouth full.
‘She must be getting near her time,’ said Pasquale.
‘Very near. It may be today, it may be tomorrow, or perhaps it was yesterday. I should be with her.’
‘There’s nothing a man can do at such a time but look miserable and get in other people’s way. If it’s the first one he goes about snivelling with fear, and if it’s the fourth he grumbles because there’s no one to cook his dinner. That’s all a man can do.’
‘I could comfort her,’ said Angelo.
‘Don’t you believe it. When his wife’s lying-in, his home’s no good to any man, and he’s no good to his home.’
‘She is all alone,’ said Angelo.
‘Except for her mother, and three or four of her sisters, and every woman in the village who can think of an excuse to go along and see what’s happening,’ said Pasquale.
A few hours later they attacked again. The air was full of the wild whistling of passing shells, the earth shook and rose in black fountains. Angelo waited, and because he was no longer alone, but one of many inspired by firm intention and welded by discipline, his fear no longer entered and destroyed him, but only hovered above him like a carrion bird that dares not strike a living man. Then Pasquale spoke. ‘Andiamo!’ he said.
‘Andiamo!’ Angelo repeated, a trifle shrilly, and got up.
He climbed the flood-bank and bullets spat in his ear as they passed him. He splashed across the stream and clambered up the farther bank. Piou, piou! cried the bullets, and shells burst like lions roaring under a cliff.
Angelo ran with his elbows out and his head down. He was dimly aware of the men on either side of him – men who had become his friends – and their presence comforted him. But what he chiefly desired was to reach, as quickly as possible, some place of shelter. The smallest hillock, any meagre protuberance of mud behind which he could lie concealed, would serve his purpose. There, over there, was a little weal of earth and greenery. What bliss to reach it!
Then like a drowning man he gasped in the squall of a near explosion and something hit his left hand so hard that he spun round, facing the other way, and after a wild stumble fell flat upon his face. Fear and indignation, mingled together, poured into his mind. He had been wounded. Oh, what injustice, and ah, what misery! He looked at his hand, and was seized by an overwhelming sorrow for his poor body that had been so mutilated.
It was not long before someone came to help him, and as he returned unsteadily to the flood-banks from which the attack had started, he was surprised to find how near they were. He had been running, he thought, for a long time, but now he perceived that he had gone no more than forty yards before being hit.
He fainted when his wound was dressed, and his first anxiety when he recovered consciousness was for the safety of his wallet. He felt for it, with his good hand, and found it still in his pocket. He took great care of it on his way to hospital, and put it under his pillow as soon as he got to bed.
When he was told that his left hand would have to be amputated, he fell into a profound melancholy that was curiously charged with a feeling of guilt, and for some time he was convinced that the loss of his hand was a deliberate punishment. He could never decide, however, for what he was being punished, because the more deeply he searched his conscience the more sins he discovered, many of them grave indeed, and the innumerable little ones were so wanton that it was difficult to imagine how they had escaped correction for so long. But though justice had been tardy its penalty was severe, and night after night he wept for his cunning fingers and the fingernails that were the shape of almonds, the brown skin and the blanched knuckles, the strong palm calloused by work and scored with inscrutable lines, the sturdy thumb on its plump throne of muscle, and the adept strength by which he could hang from the branch of a tree or gently enclose a girl’s soft arm. A marvellous thing was a hand, and a fearful calamity to lose it. His sin must have been grievous indeed, but still, out of so many that lay upon his conscience, he could not see which was the blackest nor decide for which he had been condemned.
And then, after days of anguished inquiry, it occurred to him one morning that he had been lucky beyond all hope or expectation. There he was, with all the sins in the calendar growing out of him, a vast crop of them every year, like figs fattening in August on an ancient tree, and by some great stroke of mercy he had been punished for only one of them, while hundreds had been ignored, perhaps even forgiven. What a marvellous clemency! He was still alive, and upon the stump of his wrist he could wear a smooth steel hook. A hook flashing in the sun, with which he could hold an ox by the bridle and with a gesture frighten small boys. A hook would be a fine appendage to his arm.
He sat up in bed and declared, ‘Now I am going to get well!’
Almost immediately his health began to improve, and after a few weeks he was sent to a convalescent hospital in a village on the Adriatic coast south of Rimini. He was, he discovered, not very far from Pesaro, where in the service of the Germans, more than a year and a half before, he had helped to demolish a lot of houses. He remembered the officer who had commanded his company, the pale and earnest young man like a student, who had despised the Allies for their inefficiency; and wondered what had become of him. For by now the German army in Italy had surrendered, after its total defeat on the Po and beyond it; and the war was over and the Allies were the victors.
He was returning to hospital one evening, after walking on the pale bright beach, when he observed in the village street a girl with a baby in her arms who was trying to attract the interest of a group of soldiers. Though the soldiers wanted nothing to do with her, she was insistent. She took one of them by the sleeve, but he made an impatient movement and would not look at her. ‘Niente mangiare!’ she was saying.
Angelo, who had stepped off the pavement to avoid them, paused to glance in her direction. ‘Niente mangiare,’ she said again in a piteous voice, and suddenly he realized that he had heard her voice before.
In great confusion he spoke to her. ‘Do you remember me?’ he asked.
She was thinner than she had been, and the childish roundness of her cheeks had become a small sad oval. But her eyes were the larger by contrast, and the new fragility of her wrists was even prettier than the smooth sturdiness of her forearms when, a year and a half before, he had watched her hauling on the sea-wet rope.
She shook her head when he asked again if she remembered, and holding out her hand repeated dully, ‘Niente mangiare.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Angelo, ‘this is a dreadful state of affairs. Well, you had better come with me, for it happens that I know of a place where we can get something to eat, and I have plenty of money at present. But I wish you remembered me.’
For a little way she walked beside him in silence, and then she said, ‘You used to come and help us haul the nets. Your name is Angelo.’
‘Of course it is! And you are Annunziata, I recognized you immediately.’
‘You have been wounded?’ she asked.
‘At the battle of the Santerno. We of the Cremona Brigade suffered very heavily,’ said Angelo proudly.
‘Was that where the Poles were fighting?’
‘No, they took Bologna, I think. – But is it true, really quite true, that you and your baby have nothing to eat?’
‘Somebody gave us a meal yesterday, but it was only a little one.’
‘And where is your husband?’
‘He was killed. He was serving with the Tedeschi, and when he tried to escape from them, they shot him.’
‘He was with the Tedeschi when I first met you. Did you never see him again?’
‘No, not after that.’
‘I am very sorry,’ said Angelo, and looked at her and her baby, and deeply sighed. They said no more until they came to a small inn that Angelo sometimes visited when the meals at the hospital were not to his liking. The innkeeper served only those whom he knew, for he never had very much to offer, and what he had had usually been obtained in some clandestine manner. But Angelo, who was very well off with the money he had taken from the dead German, had become a favourite customer, and when he told the innkeeper and his wife that Annunziata was his sister, and the victim of evil circumstance, whom he had encountered in the nick of time, for she was starving – but before he could finish his explanation the innkeeper’s wife had taken charge of the poor girl and her baby, and was bustling to and fro to prepare a meal, while the innkeeper stood watching her, shaking his head, and commenting profoundly on the sad state to which the world had fallen.
They would give her a bed, said the innkeeper, and Angelo could be sure that she would be well looked after. Annunziata said little, for she was too tired even to be surprised by what had happened. Her baby lay in her lap and sucked a thumb. It was a large child, fatter than she, and appeared to be about three or four months old.
When the meal was ready the innkeeper’s wife took the baby and Annunziata pulled her chair to the table. She had been wearing a cotton shawl round her head, and when she took it off Angelo saw that her hair had been cut short. It was no longer than that of a young man who had neglected to go to the barber, and very ragged and untidy. Angelo did not stay much longer, but said he would return in the morning.
In his dreams that night he remembered his first meeting with Annunziata when she and the old fishermen, and their wives and their granddaughters, had been hauling their nets, and Annunziata with her skirts kilted high had leaned on the greenish rope, and little salt-water drops had fallen from it on her plump brown thighs. How pretty she had been! – And how pretty she is! he thought when he saw her in the morning.
Her eyes were bright again, and she had washed her hair and brushed it tidily. The innkeeper’s wife had lent her a clean blouse and a skirt that was too big for her, and her legs were also well washed. She had recovered something of her spirit, and she began to thank Angelo so warmly for his kindness that he had to caution her, when the innkeeper and his wife were out of hearing, against showing too much gratitude. ‘For you are supposed to be my sister,’ he said, ‘and a sister takes a great deal for granted.’
He gave her some money to buy new clothes, and two or three days later they went for a walk together. She tied a kerchief round her head, and said, ‘You will not be ashamed to be seen with me now.’
‘I shall be very proud,’ said Angelo, ‘for though I searched from Rimini to Ancona I do not think I could find a lovelier companion.’
‘If I look well,’ she said, ‘it is due to your kindness. I have never had such nice clothes before.’
She took his wounded arm and said, ‘Oh, your poor hand! It makes me sad to think how you have suffered.’
‘Very soon,’ said Angelo, ‘I shall be wearing a fine steel hook. That will be very distinguished.’
They sat on the beach and looked in silence at the placid sea. Presently Annunziata said, ‘When I asked you if there were any Polish soldiers fighting beside you, in the battle where you were wounded, I was hoping that you might be able to tell me about someone of whom I am very fond. I thought you might have met him. His first name is Stanislas, but I cannot tell you his other name. It was too difficult to say. He is very good-looking, with grey eyes and a dimple in his chin.’
‘No,’ said Angelo, a little sadly. ‘I have never met him.’
‘It is a long time since I have heard from him,’ said Annunziata, ‘and perhaps he has been shot. Then my poor baby will be an orphan.’
‘It is Stanislas who is the father of your baby?’
‘Oh yes, he is already very like Stanislas. If you knew him you would have no doubt about it. And I am not a bad girl, you must not think that. I have never gone with any other man. But when I heard that my husband had been killed my heart was quite broken for a long time, and I became very lonely. And then I met Stanislas, and he also was lonely.’
‘And you were sorry for him,’ said Angelo.
‘Very, very sorry. But how did you know?’
‘It is nearly always so. Women are constantly being sorry for foreign soldiers.’
‘But no one could help being sorry for Stanislas, because he had no home to go to. He came from a city called Lwow – it is very hard to pronounce it – but Lwow is no longer in Poland, for the Russians have taken it, and Stanislas did not want to become a Russian. And I cannot understand why Russia should behave in such a way, for I thought that Poland and Russia were both fighting against Germany.’
‘They were indeed.’
‘And therefore they were on the same side, and surely it is very wicked to rob one’s neighbours.’
‘Hush, hush! You must not say such a thing, Annunziata, not even as a joke. Russia is a very dignified and important nation. She is, moreover, extremely sensitive about her reputation in the world, and any Russian who heard you suggesting that she was capable of robbery would be extremely hurt. You do not understand these things.’
‘It is quite certain that the Russians had some good reason for taking Lwow, though it is possible that no one in our position could fully comprehend it. Perhaps they thought they could look after it better than the Poles, and took it away from them, not because they wanted it, but because they felt it to be their duty.’
‘And Stanislas, in consequence, has no home to go to.’
‘We ordinary people always suffer when a great nation develops a sense of duty,’ said Angelo.
‘Even though he may be dead by now,’ said Annunziata, ‘I continue to be sorry for Stanislas. We were so happy together for a little time. He had a very deep voice and a way of saying things, even the most ordinary things, that made you quite sure he had some strong emotion about them. Everything he said sounded impressive, and it was most moving to listen to him. But often, of course, he was extremely unhappy, and then I also had to weep. I suffered in other ways because of my friendship with him. That was why they cut off my hair.’
‘Because of Stanislas?’
‘There were some young men at home who had been Fascists, as everybody knew, but when the situation changed they became Patriots. So naturally they wanted to do something to show that they were now Patriots, and prove their enthusiasm. They told me that it was wrong for an Italian girl to go out with a foreigner, and I must stop it. But by then I knew that I was going to have a baby, so it was too late to stop. And because I was in love with Stanislas I told them to mind their own business. So then they cut off my hair.’
Angelo took her hands and pressed them fiercely. ‘What cruelty! I do not want to think about it.’
‘They were rough with me,’ said Annunziata. ‘We are not all so good-humoured, we Italians, as we pretend to be.’
‘I am certainly not good-humoured when I think of such hooligans! But how anyone could ever fail to treat you well, I do not understand. Everybody, it seems to me, should want to be kind and tender to you.’
‘Life has by no means been like that,’ said Annunziata.
‘But it should be!’ cried Angelo. ‘I know it should. And why is it not so?’
‘It would be very pleasant if it were,’ said Annunziata, ‘but I do not think we should expect too much from life. – And now we must go back. My baby is very good and sleeps well, but I have left him alone for a long time.’
As they walked towards the inn she asked him, ‘Are you married now? Your sweetheart, I remember, said that she would not marry you until the war was over. But perhaps she changed her mind?’
‘Yes,’ said Angelo, ‘I have now been married for nearly a year, and when I go home again I shall find more people in the house than when I left it. Our son is already two months old.’
‘You must be very happy. It is a good thing to have a home.’
Every evening they walked together, or sat among the little fruit trees that grew behind the inn, and with good food to nourish her body and Angelo’s flattering attention to please her mind, Annunziata became prettier and more cheerful day by day. The innkeeper’s wife said that never in her life before had she seen a brother and a sister so devoted, but the innkeeper himself was increasingly suspicious and took to asking Annunziata certain questions that she found difficult to answer; and of which she made no mention to Angelo.
His suspicions grew darker as their evening walks became longer, and one night when their return was late indeed he told his wife that he was going to get the truth out of Angelo if he had to squeeze it out of his gullet.
That evening, as it happened, Angelo had accepted a great responsibility and asserted himself in a very proud and singular manner. He and Annunziata were sitting in a secluded hollow on the shoreward side of the dunes which, along that part of the coast, rise in tufted hillocks above a narrow beach. The night was starless and the sky so dark that the sea was invisible, and the earth no more than a palpable obscurity. There was no wind nor any sound to be heard except the lapse of little waves and the crumbling of the sand beneath their touch; until the silence was broken by Angelo’s inquiring voice.
‘Are you, by any chance,’ he asked, ‘behaving like this because you are sorry for me?’
‘Dear Angelo,’ she said, ‘of course I am sorry for you. How could I be hard-hearted when you have suffered so, and lost your poor hand –’
‘That is enough,’ he said. ‘I refuse to be an object of pity! If, like so many others, you regard your love as the bread of charity, I do not want it.’
‘But Angelo –’
‘You can do no good by argument. My mind is made up. There is, I am well aware, a widespread belief that because of the war a woman is entitled to be sorry for anyone who takes her fancy. But I do not share that belief. If it became the accepted rule, we should never have peace at all. – No, I am not going to listen. And I am not going to join the breadline for love, either yours or anyone else’s.’
Annunziata began to cry. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘The gift of understanding is very rare,’ said Angelo coldly.
‘I love you because you have been so kind to me. You found me starving, and you helped me. You have been more generous to me than anyone I have ever known. I do not think that anyone has been generous to me before.’
‘You are now admitting,’ said Angelo, ‘that our friendship began, not because you were sorry for me, but because I was sorry for you.’
‘I know that! Do you not think I am grateful? But because you have been sorry for me, I do not see why you should not love me.’
‘But this is a very different state of affairs,’ said Angelo. ‘This alters the situation entirely. – No, wait a minute. I must see to it that the difference is quite clear in your mind. – Do you realize that if we become lovers, it will not be the result of your being sorry for me?’
‘That is what you have been saying.’
‘But it may well be the result of my being sorry for you?’
‘How glad I am that you were!’
‘Dear Annunziata! I knew that you could understand if you tried.’
It was not until they had returned to the inn that Annunziata asked, ‘Will it make you angry if I admit that I still do not see why you had to decide which of us was sorry for the other? What difference did it make?’
‘It was a matter of principle,’ said Angelo.
Before the innkeeper could make up his mind to speak openly of his suspicions, and demand from Angelo the true account of his relations with Annunziata, the military authorities announced that his wound was now healed and he must go and be fitted with a hook, as he desired, and receive his discharge from the army.
‘And what will happen to me?’ asked Annunziata with misery in her eyes.
‘It is going to be difficult,’ said Angelo, ‘but I dare say I can make her see reason.’
‘Whom do you mean?’
‘Lucrezia, of course. I shall tell her that as many young women have given hospitality, during the last few years, to lonely soldiers, I feel entitled to give similar hospitality to you, who are certainly as lonely as any soldier I have ever known.’
‘I am entirely alone, except for my baby,’ said Annunziata.
‘Another baby or two will make very little difference in the house; if, indeed, I have a house to go to, about which I am still in doubt.’
‘You are going to take me with you?’
‘Had I allowed you to be sorry for me,’ said Angelo, ‘I might have deserted you without compunction. But when I insisted on being sorry for you, I accepted the responsibility for what has passed between us. I can do nothing else. Nor indeed – dear Annunziata! – do I wish to.’