Over the Hills.
Johanna’s rather ricketty trunk and Gilbert’s rather flimsy bags were put on the railway to travel by themselves to Kufstein, on the Austrian frontier. Peace go with them.
Our hero and heroine arose at dawn one morning in early August, a little nervous and feeling very strange at setting off on foot to cross the Alps and conquer the south. They had about thirteen pounds between them, and heaven knows what in front of them.
It was nearly seven when they set out. Gilbert called at the little station to see if the bags had gone. They had gone. Then goodbye, Ommerbach! Goodbye little flat, and balcony over the wild road! Goodbye farm-bells that had jangled in so many of the crises of our couple! Goodbye little village of seven houses.
The morning was dewy but sunny, and the pale blue chicory had opened its sky-sparkles by the road. Gilbert put a sprig in his coat. He had his brown knapsack on his back, his old brown hat on his head. Johanna had her lighter grey knapsack on her back, her old panama with a cherry ribbon on her head — and she wore her dark cotton voile dress. So they took to the road — feeling rather unsure, but in a mood for going on and on, inevitably.
By eight o’clock they were on the hill above Schloss Wolfratsberg, looking down on that ancient townlet, whose chimneys smoked blue, whose two tall-necked churches lifted their bird-head cupolas, whose river ran hastily under two bridges, whose water-poplar trees were tall and plumy, whose saw-mill made a just audible sound. Touching sight, an ancient, remote little town sending up its morning woodsmoke, down below beside its river.
So they descended, and bought a spirit-machine and a saucepan, methylated spirit, bread, butter and sausage. Then they crept through the long, attractive old street on tip-toe, for fear that Louise should spy them from her villa above, or that Louise’s servants or children should pounce on them.
But heaven be praised, they passed unchallenged, and merged into the water-meadows beyond the town. There they sat down a minute on a bench, and heard the church bells, and watched the women washing linen in the river. Well Goodbye Wolfratsberg! There is a long road ahead, over the mountains and into the unknown.
In the middle of the morning they sat in a pine-wood a little way back from the road and ate bread and sausage and drank Frau Breitgau’s Schnapps from a little bottle. A peasant with his dog, passing along the high-road through the trees, shouted a greeting and wished a pleasant wedding. Whereupon they both felt uneasy, as if he knew their involved circumstances.
They took to the road again. The sky was cloudy, and looked like rain. So when they came to a station on the little railway, they waited for a train, and rode ten miles to the terminus. There they descended, and took the high-road towards Austria. It wound at the very toes of the mountains. The steep slopes and cliffs came down on the right. On the left was a deep wood — and sometimes a marsh flat.
Darker grew the sky — down came the rain, the uncompromising mountain rain. In the grey, disconsolate, Alpine downpour they trudged on, Johanna in her burberry, he in his shower-coat. The cherry ribbon began to run streaks into Johanna’s panama, whose brim drooped into her neck. Drops of water trickled down her back. Gilbert’s trouser-bottoms flapped his wet ankles. The black pine-trees over the road drooped grimly, as if promising rain for ever. And this was the first afternoon.
“Bad luck!” said Gilbert.
“Isn’t it,” she cried.
“But I don’t mind,” said he.
“I rather like it, really,” said she.
“So do I,” he chimed.
In which frame of mind they trudged on to a village. They entered the inn. Farmers and wagoners had been driven in by the rain, and sat with their beer and pipes. Johanna ordered scrambled eggs with ham, and wrung out her skirt-bottoms. Then the two wet ones sat on a bench and waited for their eggs.
One lonely man sat near — one of the odd, rather woebegone figures that always appear in an inn, no matter where. He bowed to the wet finches, and asked them if they came far. Johanna told him. And of course she said, in German:
“We want to walk to Italy.”
“You and your husband?”
“Yes.”
“Ja — that’s famous, now! That is remarkable!”
The other peasants were listening — a handsome, black-eyed man, a large, blond, taciturn Bavarian farmer, and two others.
Then the little unfortunate told his tale of woe. He was a shoemaker and — But there is not space for his tale. Suffice that Johanna gave him a shilling — and he peered at it as if it were the egg of a bird of Paradise in his palm — and suddenly he spat on it, reverently — and tears came to his eyes, and he bowed three times, to Johanna, and once to Gilbert — and disappeared into the rain. And of course Johanna cried — and wiped her eyes and laughed — and the dish of orange-golden eggs appeared smoking. With black beer, thin raw ham, butter, and black bread, scrambled eggs are royal. Johanna and Gilbert ate in wistful sentimental emotion, heartily.
The men at the opposite table, under the picture of Franz Joseph, watched with all their eyes. Then the black-eyed one called the usual question:
“But you are not German, lady?”
And she gave the inevitable answer:
“Yes — and my man is English.”
Followed a lively little dialogue in Tyrolese and high German, which Gilbert could not understand. But the men were flirting with all their might with Johanna. Even the taciturn farmer of fifty put up his moustaches and flushed and became handsome. Johanna liked him better than the black-eyed one.
They asked if Gilbert could understand — and when Johanna said, not the dialect, then they began to make rather broad jokes about him, in the dialect. About his not understanding — about his silence and his youth.
“You don’t like a German husband, then, gracious lady?”
“Ja! Ja! Auch!” laughed Johanna. “Also! Also!”
After which there was such a flame of male ardour around in the room, that she was frightened, and rose to go. It had almost ceased raining.
Gilbert watched the men with dark, watchful eyes.
“There are good beds here, good, warm German beds, and everything that such a fine Frauenzimmer can wish. Will you go, then?” cried the farmer.
“Yes, yes! We must go,” cried Johanna, rather scared.
The two swung into their knapsacks. The men got up and shouted Good journey! and various other things, and bade goodbye rather jeeringly to Gilbert. He knew they jeered at him, but he did not care.
So they went in their damp clothes down the wet road to Bad Tollingen. They arrived at this little summer-resort at about half-past six — and wandered looking for a room. They found one in a small house for four shillings. It was quite comfortable, but Johanna declared she smelled stables and a slaughter-house. Gilbert smelled something, but nothing so lurid.
So they changed what they could, ate some food out of their knapsack in their room, to save expense. Then they sallied out. There was a small summer-theatre, so they paid their shilling and listened to a Vienna comedy.
The next day was sunny again. As soon as possible they were out of the house where they had slept and where Johanna had smelled so acutely. Oh the joy of getting out of an hotel, or a lodging-house, in the morning, of clearing out for good! Never to see it again!
They bought food and set out again. Johanna had a pound of peaches — rather hard. They drifted on all day — camping at intervals to make food. In the afternoon they were in the high, wild rocky valley of the young Isar. Woodsmen, like wild, sharp men from the Sagas, were busy with the rafts. At five o’clock Johanna and Gilbert decided to climb over the neck of a pass between two valleys, by a footpath. It would save ten miles of road.
So they sat by a waterfall and made tea from the ringing water, under a birch-tree. A grasshopper, a wonderful green war-horse of some tiny mediaeval knight sprang on to Gilbert’s knee, and he watched it with wonder. He felt it musically — it had a certain magic, which he felt as music. Johanna gathered tall, black-blue gentians that stood in the shadow.
Then they started up the path. It was supposed to be eight miles — two hours and a half. They climbed up through the alp-meadows and entered the higher woods, where the whortleberries were bushy. And all at once the path became indefinite. However, they followed a track along the saddle of a hill, among trees and whortleberries.
Then the track fizzled out. What to do? Gilbert thought he saw a path on the opposite hill, in among scattered trees and rocks. So down they went, down to the stream-bed. And Gilbert clambered up the opposite slope. Johanna behind saw him, with his shower-coat dangling, his knapsack a great hump on his back, as he scrambled earnestly up the steep slope, clinging to rocks.
“The camel! The camel!” she screamed from her opposite bank. “You look such a sight! You look such a sight — like a camel with a hump!” So she screamed from the distance, and she laughed with derision. Perhaps his earnest, anxious haste for a path drove her to ridicule.
However, he got to the top — and found a proper track.
“Come on! Come on!” he called. “It’s getting late.”
She came reluctantly, being in one of her perverse moods. In the thin wood-spaces as she came along she found wild strawberries. “Such lovely ones!” she shouted from the distance.
“Come on!”
“So good!”
“Come on!”
They were on the high saddle of a hill, among trees and rocks. And the dusk was falling — and already it was cold, sharp cold. Yet in the distance he could see her panama hat stooping and stooping.
“It’s getting dark,” he shouted.
“Lovely big strawberries!” she screamed in reply.
“I’m going ahead.”
“Wait! Wait! I’ve found a patch.”
There she was stooping. But he strode ahead. It was getting dark. And he did not want to sleep on damp ground in the extreme mountain cold. So he went on without her. And she was frightened, and came half running, calling to him to wait.
“You see the night,” he said angrily.
“But such heavenly strawberries you never did taste.”
“Sleep with them then,” he said angrily, striding on. He was anxious for some sort of shelter.
They were on a rough, rocky track among trees. It was almost night, and ice-scent strong in the air. He was silent, and she was now frightened.
“We shall find a hay-hut on one of the Alps,” she said.
“Let us then,” he replied.
On they went in the next-to-darkness. And suddenly, at a bend of the road among thick trees, a little hut. They opened the door. It was a tiny chapel, with two benches that would seat four persons each, and a tiny altar. He struck a match and lighted the altar candles. The floor was boarded, and quite dry. If one moved the benches, two people could just lie there: it was just big enough.
All his anxiety disappeared. He looked at the doll which represented the virgin, at the hideous paper and rag flowers of the altar, and at the innumerable little ex voto pictures that hung on the walls.
“We can sleep here,” he said. “We are all right.”
“Where?” she said.
“On the floor.”
“I’m sure we could find a hay-hut if we went on.”
“I’m not going on.”
“Do think! It’s so uncomfortable here.”
“It’s dry and weather-tight. What more do you want.”
He took a candle from the altar and climbed on a bench, looking at the ex voto pictures. They were excellent naive little paintings on wood: a woman in a huge bed, and a man and his five children kneeling in a queue across the bedroom, with joined hands., and the virgin in a cloud coming through the ceiling: a field of cattle just like a Noah’s ark set out: a man with a huge rock falling on his bent leg, and blood squashing out sky-high: a woman falling downstairs into her kitchen, and Mary, in a blue cloak, looking down in mild amazement from the ceiling beams: a man up to his waist in water, his arms thrown up, drowning, and Mary in a blue cloak on a white cloud high above: and so on and so on, a whole gallery. Gilbert was fascinated.
“Do come! Do let us find a hay-hut,” cried Johanna.
For some reason she was mad to sleep in one of the Alpine log hay-houses.
“We are well here,” he replied, standing on the bench with the candle. He glanced at her who stood outside by the bushes.
“No! No!” she said. “The hard floor.”
“But dry and warm. What more do you want.”
He had found a picture which fascinated him: a prison cell, with chains and fetters hanging on the wall, and Mary in a blue cloak prison-breaking through the roof. Then the verse.
“Du heilige IVlutter von Rerelmos Ich bitte mach mir mein Sohn von Gefangenschaft los.
Mach ihn von Eisen und Banden frei Wenn es dein Heilige Wille sei.
Anna Eichberg. 1775.”
Poor Anna Eichberg, with her son in prison in 1775, praying for him to the virgin. Why was he in prison? And whose prison. Gilbert felt he must know.
Johanna, returning from her excursion, saw through the open door of the wooden shrine how he stood on a seat with the candle and peered at this picture, and gaped and mused.
“I’ve found one,” she cried in triumph.
“Come and look,” he said.
“No. Come quick. I’ve found a lovely hay-hut.”
“I’m sure we’re better here.”
“No. No. Come.”
Reluctantly he obeyed. He blew out the candles and followed up the dark path. After a hundred yards it suddenly emerged in a great open darkness — the saddle of the pass — and twenty yards further on was the dark hay-house, built of logs, and roofed, but with a space of two yards between the roof and the top of the low log walls.
Gilbert climbed in and explored. In the higher, rear half the hay went practically to the roof. In the lower half it was a little less than the log walls.
“Isn’t it lovely! Isn’t it perfect,” cried Johanna.
They decided to eat. There were two bits of meat, and four little breads: all the rest eaten. An icy wind was blowing through the col. They went to the back of the hay-hut, and with difficulty got more or less out of the icy draught, so that they could fry the meat in the little saucepan over the spirit-flame. The night had become very dark. They crouched round the blue, restless flame of the spirit-machine, and heard the wind, and heard the meat faintly frizzle. Then they ate in the darkness, feeling the cold almost resound in the upper air.
They clambered up the ill-joining logs into the hut or barn. Gentle reader, never spend the night in an Alpine hay-hut if you have a chapel handy.
“Isn’t it lovely! Isn’t it perfect!” cried Johanna.
“Yes,” said Gilbert, who was growing colder each moment.
He carefully hung the knapsacks where he could lay hands on them: carefully placed the hats: then carefully buried his boots and Johanna’s shoes in the deep hay, in the faint hopes that the hay might dry them, for they were sodden. Then he took off his waistcoat and spread it for a sort of pillow for the two of them.
All this was done in pitch darkness, for how shall one strike matches in a barn of loose hay. Then the two buried themselves in a deep hole in the hay, and piled the hay above themselves, and thought they were all right. Johanna was in ecstasies. At last she had got away from her Marvell villa, Boston, and all civilisation, and was sleeping like a tramp. She wanted to be made love to there in the darkness of the hay: so she was made love to: and at length the two disposed themselves for sleep. They clung close together, and put the coats over them, and piled the hay above the coats.
“It’s lovely, lovely!” said Johanna.
But alas, gentle reader. Worse than fleas, worse even than mosquitoes on a sultry night is hay. It trickles insidiously in. It trickles and tickles your face, it goes in your ears and down your neck and is round your waist. The tickling becomes an intolerable irritation, then an inflammation.
Also a waistcoat is a bad pillowslip. You find your face in the arm-holes every other minute, in all the horror of hay in the night.
And then, gentle reader, there were chinks in the log walls, and there was the space above. So on top swept the ice wind. And below, through the chinks and through all the hay the icy point of the draught was slowly but surely and deadlily inserted.
Our tired pair of finches slept — but slept in the slowly trickling irritation of hay, and the slowly encroaching blade of ice-cold wind. Then they heard it rain — but for a mercy the roof was tight. They woke and woke and woke, and every time colder and colder and colder, and more and more irritated into frenzy by the filtering-in of the hay, on their faces, in their nostrils and ears, and under their clothing. To be cold, and galled with irritation. Oh gentle reader.
At last there was a sort of false dawn. And they got up. Gilbert put on his waistcoat and soddened boots — ice cold, ice cold. In the ghastly corpse-light of the dawn they looked out. They were at the top of a pass, in a sort of kettle among the mountains, peaks rising round. The rain, just a bit higher, was snow.
He hunted for sticks to make a fire for tea — all the spirit gone — and she went for water. Her shoes were so sodden she went barefoot — over the icy, piercing points of the mown Alp. A good penance for romance. At last she found water oozing up through the grass in a sort of marsh.
He coaxed a wretched fire between stones behind the log-house, as much out of the wind as possible. Then they drank tea and ate the last stale little breads — about two ounces each. That was the end of it.
Dawn among the peaks around their Alp was ghastly grey. And in this ice-cold greyness, in sodden boots and skirt-bottoms, they set off, like two ghosts. And they had not gone a hundred yards before they saw a light — and someone with a lantern — and heard a cow moo.
It was a forlorn, dismal little summer farm, inhabited only for some months in the year. Drawing nearer, they saw in the dismal light of the increasing dawn a thin, stooping man moving with a lantern in the cow-house — then another man came out of the house, on the stone track through the filth. No, the second man was a woman — a thin, gaunt, extinguished looking woman, fairly young. She wore the big canvas trousers, tighter at the ankles, which the peasant women wear in the marshes. She was a rather weak man, save for her knob of dun-coloured hair screwed up behind.
Johanna and Gilbert went forward, in the morning-pallor. The man and the woman stood suspiciously. The farm was hardly more than a hovel — squalid. And the two figures seemed silence-extinguished. They made a great impression on Gilbert: like two wasted, stupefied, dreary birds, immured in that kettle of the pass in the cold.
Johanna asked the way. And the woman answered in a high, screaming voice, again like a desert bird. She pointed to a curving track. It was two hours. Evidently it was almost a violation to the woman to have to speak — the noise was a violation of the intolerable overshadowed, upper silence.
Gilbert was glad to drop on to the rock path, downwards, down a gorge, out of that moist Alp. Water roared and roared below. The black-blue greater gentian stood very tall, and the starry-white Grass of Parnassus opened its watery flowers.
Down the gorge they went. It was steep, and they moved fast, and at last grew quite hot. At about eight o’clock they came to a village of about four houses. At the first house — it was fairly large, and all lined with wood — they asked for coffee. Yes, they could have it. The woman was fresh-faced and pleasant. A boy was crying by the big green stove. Outside rain, mountain rain was falling.
At length came good hot milk and coffee. Then the man came in. He was a strapping, hard-looking mountaineer. He said he was a forester — the region was famous for chamois. The Crown Prince came every summer to shoot chamois. He brought photographs of the royal highness — and a letter which the prince had written him: Dear Karl. It was a simple, natural little letter.
“My sister knows the Kronprinz — she had dancing lessons with him,” said Johanna. So Karl, the forester was suitably impressed. And our pair of finches decided to go to bed. It was pouring with rain: that awful Alpine rain which comes straight down and seems like the wet creation of the world.
Oh a good, deep down bed, with down bolsters deep above one! Tired, inflamed with hay and cold, they slept in their separate beds, glad to be apart. In extremity, one is alone. We are born single and we die singly. All the better for all of us.
They got up at about two o’clock. The rain was falling like doomsday. At four there was a post-omnibus which ran to the Achen lake, to Scholastika. They decided to take it.
At least they had dry clothes. So they sat in the bumping omnibus with two other people, on clammy wash-leather seats, and they charged through deep valleys of everlasting rain.
It was a surprise to come to Scholastika — a dark, deep lake — and find summer visitors in the hotel — a small hotel, rough and countrified. But there was no bed. They were directed to a big farm-house, across a long flagged track through the marshy flat water-meadows heading the lake. Yes, and they got a room. Upstairs was an enormous wide corridor from which the doors opened. At one end was a broad balcony — at the other end a great barn full of hay and corn. So that as one came out of one’s bedroom door one turned towards the great cavern of hay. And if one went to the edge, one saw the horns of cattle below.
The bedroom was large, with old painted Tyrolese furniture, and great blue-and-white check overbolsters. Johanna insisted on going to bed at once. So there she lay, with her fine nose just emerging from under the great bolster.
Gilbert must go and forage for food. Again, in the yellowish evening he went across the meadow at the head of the gloomy lake. And at the hotel place he was given bread, eggs, cheese, and butter — and it all cost so little. He was in Austria, for the woman asked him for Krones and Hellers. She took German money just the same. Different the people seemed here — soft, vague, easy-going, not so fierce and hostile as the Bavarian highlanders. He was in Austria, in easy Austria. And the slight fear that hung over one in Germany — an instinctive uneasy resentment of all the officialdom — did not exist any more. Pleasant, easy, happy-go-lucky Austria!
He went home pleased. People had been nice with him. The things cost nothing. He had got methylated spirit. So there in the bedroom, whilst Johanna lay in bed, he made tea, and fried eggs in butter, and they had their meal. How pleasant it was — with the wettish gold evening fading over the narrow-ended lake and the black mountains, and in the bedroom a smell of tea and fried eggs, and Johanna sitting up in bed and eating her food with joy, and more eggs spitting away in the little saucepan on the floor. Food, delicious food — how good it is when it comes haphazard, round the frail camp-fire of a little spirit-machine, in a safe bedroom far from everywhere, with yellow, wet evening falling over a rather sinister lake, and painted Tyrolese furniture, with roses and peasant tulips, looking on indoors.
Next morning they were off again, on foot. The lake was a very dark blue, ink blue, the trees tall, and some already turning gold. On the elevated road they went above the lake, right from one end to the other. And then the road plunged down-hill, towards the open.
They came in the afternoon to the wide, open place, where the railway went to Italy, and the imperial road. Here again it was warm and sweet and summery. Grapes and peaches were abundant in the shops. There was a strange touch of the south.
But now the luggage remained to be fetched from the frontier. Back along the line they travelled by the evening train, and they slept that night in steep, famous Kufstein, under its dark castle. Gilbert loved the mediaeval imperial feeling of these places. Old emperors of the Holy Roman Empire had left their mark. All seemed still feudal, feudal on an imperial scale.
At the station they hunted for their boxes. Johanna extracted her necessities, there in the vast shed of the customs deposit. And then they gave up their goods once more to the railway. Amazing reliable days of speed and easy management. Everything happened so easily, and yet so well. Wonderful lost world!
They went over the bridge, and Gilbert walked across, past the blue post, to the blue letter box just inside the German frontier. And there he posted his letters. Then they took the train back to their breaking-off point.
They decided to stay at Eckershofen, in the heart of the Tyrol. It was a village at the head of a long, big valley. Arrived finally, they looked for a room, and found one in a farmhouse at the end of the village, for about one-and-twopence a day. The house stood beside a rushing, deafening stream that roared beneath a bridge under the village street. At first Johanna and Gilbert heard nothing but the roar of rock-torn waters. But soon they began to be unaware of the noise.
In Eckershofen they decided to camp and rest for a time. They could still live for about fifteen shillings a week each. In their bedroom they made coffee in the morning. Sometimes they picnicked out for the day meals, sometimes they cooked little roasts of veal, or beef, or kidneys, over the spirit in the bedroom.
Gilbert was happy here. Three streams, and three valleys converged and met near the house. The great flat-sided slope came down from a great height across the valley, streaked with snow. The village with its low-roofed houses, seeming only just to have shaken the snow off itself and taken to the sun, was pleasant, congenial. There was a strange, mediaeval Catholicism everywhere. To see the peasants take off their hats and sink their heads as they passed the shrines and crucifixes was to be switched back into a dark, violent age. It was no lip-service, no formula. Nor was it the fetish-worship of the south. It was an almost Russian, dark mysticism, a worship of cruelty and pain and torture and death: a dark death worship. And startlingly frequent in the gloomy valleys and on the steep path-slopes were the Christs, old and young. Some were ancient Christs, of grey-silvery aged wood. Some were new, and terrible: life-sized, realistic, powerful young men, on the cross, in a death agony: white and distorted.
For the first time in his life a certain ancient root-fear awoke in Gilbert’s heart, or even deeper, in his bowels, as he came across these terrible crucifixes in the shadow and the roar of water by the roadside. He knew then, he knew once more the ancient Roman terror of the northern, tree-dark gods. He felt his breast bristle with the curious primeval horror of the great Hercynian wood, of the tree-worship of the Celts and the pristine, awful blond races. Here it lurked, as a sort of Satanism, in these valleys.
The high-road ended at Eckershofen. Beyond, only mule-tracks. And the muleteers with their strings of mules, fierce, bygone looking men, hueing and slashing up the hills, would suddenly change as they drew near a shrine or a crucifix. Suddenly a silence, a darkness, a shadow came over them. They advanced insidiously, taking off their hats to the great Christ. And then Gilbert’s heart stood still. He knew it was not Christ. It was an older, more fearful god, tree-terrible.
Even in the peasant greetings — Servus or Gruss-Gott — he seemed to hear something — something pre-Roman, northern, frightening: the bristling of wolves in the darkness of the north night, the flash of the aurora borealis, the mystery of blond forgotten gods. Overhead always the looming of great heights. And mankind creeping furtive in the valleys, as if by some dread permission.
Once Gilbert and Johanna went into the common inn, at evening, where zithers were twanging and men were dancing the Schuhplattler in their heavy mountain shoes. There was a violent commotion, a violent noise, and a sense of violent animal spirits. Gilbert, with his fatal reserve, hung back from mingling. Besides he could not dance the dance. But Johanna, watching with bright excited face, was invited and accepted. In all the fume and dust she was carried into the dance by a lusty villager with long moustaches and a little Tyrolese hat. How powerful and muscular he was, the coarse male animal with his large, curious blue eyes! He caught her beneath the breasts with his big hands and threw her into the air, at the moment of dance crisis, and stamped his great shod feet like a bull. And Johanna gave a cry of unconsciousness, such as a woman gives in her crisis of embrace. And the peasant flashed his big blue eyes on her, and caught her again.
Gilbert, watching, saw the flame of anticipation over the man. Johanna was in a Bavarian peasant-dress, tight at the breasts, full-skirted, with a rose silk apron. And the peasant desired her, with his powerful mountain loins and broad shoulders. And Gilbert sympathised with him. But also he was unhappy. He saw that legitimately Johanna was the bride of the mountaineer that night. He saw also that she would never submit. She would not have love without some sort of spiritual recognition. Given the spiritual recognition, she was a queen, more a queen the more men loved her. But the peasant’s was the other kind of desire: the male desire for possession of the female, not the spiritual man offering himself up sexually. She would get no worship from the mountaineer: only lusty mating and possession. And she would never capitulate her female castle of pre-eminence. She would go down before no male. The male must go down before her. “On your knees, oh man!” was her command in love. Useless to command this all-muscular peasant. So she withdrew. She said Danke-schon, and withdrew. And Gilbert saw the animal chagrin in the other man. The lady had let him down. The lady would let him down as long as time lasted. He would have to forfeit his male lustihood, she would yield only to worship, not to the male overweening possession. And he did not yet understand how to forfeit his hardy male lustihood.
Gilbert was in a bad mood. He knew that at the bottom Johanna hated the peasant. How she would hate him if she were given into his possession! And yet how excited she was. And he, Gilbert, must be the instrument to satisfy her roused excitement. It by no means flattered or pleased him. He sympathised with the peasant. Johanna was a fraud.
Sentimentally his mind reverted to Emmie. He had written her an occasional letter, in answer to little letters from her. So now in the farm-house by the rushing stream he remembered her again: and remembered his sister Violet: and wrote picture-postcards to both of them. And out of the few words breathed a touch of yearning we’re-so-fond-of-one-another sentiment.
Johanna, a lynx without scruples, read everything he wrote. He rather liked this trespass upon his privacy. For, not being at all sure about his own emotions, it rather pleased him to see Johanna play skittles with them.
Johanna read the two postcards, and her colour rose. She knew all about Emmie. Gilbert, a real son of his times, had told Johanna everything: particularly everything he should not have told her.
“You’re writing again to that impossible little Emmie!” she cried.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“But I thought you’d finished with her.”
“I can send her a postcard,” he declared.
“I call it filthy, messing on with her.”
“Not at all.”
“Messing. Just messing. — Talking to her about mountains! — Pah! — Oh well—” and she flung the cards aside. “Write your messy postcards if you want to. But it’s an unclean carrying-on for a man in your position.”
“Not at all. I do remember her.”
“Remember! You and your remembering! Slopping to your sister, and that impossible little Emmie! How manly you are!”
“And will be,” said he.
“But you’re not going to send her this card — you’re not.” And Johanna snatched it up and tore it in four pieces. “There!” And she threw the pieces down. She was a bit scared now.
He looked at her, and his face was dark. He looked at the torn card. And he said nothing. Amid his anger, he admired Johanna. Mistrusting his own emotions, and fearing his own sentiment, he was glad of a decided action on her part. Yet he was angry with her for her insolence.
However, he said nothing. But he gathered up the torn pieces, and put on his hat to go and post the card to his sister Violet. His thoughts and emotions were bubbling. And the bottommost thought and emotion was Damn Emmie! He stood on the bridge and pulled off the Austrian stamp. Then he threw the torn bits into the stream. And he never wrote to the damsel again. But he posted his card to Violet.
The valley began to depress him. The great slopes shelving upwards, far overhead: the sudden dark, hairy ravines in which he was trapped: all made him feel he was caught, shut in down below there. He felt tiny, like a dwarf among the great thighs and ravines of the mountains. There is a Baudelaire poem which tells of Nature, like a vast woman lying spread, and man, a tiny insect, creeping between her knees and under her thighs, fascinated. Gilbert felt a powerful revulsion against the great slopes and particularly against the tree-dark, hairy ravines in which he was caught.
Bilberries were ripe, and cranberries. Sometimes he and Johanna would lunch in a dark wood, and blacken their mouths with bilberries. Sometimes they would eat in a sunny place, where cranberries like tiny apples, like coral, in clusters shone rosy. There were many butterflies in these open sunny places.
Came letters again from Everard — and a tiny note from one of the boys, the elder. Johanna cried and looked queer. The little scrap of a note from her son upset her far more than all the ravings of her husband. But she backed away — she fought off her realisation.
To Gilbert, Everard was much more real than the children. He read the other man’s letters: “I have been mad, but for my children’s sake I try to keep my sanity. But when I look at the future before me, it is all I can do to prevent myself from beating out my brains against the wall — I cannot stay here in Boston, where everything is leaking out. The looks of sympathy are too much for me, and the knowledge that they all condemn you and look on you as a fallen woman, a pariah in society, makes me lose my reason. Think, woman, think what you have done. Think of the lives you have wrecked. Think of the simple pride and happiness of my aged parents, who loved you, who are loving you even now, in their ignorance — you will send my old father to the grave, killed by his son’s dishonor, and you will poison the innocent belief of my faithful mother. You have darkened forever the lives of your children, and branded their foreheads with their mother’s shame. As for me, I do not live any longer, except as a broken, meaningless automaton, which works for the sake of my children, whom I must save out of the inferno of their mother’s infamy, though every act I make is a new death to me
“Ah me — !” sighed Johanna as she read. It was very upsetting. But after all, there are so many other things than the things people choose to write or think. Johanna knew well enough that at the bottom Everard was infinitely relieved — that he raved the harder in order not to know his own relief. The almost diabolical connubial tension that had existed between him and Johanna was breaking him far more inevitably than this shock of her departure would break him. This shock was like an operation which removes the fatal malady: critical, but a salvation in the end.
Gilbert however had not been through the marriage school, so he took Everard almost at face value. He imagined a dark-eyed, aristocratic-looking, handsome man with grey temples and greying moustache tortured under the stars, away there in Boston, tortured with tortures more than man can bear. And the crucifixes hanging over the Alpine paths, over the little, wistful summer flowers: the strange, deathly, veined pallor of the Grass of Parnassus flowers, in dark, marshy places; the intense gloom of the ravines, with rushing water; and the strange dark eyes of some of the lean peasant men who came over the slopes with their oxen filled our young hero with an almost preternatural apprehension.
Once at twilight he was watching again a dead Christ on a Cross: a dead, naked man dropping forward realistically on the nails, above the darkening highway. And at that moment a bullock-wagon was heard slowly descending from above. Gilbert turned and watched in silence. Slowly, strangely the foreheads of the cattle swayed nearer, with the soft, static step of oxen placing their feet. And when they were abreast the driver, crouched between the shafts, looked up at Gilbert. And from the dark eyes, from the aloof, handsome face seemed to come such a strange look, that Gilbert winced and turned instinctively away, to the dead, dropping burden of the Christ.
It was a dark look, torture, and hate: so it seemed to our friend. A dark look from a passionate face — from the face of a man dying on the cross of passion — tortured to death — having chosen the death — yet at the last moment black with hate and accusation. It is no joke being crucified on the cross of sex-passion and love. And at the last moment — at the last moment breaks out the black hate against the death-dealers, against the death itself.
The bullock-wagon clattered on. Johanna had drifted down the road. At Gilbert’s feet the mountain pansies still pricked their little ears, in the underlight. Above, the Christ dropped slack on his nails. And Gilbert remembered Everard’s letter: “I gave you everything. I would have been cut to pieces for you.” And he shivered.
For the first time in his life, he knew what it was to be hated. He had seen clearly Everard’s black, helpless eyes of hate, bottomless hate. The dark mountains seemed to reverberate with it.
“So he hates me,” thought Gilbert to himself.
And he shrank from the knowledge — it was a piece of pure knowledge, and it seemed to project his soul naked out of his body, among the darkening hills.
To be hated — fathomlessly hated. He knew it among the terrible, black-gulfed mountains.
And he tried to shrink away: to shrink far away. “I would have been cut to pieces for you.” The words made him sick. Fancy wanting to be cut to pieces for somebody — nay, by somebody one loves! How fearful — how foul! “I gave you everything, body and soul.” Perhaps it was not true. But in so far as it was true, why this horrible sexual self-sacrifice in marriage? Surely it was obscene.
Supposing Pontius Pilate had come at the last hour to Calvary, and said “No more of this unclean business!” Suppose he had ordered Jesus to be taken down, restored, healed, and sent home to live. Would the world have been worse? Would it?
The position was, in a degree, Everard’s. His marriage was an awful torture to him. Yet he wanted to die of it. And now Johanna had left him, so that he must live. The terrible sexual-passional crucifixion was interrupted — and the crucified husband taken down, told to live.
And on Master Gilbert devolved the responsibility for the interruption. He knew it. And at the bottom of his soul he believed that Everard should be grateful. Should be. Perhaps even was — or would be in the end. Grateful that another man had taken this wife away from him — this Gethsemane cup. Gilbert would have to swallow the same cup: but with a different stomach, surely.
At the bottom of his soul he firmly believed that Everard should be grateful to him. But the bottom of one’s soul is rather a remote region. And for the present he had to realise the blind, black hate that was surging against him. To be hated — to be blackly, blindly, fathomlessly hated!
He shrank, and there came on his face the wistful, wondering look of an animal shot in mid-flight — a look which Johanna detested. She had been sufficiently cursed by the wounded-animal look. She preferred the light of battle. But as yet Gilbert was down and wincing.