It was the view which finally made us take the place. True, the
house had its disadvantages. It was a long way out of town and had
no telephone. The rent was unduly high, the drainage system poor. On
windy nights, when the ill-fitting panes were rattling so furiously in
the window-frames that you could fancy yourself in an hotel omnibus,
the electric light, for some mysterious reason, used invariably to go
out and leave you in the noisy dark. There was a splendid bathroom;
but the electric pump, which was supposed to send up water from the
rain-water tanks in the terrace, did not work. Punctually every autumn
the drinking well ran dry. And our landlady was a liar and a cheat.
But these are the little disadvantages of every hired house, all
over the world. For Italy they were not really at all serious. I
have seen plenty of houses which had them all and a hundred others,
without possessing the compensating advantages of ours--the southward
facing garden and terrace for the winter and spring, the large cool
rooms against the midsummer heat, the hilltop air and freedom from
mosquitoes, and finally the view.
And what a view it was! Or rather, what a succession of views. For
it was different every day; and without stirring from the house one
had the impression of an incessant change of scene: all the delights
of travel without its fatigues. There were autumn days when all the
valleys were filled with mist and the crests of the Apennines rose
darkly out of a flat white lake. There were days when the mist invaded
even our hilltop and we were enveloped in a soft vapour in which the
mist-coloured olive trees, that sloped away below our windows towards
the valley, disappeared as though into their own spiritual essence; and
the only firm and definite things in the small, dim world within which
we found ourselves confined were the two tall black cypresses growing
on a little projecting terrace a hundred feet down the hill. Black,
sharp, and solid, they stood there, twin pillars of Hercules at the
extremity of the known universe; and beyond them there was only pale
cloud and round them only the cloudy olive trees.
These were the wintry days; but there were days of spring and autumn,
days unchangingly cloudless, or--more lovely still--made various by
the huge floating shapes of vapour that, snowy above the far-away
snow-capped mountains, gradually unfolded, against the pale bright
blue, enormous heroic gestures. And in the height of the sky the
bellying draperies, the swans, the aerial marbles, hewed and left
unfinished by gods grown tired of creation almost before they had
begun, drifted sleeping along the wind, changing form as they moved.
And the sun would come and go behind them; and now the town in the
valley would fade and almost vanish in the shadow, and now, like an
immense fretted jewel between the hills, it would glow as though by its
own light. And looking across the nearer tributary valley that wound
from below our crest down towards the Arno, looking over the low dark
shoulder of hill on whose extreme promontory stood the towered church
of San Miniato, one saw the huge dome airily hanging on its ribs of
masonry, the square campanile, the sharp spire of Santa Croce, and
the canopied tower of the Signoria, rising above the intricate maze
of houses, distinct and brilliant, like small treasures carved out of
precious stones. For a moment only, and then their light would fade
away once more, and the travelling beam would pick out, among the
indigo hills beyond, a single golden crest.
There were days when the air was wet with passed or with approaching
rain, and all the distances seemed miraculously near and clear. The
olive trees detached themselves one from another on the distant slopes;
the far-away villages were lovely and pathetic like the most exquisite
small toys. There were days in summer-time, days of impending thunder
when, bright and sunlit against huge bellying masses of black and
purple, the hills and the white houses shone as it were precariously,
in a dying splendour, on the brink of some fearful calamity.
How the hills changed and varied! Every day and every hour of the
day, almost, they were different. There would be moments when,
looking across the plain of Florence, one would see only a dark blue
silhouette against the sky. The scene had no depth; there was only
a hanging curtain painted flatly with the symbols of mountains. And
then, suddenly almost, with the passing of a cloud, or when the sun
had declined to a certain level in the sky, the flat scene transformed
itself; and where there had been only a painted curtain, now there were
ranges behind ranges of hills, graduated tone after tone from brown, or
grey, or a green gold to far-away blue. Shapes that a moment before had
been fused together indiscriminately into a single mass, now came apart
into their constituents. Fiesole, which had seemed only a spur of Monte
Morello, now revealed itself as the jutting headland of another system
of hills, divided from the nearest bastions of its greater neighbour by
a deep and shadowy valley.
At noon, during the heats of summer, the landscape became dim,
powdery, vague, and almost colourless under the midday sun; the hills
disappeared into the trembling fringes of the sky. But as the afternoon
wore on the landscape emerged again, it dropped its anonymity, it
climbed back out of nothingness into form and life. And its life,
as the sun sank and slowly sank through the long afternoon, grew
richer, grew more intense with every moment. The level light, with its
attendant long, dark shadows, laid bare, so to speak, the anatomy of
the land; the hills--each western escarpment shining, and each slope
averted from the sunlight profoundly shadowed--became massive, jutty,
and solid. Little folds and dimples in the seemingly even ground
revealed themselves. Eastward from our hilltop, across the plain of the
Ema, a great bluff cast its ever-increasing shadow; in the surrounding
brightness of the valley a whole town lay eclipsed within it. And as
the sun expired on the horizon, the further hills flushed in its warm
light, till their illumined flanks were the colour of tawny roses; but
the valleys were already filled with the blue mist of evening. And
it mounted, mounted; the fire went out of the western windows of the
populous slopes; only the crests were still alight, and at last they
too were all extinct. The mountains faded and fused together again into
a flat painting of mountains against the pale evening sky. In a little
while it was night; and if the moon were full, a ghost of the dead
scene still haunted the horizons.
Changeful in its beauty, this wide landscape always preserved a
quality of humanness and domestication which made it, to my mind at
any rate, the best of all landscapes to live with. Day by day one
travelled through its different beauties; but the journey, like our
ancestors’ Grand Tour, was always a journey through civilisation.
For all its mountains, its steep slopes and deep valleys, the Tuscan
scene is dominated by its inhabitants. They have cultivated every rood
of ground that can be cultivated; their houses are thickly scattered
even over the hills, and the valleys are populous. Solitary on the
hilltop, one is not alone in a wilderness. Man’s traces are across the
country, and already--one feels it with satisfaction as one looks out
across it--for centuries, for thousands of years, it has been his,
submissive, tamed, and humanised. The wide, blank moorlands, the sands,
the forests of innumerable trees--these are places for occasional
visitation, healthful to the spirit which submits itself to them for
not too long. But fiendish influences as well as divine haunt these
total solitudes. The vegetative life of plants and things is alien and
hostile to the human. Men cannot live at ease except where they have
mastered their surroundings and where their accumulated lives outnumber
and outweigh the vegetative lives about them. Stripped of its dark
woods, planted, terraced, and tilled almost to the mountains’ tops,
the Tuscan landscape is humanised and safe. Sometimes upon those who
live in the midst of it there comes a longing for some place that is
solitary, inhuman, lifeless, or peopled only with alien life. But the
longing is soon satisfied, and one is glad to return to the civilised
and submissive scene.
I found that house on the hilltop the ideal dwelling-place. For there,
safe in the midst of a humanised landscape, one was yet alone; one
could be as solitary as one liked. Neighbours whom one never sees at
close quarters are the ideal and perfect neighbours.
Our nearest neighbours, in terms of physical proximity, lived very
near. We had two sets of them, as a matter of fact, almost in the same
house with us. One was the peasant family, who lived in a long, low
building, part dwelling-house, part stables, storerooms and cowsheds,
adjoining the villa. Our other neighbours--intermittent neighbours,
however, for they only ventured out of town every now and then, during
the most flawless weather--were the owners of the villa, who had
reserved for themselves the smaller wing of the huge L-shaped house--a
mere dozen rooms or so--leaving the remaining eighteen or twenty to us.
They were a curious couple, our proprietors. An old husband, grey,
listless, tottering, seventy at least; and a signora of about forty,
short, very plump, with tiny fat hands and feet and a pair of very
large, very dark black eyes, which she used with all the skill of a
born comedian. Her vitality, if you could have harnessed it and made
it do some useful work, would have supplied a whole town with electric
light. The physicists talk of deriving energy from the atom; they
would be more profitably employed nearer home--in discovering some
way of tapping those enormous stores of vital energy which accumulate
in unemployed women of sanguine temperament and which, in the present
imperfect state of social and scientific organisation, vent themselves
in ways that are generally so deplorable: in interfering with other
people’s affairs, in working up emotional scenes, in thinking about
love and making it, and in bothering men till they cannot get on with
their work.
Signora Bondi got rid of her superfluous energy, among other ways, by
“doing in” her tenants. The old gentleman, who was a retired merchant
with a reputation for the most perfect rectitude, was allowed to have
no dealings with us. When we came to see the house, it was the wife
who showed us round. It was she who, with a lavish display of charm,
with irresistible rollings of the eyes, expatiated on the merits
of the place, sang the praises of the electric pump, glorified the
bathroom (considering which, she insisted, the rent was remarkably
moderate), and when we suggested calling in a surveyor to look over
the house, earnestly begged us, as though our well-being were her only
consideration, not to waste our money unnecessarily in doing anything
so superfluous. “After all,” she said, “we are honest people. I
wouldn’t dream of letting you the house except in perfect condition.
Have confidence.” And she looked at me with an appealing, pained
expression in her magnificent eyes, as though begging me not to insult
her by my coarse suspiciousness. And leaving us no time to pursue the
subject of surveyors any further, she began assuring us that our little
boy was the most beautiful angel she had ever seen. By the time our
interview with Signora Bondi was at an end, we had definitely decided
to take the house.
“Charming woman,” I said, as we left the house. But I think that
Elizabeth was not quite so certain of it as I.
Then the pump episode began.
On the evening of our arrival in the house we switched on the
electricity. The pump made a very professional whirring noise; but no
water came out of the taps in the bathroom. We looked at one another
doubtfully.
“Charming woman?” Elizabeth raised her eyebrows.
We asked for interviews; but somehow the old gentleman could never see
us, and the Signora was invariably out or indisposed. We left notes;
they were never answered. In the end, we found that the only method
of communicating with our landlords, who were living in the same house
with us, was to go down into Florence and send a registered express
letter to them. For this they had to sign two separate receipts and
even, if we chose to pay forty centimes more, a third incriminating
document, which was then returned to us. There could be no pretending,
as there always was with ordinary letters or notes, that the
communication had never been received. We began at last to get answers
to our complaints. The Signora, who wrote all the letters, started by
telling us that, naturally, the pump didn’t work, as the cisterns were
empty, owing to the long drought. I had to walk three miles to the post
office in order to register my letter reminding her that there had been
a violent thunderstorm only last Wednesday, and that the tanks were
consequently more than half full. The answer came back: bath water had
not been guaranteed in the contract; and if I wanted it, why hadn’t I
had the pump looked at before I took the house? Another walk into town
to ask the Signora next door whether she remembered her adjurations
to us to have confidence in her, and to inform her that the existence
in a house of a bathroom was in itself an implicit guarantee of bath
water. The reply to that was that the Signora couldn’t continue to have
communications with people who wrote so rudely to her. After that I put
the matter into the hands of a lawyer. Two months later the pump was
actually replaced. But we had to serve a writ on the lady before she
gave in. And the costs were considerable.
One day, towards the end of the episode, I met the old gentleman in the
road, taking his big maremman dog for a walk--or being taken, rather,
for a walk by the dog. For where the dog pulled the old gentleman
had perforce to follow. And when it stopped to smell, or scratch the
ground, or leave against a gatepost its visiting-card or an offensive
challenge, patiently, at his end of the leash, the old man had to wait.
I passed him standing at the side of the road, a few hundred yards
below our house. The dog was sniffing at the roots of one of the twin
cypresses which grew one on either side of the entry to a farm; I heard
the beast growling indignantly to itself, as though it scented an
intolerable insult. Old Signor Bondi, leashed to his dog, was waiting.
The knees inside the tubular grey trousers were slightly bent. Leaning
on his cane, he stood gazing mournfully and vacantly at the view. The
whites of his old eyes were discoloured, like ancient billiard balls.
In the grey, deeply wrinkled face, his nose was dyspeptically red.
His white moustache, ragged and yellowing at the fringes, drooped in
a melancholy curve. In his black tie he wore a very large diamond;
perhaps that was what Signora Bondi had found so attractive about him.
I took off my hat as I approached. The old man stared at me absently,
and it was only when I was already almost past him that he recollected
who I was.
“Wait,” he called after me, “wait!” And he hastened down the road in
pursuit. Taken utterly by surprise and at a disadvantage--for it was
engaged in retorting to the affront imprinted on the cypress roots--the
dog permitted itself to be jerked after him. Too much astonished to be
anything but obedient, it followed its master. “Wait!”