Lieutenant Bloch looked at her with sorrowful and hungry eyes. The blush had faded from his cheeks, he was pale as a plank of wood by now, and his short hair was the colour of a sponge. He sighed, and his lips began to whisper. He sighed again and in a soft voice recited:
Nun muss ich gar
Um dein aug und haar
Alle tage
In sehnen leben.
‘How charming of you,’ said the Marchesa.
‘So you’re a poet, are you?’ asked Fest.
‘That is not my own composition,’ said Lieutenant Bloch, ‘but nevertheless I am a poet. We Germans – are we not all poets?’
‘Poets and policemen,’ said Fest. ‘My poor Bloch!’
The Lieutenant flushed again and said angrily, ‘I have been doing my duty. I am not ashamed of it!’
One after another his policemen returned. ‘Well?’ he asked.
‘There’s no one else here, sir, except the servants.’
‘So now you can go with a clear conscience,’ said Fest.
The Lieutenant hesitated, but then said stubbornly, ‘You must inform me who you are.’
‘So that your ratcatchers can tell everyone where I pay my calls? I don’t think so, Bloch.’
‘I shall have to make my report. I cannot say there was no one here.’
Fest rubbed his chin and for a moment or two was thoughtful. Then in a friendlier voice he said, ‘I am thinking of more than my own reputation. I wonder if I – if we – can rely on your discretion?’
‘I am by birth a gentleman, sir!’
‘A poet, a gentleman, and a policeman! – No, do not be angry, my dear Bloch, I am only making a little joke, as one does between friends. Well, come here.’
He bent and whispered closely in the Lieutenant’s ear. Bloch retreated a step and gravely bowed. He ordered his policemen to go. Then, with a sudden fluency, he made an elaborate apology for his intrusion. The Marchesa gave him her hand to kiss and he bent profoundly. He found his cap, but held it under his arm and was clearly reluctant to leave. Fest took him by the arm and led him downstairs. He stood and watched him go. Then he moved a carved chest to hold the broken outer door in place, and returned to the drawing-room.
The Marchesa had lifted a couple of the cushions and was looking at the Count with some anxiety. His face was darkly coloured and he was breathing very slowly and laboriously. His eyes were half-closed. Fest raised him to a sitting position and gave him a glass of brandy.
The Count laid his hand upon the Marchesa’s and said wearily, ‘I was sure that you had been putting on weight, my dear.’
‘I am thinner than I have been for several years,’ said the Marchesa, and slid on her saut-de-lit. Then she rang a little silver bell. ‘Let us have an early breakfast,’ she said.
‘That will suit me very well,’ said Fest, ‘for I should like to stay here for an hour or two in case they are watching the house. – The Count, I suggest, should leave Rome as soon as possible. You also, for a little while at least.’
‘There is a small house belonging to Agesilas in Montenero. It is easy to reach, we might go there.’
A few minutes later she asked, ‘Did you tell the policeman your true name?’
‘That would not have been helpful.’
‘Then whose did you give?’
‘You must realize that these people are quite ignorant,’ said Fest, ‘and it is easy to deceive them. I invented a very simple name, but gave myself a good address. I told him that I was their Military Attaché at the Vatican.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS NIGHT, it was raining, and Angelo was drunk. The wind blew coldly, and he was alone on the mountainside.
In his mind, like a bird in a wood before morning, a voice was crying, ‘Free, free, I’m totally free!’ But he was extremely frightened, and the voice increased his fear. If the gods should hear it, swaggering like a blackbird, they might take him by the heels and haul him into captivity again. He tried to silence the voice, but it would not be quiet. Sometimes it was more like a meadow-rill chuckling deeply through summer grass: ‘Happy Angelo, lucky Angelo.’
Below him in the darkness a pebbly torrent fell with a hiss and a rumble into a granite linn. The mountainside was patched with pale shapes of snow, and sagging from the southern sky hung a black and monstrous cloud. He stumbled and slipped on the rutted path, his feet gathered great overshoes of mud, and he felt upon his legs the coldness of his sodden clothes. ‘Free, free!’ sang the wilful voice, and he looked dreadfully over his shoulder to see if he were followed. There was a German army behind him.
For ten weeks he had served it, and for much of that time his body had felt like a scoured egg-shell. There was no substance in it. Fear had emptied it with a spoon whenever a shell burst near him, and the last month had shed all its withered days under shell-fire. He had seen five of his fellow privates killed, and for ten days he had been lousy. He tripped again. The sole was coming off his right boot, and tears ran down his rain-wet face to contemplate such gross injustice. The blackbird voice no longer sang, and he remembered his friend Giuseppe who, an hour ago, had also been drunk and free. But Giuseppe had been unlucky in the minefield. They had not known about the mines until Giuseppe set his foot on one.
It was Giuseppe who had found the bottle of grappa that gave them both the courage to escape. They had been rebuilding a bomb-ruined bridge not far behind the front line, and Giuseppe had discovered the bottle in a cupboard that had survived the shattered walls of a nearby cottage. When dusk descended they had privily returned to the cottage, and their company had been assembled and marched away without them.
They resolved to take their chance of deserting, and Angelo with dutch courage went out to reconnoitre. Sixty yards away, beside another shell-torn house, he heard German voices and lay discreetly behind a tumbled wall to listen. A German officer was talking to a friend who had newly returned from leave with two bottles of Spanish brandy in his haversack. They had to visit their forward positions, and then they proposed to spend a pleasant evening. The Fundador, they decided, could be left safely under their blankets.
Angelo waited until they had gone. Then, without difficulty, he found the haversack and took it back to Giuseppe, who promptly knocked the neck off one of the bottles, took a good draught, and handed it to Angelo.
Never in their lives had they tasted such brandy. It mingled with the strong grappa in their blood, and made the business of escaping seem an easy jest. They felt no need to make a plan, no need for caution. They would simply walk out. Giuseppe corked the broken bottle with a rag, and Angelo put the other in his pocket.
The rain fell in black cascades. Before they had gone a dozen yards they lost each other in the darkness, thought it comical that this should happen, and shouted till they met again. Then they fell into a panic to think that someone might have heard them, and hand-in-hand began to run.
They were lucky. They knew the way by daylight, and unthinking memory guided them. They knew where there was a thicket of barbed wire, for they had helped to lay it. The rain fell harshly from a viewless sky, and no one challenged them.
Then Giuseppe complained of a stitch, and lagged behind. Angelo forgot him and went on. When the mine exploded he threw himself flat on the mud and lay there while machine-guns hammered nervously behind and strong lights, bursting in the sky, made visible like rods of brilliant wire the slanting rain. The firing did not last long, and presently he got up and began to run again. A sensation of relief, as though he had vomited and were rid of a load of sickness, was all he felt at first, but soon it became a bubbling happiness that he could not repress, and the blackbird voice began to sing and he could not quieten it.
But now, remembering Giuseppe, he cried most bitterly for the death of his friend and for the loneliness in which it left him. He sat on a rock and tried to repair his torn boot, but a sudden consciousness of guilt swept over him like a curving wave, and left him shuddering.
He was to
blame for Giuseppe’s death. It was he, Angelo, who had first whispered of desertion, and how shameful that now appeared! The Germans had fed him and clothed him and trusted him, and he had deserted them. He had already deserted his own army, the men with whom he had lived and the officers to whom he owed obedience: he had taken to his heels at Reggio and never seen them again. He was twice a deserter, he had broken faith with both sides.
He felt the cold eyes of the world upon him, and he could not escape their scorn. Now, thought Angelo, my poverty is immeasurably increased, since I, who never had much to live on, have now got nothing to live for. No one will ever trust me again, or want my company, and what is life worth without friends, a little respect, and a little liking?
He sat for a long time spellbound in grief. It was only to break the spell that at last he got up and with fumbling steps continued his journey. ‘I have nothing to live on,’ he said aloud, ‘because I have rejected the bread of both sides. I have nothing to live for, because both sides despise me. I am a man only because I suffer.’
His loose sole caught in a root, and falling heavily he struck his knee against a sharp rock. Physical pain expelled his moral agony, and he remembered the Spanish lenitive he carried. He sat in the mud, rocking to and fro, and with a knife dug out the cork. He tilted the bottle to his lips, and after swallowing three or four times felt the pain diminish to a fiery patch. Tenderly, tentatively, he began to rub the injured bone.
‘My poor little knee-cap!’ he groaned. ‘Oh, what a blow it was! Oh, how sore it is! Oh, my misery, miserable me!’
Little knee-cap! he thought, and with cold fingers explored its smooth round edge. It was like a pebble on a beach, a white pebble polished for a thousand years by that old craftsman the Sea. By the monstrous hands of the Sea. The Sea had carved for his own delight the Sporades and Cyclades, and drawn with a whimsical finger fantastic bays between the feet of soaring mountains, and polished in his idle hours a million multitudes of smooth white pebbles to scatter on his beaches. The gods were cruel, but God, what artists! And here, beneath his bruised and dirty skin, lay like an ocean-jewel his own dear knee-cap on a throne of ivory clothed with satin. He had seen a knee-joint stripped for inspection by a shell-splinter, and he remembered how beautiful were its smooth surfaces. Like an archaeologist in the Sila discovering a temple to Diana, a piece of metal had revealed the architecture of a soldier, and Angelo had stood amazed.
‘But now, my little knee-cap,’ he announced, ‘I realize that I also am a masterpiece, for lovely though you are, cara rotellina, you are not the only marvel in my territory. I have, for instance, a pair of kidneys that perform the most remarkable tasks, and other glands that contain a family-tree which Adam planted. As a telephone system my nerves are astonishingly good, and they also carry power to my remotest parts, with the most gratifying efficiency. I have, moreover, a brain that in time of drought can always turn on the tap for tears, and in better seasons will instruct my tongue to utter the most intricate and delightful thoughts. My tongue is a highly skilled performer, and obeys upon the instant. Listen to him now: he’s doing very well, isn’t he? Oh, my dear rotella, I am a truly remarkable person, I do assure you. And also – note this! – I am free! And do you know what freedom means? It means that some day we shall go home to Pontefiore and be re-united with my adored Lucrezia.
‘There will be many nights like this in the years to come, but you and I won’t be out in them. Not a bit of it. We’ll be snug indoors, and we’ll listen for a minute or two to the wind howling and the rain beating on the window, and then we’ll think how blessed we are to have a roof above us: and I shall turn and tuck the sheet round Lucrezia. What bliss awaits us, my rotelleta! To turn our back upon the darkness and the cold, and tuck a sheet round Lucrezia!’
He drank a little more brandy, put the bottle in his pocket, and got to his feet again. His colloquy with his knee-cap had greatly comforted him, and he went on his way, somewhat unsteadily, but with fresh resolution. He had a very vague and slender notion of where he was, but after some time it occurred to him that if he had been walking in a straight line he must now be very near, if not within, the Allies’ outpost line. He perceived that he was walking on a road again. It would be a good thing, he thought, to warn the Allies of his approach. So he began to shout.
‘Hallo, Englishmen! Hullo, Englishmen!’ he shouted. ‘Please do not shoot me, because I am a friend. Do not shoot me, I am a friend.’
He was answered almost immediately. From somewhere in the darkness a voice called, ‘Then stop making that disgusting noise, and come and help me.’
Angelo, surprised, looked left and right but could see no one. The swollen black cloud had passed, and in the southern sky were the grey embers of dead stars. Above him was a pale hillside, a snowfield roughly combed by the rain, and below him the ground fell steeply and was dark.
‘Hurry up!’ said the voice.
‘Where are you? I cannot see you,’ said Angelo nervously.
‘Don’t argue. Come and get me out of this hole.’
Angelo went slowly forward. The road curved to the left, and was built like a terrace on the slope of a hill. Twenty yards on, to the right of the road and below him, Angelo discerned four wheels, and beneath them a motor-car of some small kind.
‘How much longer are you going to keep me waiting?’ demanded the voice. ‘Don’t stand up there admiring the view, come down and get busy.’
Angelo scrambled down, and lying beside the overturned jeep peered into the hole beneath. It had fallen like a lid over a small trench, that might sometime have been a machine-gun position, and in the cavity sat a figure whose pale face was now very close to Angelo’s. ‘See if you can lift it,’ the prisoner suggested.
Angelo, with great willingness but no effect, did his best. First from the one side and then from the other he heaved and he strained, but his feet slipped in the mud, his strength was insufficient, and when he stood to get his breath he felt his arms trembling with exhaustion. ‘I am not powerful enough,’ he confessed.
There was a little pause, and then the voice said, ‘Well, if you can’t, that’s all there is to it, I suppose. It’s not your fault.’
Angelo sat down where he could converse more easily. ‘I am truly sorry,’ he said.
‘Who are you?’ asked the voice.
‘I am a deserter,’ said Angelo with some flavour of pride in his words.
‘From us or from them?’
‘From the Tedeschi, of course!’
‘Where did you learn to speak English?’
‘At school in Siena.’
‘You were educated, were you? With education a man can go anywhere. Look where it’s taken me.’
‘Are you wounded?’ asked Angelo respectfully.
‘I have a cut on the head, a fractured collar-bone, and a twisted ankle. If it hadn’t been for this hole in the ground, into which I fell like a well-played red loser, I would also have a broken back. So I don’t complain about my injuries, which are trivial. It’s the cold that’s worrying me. I’m freezing from the feet up, I’m sitting on a stone that was deposited here in the Ice Age, and I shall probably be dead before morning.’
‘I have a bottle of very good brandy,’ said Angelo. ‘If it would comfort you –’
‘Brandy!’ exclaimed the voice. ‘Are you St Bernard himself?’
‘My name is Angelo,’ said Angelo, and passed the bottle to the man in the hole.
Half a minute later his voice had become warm and friendly. ‘Spanish brandy!’ it said. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to live for a hundred years. Where did you get it?’
‘It formerly belonged to a German officer. I acquired it by good fortune.’
‘My honest co-belligerent! I drink to you with enthusiasm.’
Angelo was deeply touched. ‘Thank you very much. That is most kind of you,’ he said. ‘May I ask to whom I have the honour of talking?’
‘My name’s Telfer.’
‘An officer?’
‘A substantive lieutenant, a temporary captain, and an acting major: three in one, divisible yet not divided. It’s a trinity of officers that you have rescued, my dear St Bernard.’
‘My name is Angelo,’ Angelo repeated.
‘Then you were well christened. Take a drink from your own bottle, and tell me how it all happened.’
Encouraged by the brandy, Angelo told his story at considerable length, and when at last he had finished he was disconcerted by Major Telfer’s silence. He waited and repeated his concluding sentences; and still there was no comment, no reply. Nervously he thought that Telfer might have fainted, and reaching into the hole he grasped him by the shoulder and gently, then more forcibly, shook him.
Telfer was sleeping soundly, but Angelo succeeded in waking him. He apologized very handsomely for falling into a doze during what must have been a most interesting story.
A few minutes later he said, ‘I’m feeling sleepy again, and I don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t believe it would be a good thing in the circumstances. What can you do to keep me awake?’
‘Shall I talk to you about my early life?’
‘No, don’t do that.’
‘Would you like me to sing?’
‘That will depend on your voice. I don’t want to be soothed.’
‘I sing rather loudly,’ said Angelo, ‘and I have a good memory. Do you like Verdi?’
‘Very much,’ said Telfer.
‘I also.’ And after a little thought Angelo sang the duet of Manrico and Azucena from Il Trovatore; which inappropriately began, ‘Riposa, Ο madre.’ Then, more suitably, he doubled the Conte di Luna and Manrico: ‘Tace la notte,’ observed the Count; ‘Deserto sulla terra,’ replied the other.
Private Angelo Page 8