JOHN

Besides Il Duro, we found another Italian who could speak English, this

time quite well. We had walked about four or five miles up the lake,

getting higher and higher. Then quite suddenly, on the shoulder of a

bluff far up, we came on a village, icy cold, and as if forgotten.

We went into the inn to drink something hot. The fire of olive sticks

was burning in the open chimney, one or two men were talking at a table,

a young woman with a baby stood by the fire watching something boil in a

large pot. Another woman was seen in the house-place beyond.

In the chimney-seats sat a young mule-driver, who had left his two mules

at the door of the inn, and opposite him an elderly stout man. They got

down and offered us the seats of honour, which we accepted with

due courtesy.

The chimneys are like the wide, open chimney-places of old English

cottages, but the hearth is raised about a foot and a half or two feet

from the floor, so that the fire is almost level with the hands; and

those who sit in the chimney-seats are raised above the audience in the

room, something like two gods flanking the fire, looking out of the cave

of ruddy darkness into the open, lower world of the room.

We asked for coffee with milk and rum. The stout landlord took a seat

near us below. The comely young woman with the baby took the tin

coffee-pot that stood among the grey ashes, put in fresh coffee among

the old bottoms, filled it with water, then pushed it more into

the fire.

The landlord turned to us with the usual naïve, curious deference, and

the usual question:

'You are Germans?'

'English.'

'Ah--_Inglesi_.'

Then there is a new note of cordiality--or so I always imagine--and the

rather rough, cattle-like men who are sitting with their wine round the

table look up more amicably. They do not like being intruded upon. Only

the landlord is always affable.

'I have a son who speaks English,' he says: he is a handsome, courtly

old man, of the Falstaff sort.

'Oh!'

'He has been in America.'

'And where is he now?'

'He is at home. O--Nicoletta, where is the Giovann'?'

The comely young woman with the baby came in.

'He is with the band,' she said.

The old landlord looked at her with pride.

'This is my daughter-in-law,' he said.

She smiled readily to the Signora.

'And the baby?' we asked.

'_Mio figlio_,' cried the young woman, in the strong, penetrating voice

of these women. And she came forward to show the child to the Signora.

It was a bonny baby: the whole company was united in adoration and

service of the bambino. There was a moment of suspension, when religious

submission seemed to come over the inn-room.

Then the Signora began to talk, and it broke upon the Italian

child-reverence.

'What is he called?'

'Oscare,' came the ringing note of pride. And the mother talked to the

baby in dialect. All, men and women alike, felt themselves glorified by

the presence of the child.

At last the coffee in the tin coffee-pot was boiling and frothing out of

spout and lid. The milk in the little copper pan was also hot, among the

ashes. So we had our drink at last.

The landlord was anxious for us to see Giovanni, his son. There was a

village band performing up the street, in front of the house of a

colonel who had come home wounded from Tripoli. Everybody in the village

was wildly proud about the colonel and about the brass band, the music

of which was execrable.

We just looked into the street. The band of uncouth fellows was playing

the same tune over and over again before a desolate, newish house. A

crowd of desolate, forgotten villagers stood round in the cold upper

air. It seemed altogether that the place was forgotten by God and man.

But the landlord, burly, courteous, handsome, pointed out with a

flourish the Giovanni, standing in the band playing a cornet. The band

itself consisted only of five men, rather like beggars in the street.

But Giovanni was the strangest! He was tall and thin and somewhat

German-looking, wearing shabby American clothes and a very high double

collar and a small American crush hat. He looked entirely like a

ne'er-do-well who plays a violin in the street, dressed in the most

down-at-heel, sordid respectability.

'That is he--you see, Signore--the young one under the balcony.'

The father spoke with love and pride, and the father was a gentleman,

like Falstaff, a pure gentleman. The daughter-in-law also peered out to

look at Il Giovann', who was evidently a figure of repute, in his

sordid, degenerate American respectability. Meanwhile, this figure of

repute blew himself red in the face, producing staccato strains on his

cornet. And the crowd stood desolate and forsaken in the cold, upper

afternoon.

Then there was a sudden rugged '_Evviva, Evviva_!' from the people, the

band stopped playing, somebody valiantly broke into a line of the song:

_Tripoli, sarà italiana,

Sarà italiana al rombo del cannon'._

The colonel had appeared on the balcony, a smallish man, very yellow in

the face, with grizzled black hair and very shabby legs. They all seemed

so sordidly, hopelessly shabby.

He suddenly began to speak, leaning forward, hot and feverish and

yellow, upon the iron rail of the balcony. There was something hot and

marshy and sick about him, slightly repulsive, less than human. He told

his fellow-villagers how he loved them, how, when he lay uncovered on

the sands of Tripoli, week after week, he had known they were watching

him from the Alpine height of the village, he could feel that where he

was they were all looking. When the Arabs came rushing like things gone

mad, and he had received his wound, he had known that in his own

village, among his own dear ones, there was recovery. Love would heal

the wounds, the home country was a lover who would heal all her sons'

wounds with love.

Among the grey desolate crowd were sharp, rending 'Bravos!'--the people

were in tears--the landlord at my side was repeating softly,

abstractedly: '_Caro--caro--Ettore, caro colonello_--' and when it was

finished, and the little colonel with shabby, humiliated legs was gone

in, he turned to me and said, with challenge that almost frightened me:

'_Un brav' uomo_.'

'_Bravissimo_,' I said.

Then we, too, went indoors.

It was all, somehow, grey and hopeless and acrid, unendurable.

The colonel, poor devil--we knew him afterwards--is now dead. It is

strange that he is dead. There is something repulsive to me in the

thought of his lying dead: such a humiliating, somehow degraded corpse.

Death has no beauty in Italy, unless it be violent. The death of man or

woman through sickness is an occasion of horror, repulsive. They belong

entirely to life, they are so limited to life, these people.

Soon the Giovanni came home, and took his cornet upstairs. Then he came

to see us. He was an ingenuous youth, sordidly shabby and dirty. His

fair hair was long and uneven, his very high starched collar made one

aware that his neck and his ears were not clean, his American crimson

tie was ugly, his clothes looked as if they had been kicking about on

the floor for a year.

Yet his blue eyes were warm and his manner and speech very gentle.

'You will speak English with us,' I said.

'Oh,' he said, smiling and shaking his head, 'I could speak English very

well. But it is two years that I don't speak it now, over two years now,

so I don't speak it.'

'But you speak it very well.'

'No. It is two years that I have not spoke, not a word--so, you see, I

have--'

'You have forgotten it? No, you haven't. It will quickly come back.'

'If I hear it--when I go to America--then I shall--I shall--'

'You will soon pick it up.'

'Yes--I shall pick it up.'

The landlord, who had been watching with pride, now went away. The wife

also went away, and we were left with the shy, gentle, dirty, and

frowsily-dressed Giovanni.

He laughed in his sensitive, quick fashion.

'The women in America, when they came into the store, they said, "Where

is John, where is John?" Yes, they liked me.'

And he laughed again, glancing with vague, warm blue eyes, very shy,

very coiled upon himself with sensitiveness.

He had managed a store in America, in a smallish town. I glanced at his

reddish, smooth, rather knuckly hands, and thin wrists in the frayed

cuff. They were real shopman's hands.

The landlord brought some special feast-day cake, so overjoyed he was to

have his Giovanni speaking English with the Signoria.

When we went away, we asked 'John' to come down to our villa to see us.

We scarcely expected him to turn up.

Yet one morning he appeared, at about half past nine, just as we were

finishing breakfast. It was sunny and warm and beautiful, so we asked

him please to come with us picnicking.

He was a queer shoot, again, in his unkempt longish hair and slovenly

clothes, a sort of very vulgar down-at-heel American in appearance. And

he was transported with shyness. Yet ours was the world he had chosen as

his own, so he took his place bravely and simply, a hanger-on.

We climbed up the water-course in the mountain-side, up to a smooth

little lawn under the olive trees, where daisies were flowering and

gladioli were in bud. It was a tiny little lawn of grass in a level

crevice, and sitting there we had the world below us--the lake, the

distant island, the far-off low Verona shore.

Then 'John' began to talk, and he talked continuously, like a foreigner,

not saying the things he would have said in Italian, but following the

suggestion and scope of his limited English.

In the first place, he loved his father--it was 'my father, my father'

always. His father had a little shop as well as the inn in the village

above. So John had had some education. He had been sent to Brescia and

then to Verona to school, and there had taken his examinations to become

a civil engineer. He was clever, and could pass his examinations. But he

never finished his course. His mother died, and his father,

disconsolate, had wanted him at home. Then he had gone back, when he was

sixteen or seventeen, to the village beyond the lake, to be with his

father and to look after the shop.

'But didn't you mind giving up all your work?' I said.

He did not quite understand.

'My father wanted me to come back,' he said.

It was evident that Giovanni had had no definite conception of what he

was doing or what he wanted to do. His father, wishing to make a

gentleman of him, had sent him to school in Verona. By accident he had

been moved on into the engineering course. When it all fizzled to an

end, and he returned half-baked to the remote, desolate village of the

mountain-side, he was not disappointed or chagrined. He had never

conceived of a coherent purposive life. Either one stayed in the

village, like a lodged stone, or one made random excursions into the

world, across the world. It was all aimless and purposeless.

So he had stayed a while with his father, then he had gone, just as

aimlessly, with a party of men who were emigrating to America. He had

taken some money, had drifted about, living in the most comfortless,

wretched fashion, then he had found a place somewhere in Pennsylvania,

in a dry goods store. This was when he was seventeen or eighteen

years old.

All this seemed to have happened to him without his being very much

affected, at least consciously. His nature was simple and self-complete.

Yet not so self-complete as that of Il Duro or Paolo. They had passed

through the foreign world and been quite untouched. Their souls were

static, it was the world that had flowed unstable by.

But John was more sensitive, he had come more into contact with his new

surroundings. He had attended night classes almost every evening, and

had been taught English like a child. He had loved the American free

school, the teachers, the work.

But he had suffered very much in America. With his curious,

over-sensitive, wincing laugh, he told us how the boys had followed him

and jeered at him, calling after him, 'You damn Dago, you damn Dago.'

They had stopped him and his friend in the street and taken away their

hats, and spat into them. So that at last he had gone mad. They were

youths and men who always tortured him, using bad language which

startled us very much as he repeated it, there on the little lawn under

the olive trees, above the perfect lake: English obscenities and abuse

so coarse and startling that we bit our lips, shocked almost into

laughter, whilst John, simple and natural, and somehow, for all his long

hair and dirty appearance, flower-like in soul, repeated to us these

things which may never be repeated in decent company.

'Oh,' he said, 'at last, I get mad. When they come one day, shouting,

"You damn Dago, dirty dog," and will take my hat again, oh, I get mad,

and I would kill them, I would kill them, I am so mad. I run to them,

and throw one to the floor, and I tread on him while I go upon another,

the biggest. Though they hit me and kick me all over, I feel nothing, I

am mad. I throw the biggest to the floor, a man; he is older than I am,

and I hit him so hard I would kill him. When the others see it they are

afraid, they throw stones and hit me on the face. But I don't feel it--I

don't know nothing. I hit the man on the floor, I almost kill him. I

forget everything except I will kill him--'

'But you didn't?'

'No--I don't know--' and he laughed his queer, shaken laugh. 'The other

man that was with me, my friend, he came to me and we went away. Oh, I

was mad. I was completely mad. I would have killed them.'

He was trembling slightly, and his eyes were dilated with a strange

greyish-blue fire that was very painful and elemental. He looked beside

himself. But he was by no means mad.

We were shaken by the vivid, lambent excitement of the youth, we wished

him to forget. We were shocked, too, in our souls to see the pure

elemental flame shaken out of his gentle, sensitive nature. By his

slight, crinkled laugh we could see how much he had suffered. He had

gone out and faced the world, and he had kept his place, stranger and

Dago though he was.

'They never came after me no more, not all the while I was there.'

Then he said he became the foreman in the store--at first he was only

assistant. It was the best store in the town, and many English ladies

came, and some Germans. He liked the English ladies very much: they

always wanted him to be in the store. He wore white clothes there, and

they would say:

'You look very nice in the white coat, John'; or else:

'Let John come, he can find it'; or else they said:

'John speaks like a born American.'

This pleased him very much.

In the end, he said, he earned a hundred dollars a month. He lived with

the extraordinary frugality of the Italians, and had quite a lot

of money.

He was not like Il Duro. Faustino had lived in a state of miserliness

almost in America, but then he had had his debauches of shows and wine

and carousals. John went chiefly to the schools, in one of which he was

even asked to teach Italian. His knowledge of his own language was

remarkable and most unusual!

'But what,' I asked, 'brought you back?'

'It was my father. You see, if I did not come to have my military

service, I must stay till I am forty. So I think perhaps my father will

be dead, I shall never see him. So I came.'

He had come home when he was twenty to fulfil his military duties. At

home he had married. He was very fond of his wife, but he had no

conception of love in the old sense. His wife was like the past, to

which he was wedded. Out of her he begot his child, as out of the past.

But the future was all beyond her, apart from her. He was going away

again, now, to America. He had been some nine months at home after his

military service was over. He had no more to do. Now he was leaving his

wife and child and his father to go to America.

'But why,' I said, 'why? You are not poor, you can manage the shop in

your village.'

'Yes,' he said. 'But I will go to America. Perhaps I shall go into the

store again, the same.'

'But is it not just the same as managing the shop at home?'

'No--no--it is quite different.'

Then he told us how he bought goods in Brescia and in Said for the shop

at home, how he had rigged up a funicular with the assistance of the

village, an overhead wire by which you could haul the goods up the face

of the cliffs right high up, to within a mile of the village. He was

very proud of this. And sometimes he himself went down the funicular to

the water's edge, to the boat, when he was in a hurry. This also

pleased him.

But he was going to Brescia this day to see about going again to

America. Perhaps in another month he would be gone.

It was a great puzzle to me why he would go. He could not say himself.

He would stay four or five years, then he would come home again to see

his father--and his wife and child.

There was a strange, almost frightening destiny upon him, which seemed

to take him away, always away from home, from the past, to that great,

raw America. He seemed scarcely like a person with individual choice,

more like a creature under the influence of fate which was

disintegrating the old life and precipitating him, a fragment

inconclusive, into the new chaos.

He submitted to it all with a perfect unquestioning simplicity, never

even knowing that he suffered, that he must suffer disintegration from

the old life. He was moved entirely from within, he never questioned his

inevitable impulse.

'They say to me, "Don't go--don't go"--' he shook his head. 'But I say I

will go.'

And at that it was finished.

So we saw him off at the little quay, going down the lake. He would

return at evening, and be pulled up in his funicular basket. And in a

month's time he would be standing on the same lake steamer going

to America.

Nothing was more painful than to see him standing there in his degraded,

sordid American clothes, on the deck of the steamer, waving us good-bye,

belonging in his final desire to our world, the world of consciousness

and deliberate action. With his candid, open, unquestioning face, he

seemed like a prisoner being conveyed from one form of life to another,

or like a soul in trajectory, that has not yet found a resting-place.

What were wife and child to him?--they were the last steps of the past.

His father was the continent behind him; his wife and child the

foreshore of the past; but his face was set outwards, away from it

all--whither, neither he nor anybody knew, but he called it America.

_Italians in Exile_

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 medieval 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

bearing. This little squad of cavalry seemed more like a party of common

men riding out in 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

manoeuvring 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 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 newcomer 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

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?'