'Yes,' he said, 'that is true of Germans. The system is different. Ours
is much better; in Switzerland a man enjoys his time as a soldier. I
want to go.'
So we watched the black dots of soldiers crawling over the high snow,
listened to the unnatural dry rattle of guns, up there.
Then we were aware of somebody whistling, of soldiers yelling down the
road. We were to come on, along the level, over the bridge. So we
marched quickly forward, away from the slopes, towards the hotel, once a
monastery, that stood in the distance. The light was blue and clear on
the reedy lakes of this upper place; it was a strange desolation of
water and bog and rocks and road, hedged by the snowy slopes round the
rim, under the very sky.
The soldier was yelling again. I could not tell what he said.
'He says if we don't run we can't come at all,' said Emil.
'I won't run,' I said.
So we hurried forwards, over the bridge, where the soldier on guard was
standing.
'Do you want to be shot?' he said angrily, as we came up.
'No, thanks,' I said.
Emil was very serious.
'How long should we have had to wait if we hadn't got through now?' he
asked the soldier, when we were safely out of danger.
'Till one o'clock,' was the reply.
'Two hours!' said Emil, strangely elated. 'We should have had to wait
two hours before we could come on. He was riled that we didn't run,' and
he laughed with glee.
So we marched over the level to the hotel. We called in for a glass of
hot milk. I asked in German. But the maid, a pert hussy, elegant and
superior, was French. She served us with great contempt, as two
worthless creatures, poverty-stricken. It abashed poor Emil, but we
managed to laugh at her. This made her very angry. In the smoking-room
she raised up her voice in French:
'_Du lait chaud pour les chameaux._'
'Some hot milk for the camels, she says,' I translated for Emil. He was
covered with confusion and youthful anger.
But I called to her, tapped the table and called:
'_Mademoiselle!_'
She appeared flouncingly in the doorway.
'_Encore du lait pour les chameaux_,' I said.
And she whisked our glasses off the table, and flounced out without a
word.
But she would not come in again with the milk. A German girl brought it.
We laughed, and she smiled primly.
When we set forth again, Emil rolled up his sleeves and turned back his
shirt from his neck and breast, to do the thing thoroughly. Besides, it
was midday, and the sun was hot; and, with his bulky pack on his back,
he suggested the camel of the French maid more than ever.
We were on the downward slope. Only a short way from the hotel, and
there was the drop, the great cleft in the mountains running down from
this shallow pot among the peaks.
The descent on the south side is much more precipitous and wonderful
than the ascent from the north. On the south, the rocks are craggy and
stupendous; the little river falls headlong down; it is not a stream, it
is one broken, panting cascade far away in the gulley below, in
the darkness.
But on the slopes the sun pours in, the road winds down with its tail in
its mouth, always in endless loops returning on itself. The mules that
travel upward seem to be treading in a mill.
Emil took the narrow tracks, and, like the water, we cascaded down,
leaping from level to level, leaping, running, leaping, descending
headlong, only resting now and again when we came down on to another
level of the high-road.
Having begun, we could not help ourselves, we were like two stones
bouncing down. Emil was highly elated. He waved his thin, bare, white
arms as he leapt, his chest grew pink with the exercise. Now he felt he
was doing something that became a member of his Sportverein. Down we
went, jumping, running, britching.
It was wonderful on this south side, so sunny, with feathery trees and
deep black shadows. It reminded me of Goethe, of the romantic period:
_Kennst du das Land, wo die Citronen blühen?_
So we went tumbling down into the south, very swiftly, along with the
tumbling stream. But it was very tiring. We went at a great pace down
the gully, between the sheer rocks. Trees grew in the ledges high over
our heads, trees grew down below. And ever we descended.
Till gradually the gully opened, then opened into a wide valley-head,
and we saw Airolo away below us, the railway emerging from its hole, the
whole valley like a cornucopia full of sunshine.
Poor Emil was tired, more tired than I was. And his big boots had hurt
his feet in the descent. So, having come to the open valley-head, we
went more gently. He had become rather quiet.
The head of the valley had that half-tamed, ancient aspect that reminded
me of the Romans. I could only expect the Roman legions to be encamped
down there; and the white goats feeding on the bushes belonged to a
Roman camp.
But no, we saw again the barracks of the Swiss soldiery, and again we
were in the midst of rifle-fire and manoeuvres. But we went evenly,
tired now, and hungry. We had nothing to eat.
It is strange how different the sun-dried, ancient, southern slopes of
the world are, from the northern slopes. It is as if the god Pan really
had his home among these sun-bleached stones and tough, sun-dark trees.
And one knows it all in one's blood, it is pure, sun-dried memory. So I
was content, coming down into Airolo.
We found the streets were Italian, the houses sunny outside and dark
within, like Italy, there were laurels in the road. Poor Emil was a
foreigner all at once. He rolled down his shirt sleeves and fastened his
shirt-neck, put on his coat and collar, and became a foreigner in his
soul, pale and strange.
I saw a shop with vegetables and grapes, a real Italian shop, a dark
cave.
'_Quanto costa l'uva?_' were my first words in the south.
'_Sessanta al chilo_,' said the girl.
And it was as pleasant as a drink of wine, the Italian.
So Emil and I ate the sweet black grapes as we went to the station.
He was very poor. We went into the third-class restaurant at the
station. He ordered beer and bread and sausage; I ordered soup and
boiled beef and vegetables.
They brought me a great quantity, so, whilst the girl was serving
coffee-with-rum to the men at the bar, I took another spoon and knife
and fork and plates for Emil, and we had two dinners from my one. When
the girl--she was a woman of thirty-five--came back, she looked at us
sharply. I smiled at her coaxingly; so she gave a small, kindly smile
in reply.
'_Ja, dies ist reizend_,' said Emil, _sotto voce_, exulting. He was very
shy. But we were curiously happy, in that railway restaurant.
Then we sat very still, on the platform, and waited for the train. It
was like Italy, pleasant and social to wait in the railway station, all
the world easy and warm in its activity, with the sun shining.
I decided to take a franc's worth of train-journey. So I chose my
station. It was one franc twenty, third class. Then my train came, and
Emil and I parted, he waving to me till I was out of sight. I was sorry
he had to go back, he did so want to venture forth.
So I slid for a dozen miles or more, sleepily, down the Ticino valley,
sitting opposite two fat priests in their feminine black.
When I got out at my station I felt for the first time ill at ease. Why
was I getting out at this wayside place, on to the great, raw high-road?
I did not know. But I set off walking. It was nearly tea-time.
Nothing in the world is more ghastly than these Italian roads, new,
mechanical, belonging to a machine life. The old roads are wonderful,
skilfully aiming their way. But these new great roads are desolating,
more desolating than all the ruins in the world.
I walked on and on, down the Ticino valley, towards Bellinzona. The
valley was perhaps beautiful: I don't know. I can only remember the
road. It was broad and new, and it ran very often beside the railway. It
ran also by quarries and by occasional factories, also through villages.
And the quality of its sordidness is something that does not bear
thinking of, a quality that has entered Italian life now, if it was not
there before.
Here and there, where there were quarries or industries, great
lodging-houses stood naked by the road, great, grey, desolate places;
and squalid children were playing round the steps, and dirty men
slouched in. Everything seemed under a weight.
Down the road of the Ticino valley I felt again my terror of this new
world which is coming into being on top of us. One always feels it in a
suburb, on the edge of a town, where the land is being broken under the
advance of houses. But this is nothing, in England, to the terror one
feels on the new Italian roads, where these great blind cubes of
dwellings rise stark from the destroyed earth, swarming with a sort of
verminous life, really verminous, purely destructive.
It seems to happen when the peasant suddenly leaves his home and becomes
a workman. Then an entire change comes over everywhere. Life is now a
matter of selling oneself to slave-work, building roads or labouring in
quarries or mines or on the railways, purposeless, meaningless, really
slave-work, each integer doing his mere labour, and all for no purpose,
except to have money, and to get away from the old system.
These Italian navvies work all day long, their whole life is engaged in
the mere brute labour. And they are the navvies of the world. And whilst
they are navvying, they are almost shockingly indifferent to their
circumstances, merely callous to the dirt and foulness.
It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human
element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The
roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but
the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and
caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. So
that it seems as though we should be left at last with a great system of
roads and railways and industries, and a world of utter chaos seething
upon these fabrications: as if we had created a steel framework, and the
whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between. It is most
terrifying to realize; and I have always felt this terror upon a new
Italian high-road--more there than anywhere.
The remembrance of the Ticino valley is a sort of nightmare to me. But
it was better when at last, in the darkness of night, I got into
Bellinzona. In the midst of the town one felt the old organism still
living. It is only at its extremities that it is falling to pieces, as
in dry rot.
In the morning, leaving Bellinzona, again I went in terror of the new,
evil high-road, with its skirting of huge cubical houses and its
seething navvy population. Only the peasants driving in with fruit were
consoling. But I was afraid of them: the same spirit had set in in them.
I was no longer happy in Switzerland, not even when I was eating great
blackberries and looking down at the Lago Maggiore, at Locarno, lying by
the lake; the terror of the callous, disintegrating process was too
strong in me.
At a little inn a man was very good to me. He went into his garden and
fetched me the first grapes and apples and peaches, bringing them in
amongst leaves, and heaping them before me. He was Italian-Swiss; he had
been in a bank in Bern; now he had retired, had bought his paternal
home, and was a free man. He was about fifty years old; he spent all his
time in his garden; his daughter attended to the inn.
He talked to me, as long as I stayed, about Italy and Switzerland and
work and life. He was retired, he was free. But he was only nominally
free. He had only achieved freedom from labour. He knew that the system
he had escaped at last, persisted, and would consume his sons and his
grandchildren. He himself had more or less escaped back to the old form;
but as he came with me on to the hillside, looking down the high-road at
Lugano in the distance, he knew that his old order was collapsing by a
slow process of disintegration.
Why did he talk to me as if I had any hope, as if I represented any
positive truth as against this great negative truth that was advancing
up the hill-side. Again I was afraid. I hastened down the high-road,
past the houses, the grey, raw crystals of corruption.
I saw a girl with handsome bare legs, ankles shining like brass in the
sun. She was working in a field, on the edge of a vineyard. I stopped to
look at her, suddenly fascinated by her handsome naked flesh that shone
like brass.
Then she called out to me, in a jargon I could not understand, something
mocking and challenging. And her voice was raucous and challenging; I
went on, afraid.
In Lugano I stayed at a German hotel. I remember sitting on a seat in
the darkness by the lake, watching the stream of promenaders patrolling
the edge of the water, under the trees and the lamps. I can still see
many of their faces: English, German, Italian, French. And it seemed
here, here in this holiday-place, was the quick of the disintegration,
the dry-rot, in this dry, friable flux of people backwards and forwards
on the edge of the lake, men and women from the big hotels, in evening
dress, curiously sinister, and ordinary visitors, and tourists, and
workmen, youths, men of the town, laughing, jeering. It was curiously
and painfully sinister, almost obscene.
I sat a long time among them, thinking of the girl with her limbs of
glowing brass. Then at last I went up to the hotel, and sat in the
lounge looking at the papers. It was the same here as down below, though
not so intense, the feeling of horror.
So I went to bed. The hotel was on the edge of a steep declivity. I
wondered why the whole hills did not slide down, in some great natural
catastrophe.
In the morning I walked along the side of the Lake of Lugano, to where I
could take a steamer to ferry me down to the end. The lake is not
beautiful, only picturesque. I liked most to think of the Romans
coming to it.
So I steamed down to the lower end of the water. When I landed and went
along by a sort of railway I saw a group of men. Suddenly they began to
whoop and shout. They were hanging on to an immense pale bullock, which
was slung up to be shod; and it was lunging and kicking with terrible
energy. It was strange to see that mass of pale, soft-looking flesh
working with such violent frenzy, convulsed with violent, active frenzy,
whilst men and women hung on to it with ropes, hung on and weighed it
down. But again it scattered some of them in its terrible convulsion.
Human beings scattered into the road, the whole place was covered with
hot dung. And when the bullock began to lunge again, the men set up a
howl, half of triumph, half of derision.
I went on, not wanting to see. I went along a very dusty road. But it
was not so terrifying, this road. Perhaps it was older.
In dreary little Chiasso I drank coffee, and watched the come and go
through the Customs. The Swiss and the Italian Customs officials had
their offices within a few yards of each other, and everybody must stop.
I went in and showed my rucksack to the Italian, then I mounted a tram,
and went to the Lake of Como.
In the tram were dressed-up women, fashionable, but business-like. They
had come by train to Chiasso, or else had been shopping in the town.
When we came to the terminus a young miss, dismounting before me, left
behind her parasol. I had been conscious of my dusty, grimy appearance
as I sat in the tram, I knew they thought me a workman on the roads.
However, I forgot that when it was time to dismount.
'_Pardon, Mademoiselle_,' I said to the young miss. She turned and
withered me with a rather overdone contempt--'_bourgeoise_,' I said to
myself, as I looked at her--'_Vous avez laissé votre parasol_.'
She turned, and with a rapacious movement darted upon her parasol. How
her soul was in her possessions! I stood and watched her. Then she went
into the road and under the trees, haughty, a demoiselle. She had on
white kid boots.
I thought of the Lake of Como what I had thought of Lugano: it must have
been wonderful when the Romans came there. Now it is all villas. I think
only the sunrise is still wonderful, sometimes.
I took the steamer down to Como, and slept in a vast old stone cavern of
an inn, a remarkable place, with rather nice people. In the morning I
went out. The peace and the bygone beauty of the cathedral created the
glow of the great past. And in the market-place they were selling
chestnuts wholesale, great heaps of bright, brown chestnuts, and sacks
of chestnuts, and peasants very eager selling and buying. I thought of
Como, it must have been wonderful even a hundred years ago. Now it is
cosmopolitan, the cathedral is like a relic, a museum object, everywhere
stinks of mechanical money-pleasure. I dared not risk walking to Milan:
I took a train. And there, in Milan, sitting in the Cathedral Square, on
Saturday afternoon, drinking Bitter Campari and watching the swarm of
Italian city-men drink and talk vivaciously, I saw that here the life
was still vivid, here the process of disintegration was vigorous, and
centred in a multiplicity of mechanical activities that engage the human
mind as well as the body. But always there was the same purpose stinking
in it all, the mechanizing, the perfect mechanizing of human life.