When I was in Constance the weather was misty and enervating and depressing, it was no pleasure to travel on the big, flat, desolate lake.
When I went from Constance, it was on a small steamer down the Rhine to Schaffhausen. That was beautiful. Still, the mist hung over the waters, over the wide shallows of the river, and the sun, coming through the morning, made lovely yellow lights beneath the bluish haze, so that it seemed like the beginning of the world. And there was a hawk in the upper air fighting with two crows, or two rooks. Ever they rose higher and higher, the crow flickering above the attacking hawk, the fight going on like some strange symbol in the sky, the Germans on deck watching with pleasure.
Then we passed out of sight, between wooded banks and under bridges where quaint villages of old romance piled their red and coloured pointed roofs beside the water, very still, remote, lost in the vagueness of the past. It could not be that they were real. Even when the boat put in to shore, and the customs officials came to look, the village remained remote in the romantic past of High Germany, the Germany of fairy tales and minstrels and craftsmen. The poignancy of the past was almost unbearable, floating there in colour upon the haze of the river.
We went by some swimmers, whose white, shadowy bodies trembled near the side of the steamer, under water. One man with a round, fair head, lifted his face and one arm from the water and shouted a greeting to us, as if he were a Niebelung, saluting with bright arm lifted from the water, his face laughing, the fair moustache hanging over his mouth. Then his white body swirled in the water, and he was gone, swimming with the side stroke.
Schaffhausen the town, half old and bygone, half modern, with breweries and industries, that is not very real. Schaffhausen Falls, with their factory in the midst and their hotel at the bottom, and the general cinematograph effect, they are ugly.
It was afternoon when I set out to walk from the Falls to Italy, across Switzerland. I remember the big, fat, rather gloomy fields of this part of Baden, damp and unliving. I remember I found some apples under a tree in a field near a railway embankment, then some mushrooms, and I ate both. Then I came on to a long, desolate high road, with dreary, withered trees on either side, and flanked by great fields where groups of men and women were working. They looked at me as I went by down the long, long road, alone and exposed and out of the world.
I remember nobody came at the border village to examine my pack, I passed through unchallenged. All was quiet and lifeless and hopeless, with big stretches of heavy land.
Till sunset came, very red and purple, and suddenly, from the heavy spacious open land I dropped sharply into the Rhine valley again, suddenly, as if into another glamorous world.
There was the river rushing along between its high, mysterious, romantic banks, which were high as hills, and covered with vine. And there was the village of tall, quaint houses flickering its lights on to the deep-flowing river, and quite silent, save for the rushing of water.
There was a fine covered bridge, very dark. I went to the middle, and looked through the opening at the dark water below, at the façade of square lights, the tall village-front towering remote and silent above the river. The hill rose on either side the flood, down here was a small, forgotten, wonderful world, that belonged to the date of isolated village communities and wandering minstrels.
So I went back to the inn of “The Golden Stag,” and, climbing some steps, I made a loud noise. A woman came, and I asked for food. She led me through a room where were enormous barrels, ten feet in diameter, lying fatly on their sides; then through a large stone-clean kitchen, with bright pans, ancient as the Meistersinger; then up some steps and into the long guest-room, where a few tables were laid for supper.
A few people were eating. I asked for Abendessen, and sat by the window looking at the darkness of the river below, the covered bridge, the dark hill opposite, crested with its few lights.
Then I ate a very large quantity of knoedel soup, and bread, and drank beer, and was very sleepy. Only one or two village men came in, and these soon went again, the place was dead still. Only at a long table on the opposite side of the room were seated seven or eight men, ragged, disreputable, some impudent—another came in late—the landlady gave them all thick soup with dumplings and bread and meat, serving them in a sort of brief disapprobation. They sat at the long table, eight or nine tramps and beggars and wanderers out of work, and they ate with a sort of cheerful callousness and brutality for the most part, and as if ravenously, looking round and grinning sometimes, subdued, cowed, like prisoners, and yet impudent. At the end one shouted to know where he was to sleep. The landlady called to the young serving-woman, and in a classic German severity of disapprobation, they were led up the stone stairs to their room. They tramped off in threes and twos, making a bad, mean, humiliated exit. It was not yet eight o’clock. The landlady sat talking to one bearded man, staid and severe, whilst, with her work on the table, she sewed steadily.
As the beggars and wanderers went slinking out of the room, some called impudently, cheerfully:
“Nacht, Frau Wirtin—G’Nacht, Wirtin—’te Nacht, Frau,” to all of which the hostess answered a stereotyped “Gute Nacht,” never turning her head from her sewing or indicating by the faintest movement that she was addressing the men who were filing raggedly to the doorway.
So the room was empty, save for the landlady and her sewing, the staid, elderly villager to whom she was talking in the unbeautiful dialect, and the young serving-woman who was clearing away the plates and basins of the tramps and beggars.
Then the villager also went.
“Gute Nacht, Frau Seidl,” to the landlady; “Gute Nacht,” at random, to me.
So I looked at the newspaper. Then I asked the landlady for a cigarette, not knowing how else to begin. So she came to my table, and we talked.
It pleased me to take upon myself a sort of romantic, wandering character; she said my German was “schön”; a little goes a long way.
So I asked her who were the men who had sat at the long table. She became rather stiff and curt.
“They are the men looking for work,” she said, as if the subject were disagreeable.
“But why do they come here, so many?” I asked.
Then she told me that they were going out of the country: this was almost the last village of the border: that the relieving officer in each village was empowered to give to every vagrant a ticket entitling the holder to an evening meal, bed, and bread in the morning, at a certain inn. This was the inn for the vagrants coming to this village. The landlady received fourpence per head, I believe it was, for each of these wanderers.
“Little enough,” I said.
“Nothing,” she replied.
She did not like the subject at all. Only her respect for me made her answer.
“Bettler, Lumpen, und Taugenichtse!” I said, cheerfully.
“And men who are out of work, and are going back to their own parish,” she said stiffly.
So we talked a little, and I too went to bed.
“Gute Nacht, Frau Wirtin.”
“Gute Nacht, mein Herr.”
So I went up more and more stone stairs, attended by the young Woman. It was a great, lofty, old, deserted house, with many drab doors.
At last, in the distant topmost floor, I had my bedroom with two beds and bare floor and scant furniture. I looked down at the river far below, at the covered bridge, at the far lights on the hill above, opposite. Strange to be here in this lost, forgotten place, sleeping under the roof with tramps and beggars. I debated whether they would steal my boots if I put them out. But I risked it. The door-latch made a loud noise on the deserted landing, everywhere felt abandoned, forgotten. I wondered where the eight tramps and beggars were asleep. There was no way of securing the door. But somehow I felt that, if I were destined to be robbed or murdered, it would not be by tramps and beggars. So I blew out the candle and lay under the big feather bed, listening to the running and whispering of the mediaeval Rhine.
And when I waked up again it was sunny, it was morning on the hill opposite, though the river deep below ran in shadow.
The tramps and beggars were all gone: they must be cleared out by seven o’clock in the morning. So I had the inn to myself, I, and the landlady, and the serving-woman. Everywhere was very clean, full of the German morning energy and brightness, which is so different from the Latin morning. The Italians are dead and torpid first thing, the Germans are energetic and cheerful.
It was cheerful in the sunny morning, looking down on the swift river, the covered, picturesque bridge, the bank and the hill opposite. Then down the curving road of the facing hill the Swiss cavalry came riding, men in blue uniforms. I went out to watch them. They came thundering romantically through the dark cavern of the roofed-in bridge, and they dismounted at the entrance to the village. There was a fresh morning-cheerful newness everywhere, in the arrival of the troops, in the welcome of the villagers.
The Swiss do not look very military, neither in accoutrement nor in bearing. This little squad of cavalry seemed more like a party of common men riding out on some business of their own than like an army. They were very republican and very free. The officer who commanded them was one of themselves, his authority was by consent.
It was all very pleasant and genuine, there was a sense of ease and peacefulness, quite different from the mechanical, slightly sullen manœuvring of the Germans.
The village baker and his assistant came hot and floury from the bakehouse, bearing between them a great basket of fresh bread. The cavalry were all dismounted by the bridge-head, eating and drinking like business men. Villagers came to greet their friends: one soldier kissed his father, who came wearing a leathern apron. The school bell tang-tang-tanged from above, school-children merged timidly through the grouped horses, up. the narrow street, passing unwillingly with their books. The river ran swiftly, the soldiers, very haphazard and slack in uniform, real shack-bags, chewed their bread in large mouthfuls, the young lieutenant, who seemed to be an officer only by consent of the men, stood apart by the bridge-head, gravely. They were all serious and self-contented, very unglamorous. It was like a business excursion on horseback, harmless and uninspiring. The uniforms were almost ludicrous, so ill-fitting and casual.
So I shouldered my own pack and set off, through the bridge over the Rhine, and up the hill opposite.
There is something very dead about this country. I remember I picked apples from the grass by the roadside, and some were very sweet. But for the rest, there was mile after mile of dead, uninspired country, uninspired, so neutral and ordinary that it was almost destructive.
One gets this feeling always in Switzerland, except high up: this feeling of average, of utter, soulless ordinariness, something intolerable. Mile after mile, to Zurich, it was just the same. It was just the same in the tram-car going into Zurich; it was just the same in the town, in the shops, in the restaurant. All was the utmost level of ordinariness and well-being, but so ordinary that it was like a blight. All the picturesqueness of the town is as nothing, it is like a most ordinary, average, usual person in an old costume. The place was soul-killing.
So after two hours’ rest, eating in a restaurant, wandering by the quay, and through the market, and sitting on a seat by the lake, I found a steamer that would take me away. That is how I always feel in Switzerland, the only possible living sensation is the sensation of relief in going away, always going away. The horrible average ordinariness of it all, something utterly without flower or soul or transcendence, the horrible vigorous ordinariness, is too much.
So I went on a steamer down the long lake, surrounded by low grey hills. It was Saturday afternoon. A thin rain came on. I thought I would rather be in fiery Hell than in this dead level of average life.
I landed somewhere on the right bank, about three-quarters of the way down the lake. It was almost dark. Yet I must walk away. I climbed a long hill from the lake, came to the crest, looked down the darkness of the valley, and descended into the deep gloom, down into a soulless village.
But it was eight o’clock, and I had had enough. One might as well sleep. I found the “Gasthaus zur Post.”
It was a small, very rough inn, having only one common room, with bare tables, and a short, stout, grim, rather surly landlady, and a landlord whose hair stood up on end, and who was trembling on the edge of delirium tremens.
They could only give me boiled ham: so I ate boiled ham and drank beer, and tried to digest the utter cold materialism of Switzerland.
As I sat with my back to the wall, staring blankly at the trembling landlord, who was ready at any moment to foam at the mouth, and at the dour landlady, who was quite capable of keeping him in order, there came in one of those dark, showy Italian girls, with a man. She wore a blouse and skirt, and no hat. Her hair was perfectly dressed. It was really Italy. The man was soft, dark, he would get stout later, trapu, he would have somewhat the figure of Caruso. But as yet he was soft, sensuous, young, handsome.
They sat at the long side-table, with their beer, and created another country at once within the room. Another Italian came, fair and fat and slow, one from the Venetian province: then another, a little, thin young man. who might have been a Swiss, save for his vivid movement.
This last was the first to speak to the Germans. The others had just said “Bier.” But the little new-comer entered into a conversation with the landlady.
At last there were six Italians sitting talking loudly and warmly at the side-table. The slow, cold German-Swiss at the other tables looked at them occasionally. The landlord, with his crazed, stretched eyes, glared at them with hatred. But they fetched their beer from the bar with easy familiarity, and sat at their table, creating a bonfire of life in the callousness of the inn.
At last they finished their beer, and trooped off down the passage. The room was painfully empty. I did not know what to do.
Then I heard the landlord yelling and screeching and snarling from the kitchen at the back, for all the world like a mad dog. But the Swiss Saturday evening customers at the other tables smoked on and talked in their ugly dialect, without trouble. Then the landlady came in, and soon after the landlord, he collarless, with his waistcoat unbuttoned, showing his loose throat, and accentuating his round, pot belly. His limbs were thin and feverish, the skin of his face hung loose, his eyes were glaring, his hands trembled. Then he sat down to talk to a crony. His terrible appearance was a fiasco; nobody heeded him at all, only the landlady was surly.
From the back came loud noises of pleasure and excitement, and banging about. When the room door was opened I could see down the dark passage opposite another lighted door. Then the fat, fair Italian came in for more beer.
“What is all the noise?” I asked the landlady at last.
“It is the Italians,” she said.
“What are they doing?”
“They are doing a play.”
“Where?”
She jerked her head: “In the room at the back.”
“Can I go and look at them?”
“I should think so.”
The landlord glaringly watched me go out. I went down the stone passage, and found a great, half-lighted room, that might be used to hold meetings, with forms piled at the side. At one end was a raised platform or stage. And on this stage was a table and a lamp, and the Italians grouped round the light, gesticulating and laughing. Their beer mugs were on the table and on the floor of the stage: the little sharp youth was intently looking over some papers, the others were bending over the table with him.
They looked up as I entered from the distance, looked at me in the distant twilight of the dusky room, as if I were an intruder, as if I should go away when I had seen them. But I said, in German:
“May I look?”
They were still unwilling to see or to hear me.
“What do you say?” the small one asked in reply.
The others stood and watched, slightly at bay, like suspicious animals.
“If I might come and look,” I said in German, then, feeling very uncomfortable, in Italian: “You are doing a drama, the landlady told me.”
The big, empty room was behind me, dark; the little company of Italians stood above me, in the light of the lamp which was on the table. They all watched with unseeing, unwilling looks: I was merely an intrusion.
“We are only learning it,” said the small youth.
They wanted me to go away. But I wanted to stay.
“May I listen,” I said. “I don’t want to stay in there.” And I indicated, with a movement of the head, the inn-room beyond.
“Yes,” said the young intelligent man. “But we are only reading our parts.”
They had all become more friendly to me, they accepted me.
“You are a German?” asked one youth.
“No—English.”
“English? But do you live in Switzerland?”
“No—I am walking to Italy.”
“On foot?”
They looked with wakened eyes.
“Yes.”
So I told them about my journey. They were puzzled. They did not quite understand why I wanted to walk. But they were delighted with the idea of going to Lugano and Como and then to Milan.
“Where do you come from?” I asked them.
They were all from the villages between Verona and Venice. They had seen the Garda. I told them of my living there.
“Those peasants of the mountains,” they said at once, “they are people of little education. Rather wild folk.”
And they spoke with good-humoured contempt.
I thought of Paolo, and Il Duro, and the Signor Pietro, our padrone, and I resented these factory-hands for criticising them.
So I sat on the edge of the stage whilst they rehearsed their parts. The little, thin, intelligent fellow, Giuseppino, was the leader. The others read their parts in the laborious, disjointed fashion of the peasant, who can only see one word at a time, and has then to put the words together, afterwards, to make sense. The play was an amateur melodrama, printed in little penny booklets, for carnival production. This was only the second reading they had given it, and the handsome, dark fellow, who was roused and displaying himself before the girl, a hard, erect piece of callousness, laughed and flushed and stumbled, and understood nothing till it was transferred into him direct through Giuseppino. The fat, fair, slow man was more conscientious. He laboured through his part. The other two men were in the background, more or less.
The most confidential was the fat, fair, slow man, who was called Alberto. His part was not very important, so he could sit by me and talk to me.
He said they were all workers in the factory—silk, I think it was—in the village. They were a whole colony of Italians, thirty or more families. They had all come at different times.
Giuseppino had been longest in the village. He had come when he was eleven, with his parents, and had attended the Swiss school. So he spoke perfect German. He was a clever man, was married, and had two children.
He himself, Alberto, had been seven years in the valley; the girl, la Maddelena, had been here ten years; the dark man, Alfredo, who was flushed with excitement of her, had been in the village about nine years; he alone of all the men was not married.
The others had all married Italian wives, and they lived in the great dwelling whose windows shone yellow by the rattling factory. They lived entirely among themselves, none of them could speak German, more than a few words, except the Giuseppino, who was like a native here.
It was very strange being among these Italians exiled in Switzerland. Alfredo, the dark one, the unmarried, was in the old tradition. Yet even he was curiously subject to a new purpose, as if there were some greater new will that included him, sensuous, mindless as he was. He seemed to give his consent to something beyond himself. In this he was different from Il Duro, in that he had put himself under the control of the outside conception.
It was strange to watch them on the stage, the Italians all lambent, soft, warm, sensuous, yet moving subject round Giuseppino, who was always quiet, always ready, always impersonal. There was a look of purpose, almost of devotion on his face, that singled him out and made him seem the one stable, eternal being among them. They quarrelled, and he let them quarrel up to a certain point; then he called them back. He let them do as they liked, so long as they adhered more or less to the central purpose, so long as they got on in some measure with the play.
All the while they were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The Alberto was barman: he went out continually with the glasses. The Maddelena had a small glass. In the lamplight of the stage, the little party read and smoked and practised, exposed to the empty darkness of the big room. Queer and isolated it seemed, a tiny, pathetic magic-land far away from the barrenness of Switzerland. I could believe in the old fairy tales, where, when the rock was opened, a magic underworld was revealed.
The Alfredo, flushed, roused, handsome, but very soft and enveloping in his heat, laughed and threw himself into his pose, laughed foolishly, and then gave himself up to his part. The Alberto, slow and laborious, yet with a spark of vividness and natural intensity flashing through, replied and gesticulated, the Maddelena laid her head on the bosom of Alfredo, the other men started into action, and the play proceeded intently for half an hour.
Quick, vivid, and sharp, the little Giuseppino was always central. But he seemed almost invisible. When I think back, I can scarcely see him, I can only see the others, the lamplight on their faces and on their full, gesticulating limbs. I can see the Maddelena, rather coarse and hard and repellent, declaiming her words in a loud, half-cynical voice, falling on the breast of the Alfredo, who was soft and sensuous, more like a female, flushing, with his mouth getting wet, his eyes moist, as he was roused. I can see the Alberto, slow, laboured, yet with a kind of pristine simplicity in all his movements, that touched his fat commonplaceness with beauty. Then there were the other two men, shy, inflammable, unintelligent, with their sudden Italian rushes of hot feeling. All their faces are distinct in the lamplight, all their bodies are palpable and dramatic.
But the face of the Giuseppino is like a pale luminousness, a sort of gleam among all the ruddy glow, his body is evanescent, like a shadow. And his being seemed to cast its influence over all the others, except perhaps the woman, who was hard and resistant. The other men seemed all overcast, mitigated, in part transfigured by the will of the little leader. But they were very soft stuff, if inflammable.
The young woman of the inn, niece of the landlady, came down and called out across the room.
“We will go away from here now,” said the Giuseppino to me. “They close at eleven. But we have another inn in the next parish that is open all night. Come with us and drink some wine.”
“But,” I said, “you would rather be alone.”
No, they pressed me to go, they wanted me to go with them, they were eager, they wanted to entertain me. Alfredo, flushed, wet-mouthed, warm, protested I must drink wine, the real Italian red wine, from their own village at home. They would have no nay.
So I told the landlady. She said I must be back by twelve o’clock.
The night was very dark. Below the road the stream was rushing, there was a great factory on the other side of the water, making faint quivering lights of reflection, and one could see the working of machinery shadowy through the lighted windows. Near by was the tall tenement where the Italians lived.
We went on through the straggling, raw village, deep beside the stream, then over the small bridge, and up the steep hill down which I had come earlier in the evening.
So we arrived at the café. It was so different inside from the German inn, yet it was not like an Italian café either. It was brilliantly lighted, clean, new, and there were red-and-white cloths on the tables. The host was in the room, and his daughter, a beautiful red-haired girl.
Greetings were exchanged with the quick, intimate directness of Italy. But there was another note also, a faint echo of reserve, as though they reserved themselves from the outer world, making a special inner community.
Alfredo was hot: he took off his coat. We all sat freely at a long table, whilst the red-haired girl brought a quart of red wine. At other tables men were playing cards, with the odd Neapolitan cards. They too were talking Italian. It was a warm, ruddy bit of Italy within the cold darkness of Switzerland.
“When you come to Italy,” they said to me, “salute it from us, salute the sun, and the earth, l’Italia.”
So we drank in salute of Italy. They sent their greeting by me.
“You know in Italy there is the sun, the sun,” said Alfredo to me, profoundly moved, wet-mouthed, tipsy.
I was reminded of Enrico Persevalli and his terrifying cry at the end of Ghosts:
So we talked for a while of Italy. They had a pained tenderness for it, sad, reserved.
“Don’t you want to go back?” I said, pressing them to tell me definitely. “Won’t you go back some time?”
“Yes,” they said, “we will go back.”
But they spoke reservedly, without freedom. We talked about Italy, about songs, and Carnival; about the food, polenta, and salt. They laughed at my pretending to cut the slabs of polenta with a string: that rejoiced them all: it took them back to the Italian mezzo-giorno, the bells jangling in the campanile, the eating after the heavy work on the land.
But they laughed with the slight pain and contempt and fondness which every man feels towards his past, when he has struggled away from that past, from the conditions which made it.
They loved Italy passionately; but they would not go back. All their blood, all their senses were Italian, needed the Italian sky, the speech, the sensuous life. They could hardly live except through the senses. Their minds were not developed, mentally they were children, lovable, naïve, almost fragile children. But sensually they were men: sensually they were accomplished.
Yet a new tiny flower was struggling to open in them, the flower of a new spirit. The substratum of Italy has always been pagan, sensuous, the most potent symbol the sexual symbol. The child is really a non-Christian symbol: it is the symbol of man’s triumph of eternal life in procreation. The worship of the Cross never really held good in Italy. The Christianity of Northern Europe has never had any place there.
And now, when Northern Europe is turning back on its own Christianity, denying it all, the Italians are struggling with might and main against the sensuous spirit which still dominates them. When Northern Europe, whether it hates Nietzsche or not, is crying out for the Dionysic ecstasy, practising on itself the Dionysic ecstasy, Southern Europe is breaking free from Dionysos, from the triumphal affirmation of life over death, immortality through procreation.
I could see these sons of Italy would never go back. Men like Paolo and Il Duro broke away only to return. The dominance of the old form was too strong for them. Call it love of country or love of the village, campanilismo, or what not, it was the dominance of the old pagan form, the old affirmation of immortality through procreation, as opposed to the Christian affirmation of immortality through self-death and social love.
But “John,” and these Italians in Switzerland were a generation younger, and they would not go back, at least, not to the old Italy. Suffer as they might, and they did suffer, wincing in every nerve and fibre from the cold material insentience of the northern countries and of America, still they would endure this for the sake of something else they wanted. They would suffer a death in the flesh, as “John” had suffered in fighting the street crowd, as these men suffered year after year cramped in their black, gloomy, cold Swiss valley, working in the factory. But there would come a new spirit out of it.
Even Alfredo was submitted to the new process; though he belonged entirely by nature to the sort of Il Duro, he was purely sensuous and mindless. But under the influence of Giuseppino he was thrown down, as fallow to the new spirit that would come.
And then, when the others were all partially tipsy, the Giuseppino began to talk to me. In him was a steady flame burning, burning, burning, a flame of the mind, of the spirit, something new and clear, something that held even the soft, sensuous Alfredo in submission, besides all the others, who had some little development of mind.
“Sa Signore,” said the Giuseppino to me, quiet, almost invisible or inaudible, as it seemed, like a spirit addressing me, “l’uomo non ha patria—a man has no country. What has the Italian government to do with us? What does a government mean? It makes us work, it takes part of our wages away from us, it makes us soldiers—and what for? What is government for?”
“Have you been a soldier?” I interrupted him.
He had not, none of them had: that was why they could not really go back to Italy. Now this was out; this explained partly their curious reservation in speaking about their beloved country. They had forfeited parents as well as homeland.
“What does the government do? It takes taxes, it has an army, and police, and it makes roads. But we could do without an army, and we could be our own police, and we could make our own roads. What is this government? Who wants it? Only those who are unjust, and want to have advantage over somebody else. It is an instrument of injustice and of wrong.
“Why should we have a government? Here, in this village, there are thirty families of Italians. There is no government for them, no Italian government. And we live together better than in Italy. We are richer and freer, we have no policemen, no poor laws. We help each other, and there are no poor.
“Why are these governments always doing what we don’t want them to do? We should not be fighting in the Cirenaica if we were all Italians. It is the government that does it. They talk and talk and do things with us: but we don’t want them.”
The others, tipsy, sat round the table with the terrified gravity of children who are somehow responsible for things they do not understand. They stirred in their seats, turning aside, with gestures almost of pain, of imprisonment. Only Alfredo, laying his hand on mine, was laughing, loosely, floridly. He would upset all the government with a jerk of his well-built shoulder, and then he would have a spree—such a spree. He laughed wetly to me.
The Giuseppino waited patiently during this tipsy confidence, but his pale clarity and beauty was something constant and star-like, in comparison with the flushed, soft handsomeness of the other. He waited patiently, looking at me.
But I did not want him to go on: I did not want to answer. I could feel a new spirit in him, something strange and pure and slightly frightening. He wanted something which was beyond me. And my soul was somewhere in tears, crying helplessly like an infant in the night. I could not respond: I could not answer. He seemed to look at me, me, an Englishman, an educated man, for corroboration. But I could not corroborate him. I knew the purity and new struggling towards birth of a true, star-like spirit. But I could not confirm him in his utterance: my soul could not respond. I did not believe in the perfectibility of man. I did not believe in infinite harmony among men. And this was his star, this belief.
It was nearly mid-night. A Swiss came in and asked for beer. The Italians gathered round them a curious darkness of reserve. And then I must go.
They shook hands with me warmly, truthfully, putting a sort of implicit belief in me, as representative of some further knowledge. But there was a fixed, calm resolve over the face of the Giuseppino, a sort of steady faith, even in disappointment. He gave me a copy of a little Anarchist paper published in Geneva. L’Anarchista, I believe it was called. I glanced at it. It was in Italian, naïve, simple, rather rhetorical. So they were all Anarchists, these Italians.
I ran down the hill in the thick Swiss darkness to the little bridge, and along the uneven, cobbled street. I did not want to think, I did not want to know. I wanted to arrest my activity, to keep it confined to the moment, to the adventure.
When I came to the flight of stone steps which led up to the door of the inn, at the side, I saw in the darkness two figures. They said a low good-night and parted, the girl began to knock at the door, the man disappeared. It was the niece of the landlady parting from her lover.
We waited outside the locked door, at the top of the stone steps, in the darkness of midnight. The stream rustled below. Then came a shouting and an insane snarling within the passage; the bolts were not withdrawn.
“It is the gentleman, it is the strange gentleman,” called the girl.
Then came again the furious shouting snarls, and the landlord’s mad voice:
“Stop out, stop out there. The door won’t be opened again.”
“The strange gentleman is here,” repeated the girl.
Then more movement was heard, and the door was suddenly open, and the landlord rushing out upon us, wielding a broom. It was a strange sight, in the half-lighted passage. I stared blankly in the doorway. The landlord dropped the broom he was waving and collapsed as if by magic, looking at me, though he continued to mutter madly, unintelligibly. The girl slipped past me, and the landlord snarled. Then he picked up the brush, at the same time crying:
“You are late, the door was shut, it will not be opened. We shall have the police in the house. We said twelve o’clock, at twelve o’clock the door must be shut, and must not be opened again. If you are late you stay out——”
So he went snarling, his voice rising higher and higher, away into the kitchen.
“You are coming to your room?” the landlady said to me coldly. And she led me upstairs.
The room was over the road, clean, but rather ugly, with a large tin, that had once contained lard or Swiss-milk, to wash in. But the bed was good enough, which was all that mattered.
I heard the landlord yelling, and there was a long and systematic thumping somewhere, thump, thump, thump, and banging. I wondered where it was. I could not locate it at all, because my room lay beyond another large room: I had to go through a large room, by the foot of two beds, to get to my door: so I could not quite tell where anything was.
But I went to sleep whilst I was wondering.
I woke in the morning and washed in the tin. I could see a few people in the street, walking in the Sunday morning leisure. It felt like Sunday in England, and I shrank from it. I could see none of the Italians. The factory stood there, raw and large and sombre, by the stream, and the drab-coloured stone tenements were close by. Otherwise the village was a straggling Swiss street, almost untouched.
The landlord was quiet and reasonable, even friendly, in the morning. He wanted to talk to me: where had I bought my boots, was his first question. I told him in Munich. And how much had they cost? I told him twenty-eight marks. He was much impressed by them: such good boots, of such soft, strong, beautiful leather, he had not seen such boots for a long time.
Then I knew it was he who had cleaned my boots. I could see him fingering them and wondering over them. I rather liked him. I could see he had had imagination, once, and a certain fineness of nature. Now he was corrupted with drink, too far gone to be even a human being. I hated the village.
They set bread and butter and a piece of cheese weighing about five pounds, and large, fresh, sweet cakes for breakfast. I ate and was thankful: the food was good.
A couple of village youths came in, in their Sunday clothes. They had the Sunday stiffness. It reminded me of the stiffness and curious self-consciousness that comes over life in England on a Sunday. But the landlord sat with his waistcoat hanging open over his shirt, pot-bellied, his ruined face leaning forward, talking, always talking, wanting to know.
So in a few minutes I was out on the road again, thanking God for the blessing of a road that belongs to no man, and travels away from all men.
I did not want to see the Italians. Something had got tied up in me, and I could not bear to see them again. I liked them so much; but, for some reason or other, my mind stopped like clockwork if I wanted to think of them and of what their lives would be, their future. It was as if some curious negative magnetism arrested my mind, prevented it from working, the moment I turned it towards these Italians.
I do not know why it was. But I could never write to them, or think of them, or even read the paper they gave me, though it lay in my drawer for months, in Italy, and I often glanced over six lines of it. And often, often my mind went back to the group, the play they were rehearsing, the wine in the pleasant café, and the night. But the moment my memory touched them, my whole soul stopped and was null; I could not go on. Even now I cannot really consider them in thought. I shrink involuntarily away. I do not know why this is.