‘It is, in any case, too late to make other arrangements for them,’ said the Countess, ‘and so they must trust in Providence. I should be happier if they were in a cave, but as that is impossible Providence will have to take the responsibility.’
The steward and the housekeeper agreed, and presently the Countess went to bed and slept as well as could be expected. The next day passed quietly, but on the morning after, as the Countess in her summer drawing-room was busy with her household accounts, she heard an unfamiliar voice, and going to the window saw a German soldier climbing over the garden wall. He was followed by two others, and then the three of them, who all carried ungainly automatic pistols and had bombs hung at their belts, stood in a group and were manifestly uncertain what to do next. The Countess was also in a state of strong incertitude, and until she could make up her mind remained in tactful concealment behind a curtain. The soldiers in the garden continued to argue, and the Countess felt her heart beating with, as it were, a disagreeable importunity. Then she heard other voices, the crash of breaking glass, and the housekeeper came in, agitated in voice and manner, to tell her that three German officers were in the hall, who demanded to see the owner of the house at once.
The senior of the three, a Captain Schlemmer, was in appearance by far the most interesting. Of medium size, of good and powerful build, the cast of his features was so handsome as to suggest the emulous work of a new Praxiteles; but some equally strong agent had ruined the tone of his facial muscles and the texture of his skin so that his beauty, though he was still young, showed itself only in the decay of what had been. An extreme, a fervent debauchery might conceivably have been the cause, but the Countess, who in her old-fashioned way had been brought up to believe not only in Good but in Evil, was convinced as soon as she saw him that he had sold his soul to the Devil. She regarded him in consequence with horror, but also with a respect that his companions failed to inspire. Lieutenant Peiss was a short strong man, dark of eye and chin, in no way remarkable; and Lieutenant Hofmeister was a tall youth with a foolish expression, a loose mouth, and flaxen hair that had not recently been cut. All three wore the blue overalls of a Parachute Regiment.
‘You are the proprietor?’ asked Schlemmer in easy Italian. ‘Good! We have taken over your house, and you will do what I tell you. I want for myself a large room with a comfortable bed and a good view. Where is one that would please me?’
‘My housekeeper will show you the way,’ said the Countess.
‘You will show me the way,’ said Schlemmer.
‘I can do it no better than she,’ said the Countess, but led him upstairs.
All three officers followed her and in silence looked into several rooms as she, silent also, opened their doors. Then Schlemmer said, ‘These do not satisfy me. Where is your own room?’
The Countess, who realized that her only policy was acquiescence, turned back across the upper hall that was flanked by the broad stone balustrade of the main staircase.
‘A minute, please,’ said Schlemmer, and stopped to examine one of a pair of large black and red Etruscan vases that stood upon the balustrade. ‘A poor barbaric design,’ he said. ‘I do not like it at all.’ And with a dismissive gesture he pushed it away. It fell with a loud crash into the hall below.
‘You are quite right,’ said the Countess calmly. ‘They are just a bad imitation of the real thing, made for tourists only, and so I told my husband when he bought them.’
‘That is a lie!’ cried Schlemmer angrily. ‘Do you think that I could be deceived by any modern fraud? I who have always been a lover of the arts? They are genuine Etruscan pottery, I tell you. Push the other one over, Hofmeister.’
Hofmeister with a snigger obeyed, and there was a second crash. ‘I told my husband he was wasting money on them,’ observed the Countess.
‘You speak a very curious Italian,’ said Schlemmer. ‘Where do you come from?’
‘I was born in Yorkshire.’
‘In England? Oh no, it is too good to be true! We have an Englishwoman for our hostess, gentlemen. A lady, I beg her pardon. And so we shall be well looked after, for now I shall certainly insist upon that. Show me your room!’
He walked round it, lifted a few toilet articles, glanced out of the window, and said, ‘It is not bad. I may use it, or if not Lieutenant Peiss can sleep here. What sort of rooms are over there?’
‘Quite small,’ said the Countess. ‘That is the old part of the castle.’
Schlemmer was turning away when Hofmeister, at the entrance to a narrow corridor, exclaimed, ‘This door is locked.’
‘Open it,’ said Schlemmer.
‘It leads to some rooms that are never used,’ said the Countess.
‘Open the door,’ said Schlemmer.
The Countess returned to her bedroom for the key, and when the door was opened a room hardly bigger than a closet was discovered. But beyond it was a larger chamber, and on one of its walls hung the Adoration of the Shepherds by Piero della Francesca. Schlemmer went close to examine it.
‘That is genuine,’ said the Countess.
‘That is unlikely,’ said Schlemmer. ‘It is well done, but I am not inclined to think it is an original.’
‘It was painted by Piero della Francesca.’
‘Or by a skilful copyist. – Has the bed been aired?’
‘Not for a long time.’
‘Then have the sheets changed before night. I shall sleep here. Hofmeister and Peiss, you can go and choose rooms for yourselves. I recommend the Countess’s for one of you. No, Countess, do not go. I want to order breakfast first.’
‘It’s long past breakfast-time,’ said the Countess.
‘It is breakfast-time when I want breakfast,’ said Schlemmer, and throwing himself on the bed he dug his dusty heels into its blue silk covering, and doubled the pillows under his left arm for greater comfort. ‘Since you are English’, he said, ‘it will give you pleasure, of course, to serve me with an English breakfast. You have bacon? And eggs? That is good. I shall have three or four slices, well fried, and three or four boiled eggs. Some toasted bread and cherry jam. All that is very English, is it not? But I do not want your English tea. Bring me instead a bottle of your best white wine, and a bottle of brandy. But not Italian brandy, which I do not like. In a house such as this you must have plenty of cognac. And send a girl to take off my boots.’
He lay alone, staring at the picture of the Adoration. It was, he admitted, a masterly piece of work. The quality of the paint was right. There was none of that fulsomeness with which a copyist, striving to do his subject justice, so often betrays himself; but all the tones had the gentleness of old colour that has lost its ostentation to the centuries. The gentleness of an aged champagne found in a forgotten bin that has outlived its effervescence. The gentleness of dawn and sunset in the older countries of the world where civilization has long since given docility and form to the reflecting earth. Yes, it was good. But the Englishwoman had said it was genuine, and she of course was lying. She was lying to deceive him for some purpose of her own; and therefore the picture was no better than a copy could be.
His breakfast came. He ate quickly, drank half the bottle of wine, and filled a claret glass with brandy.
It could be an old copy, even a contemporary copy. But the drawing of the mother’s head had the firmness that suggests the originality of genius. Something is made, by genius, and nothing before it was ever quite the same, and nothing after will be. The novelty of genius is so strong that straightway it seems inevitable, it could have been done no other way; but it cannot be done again. If the Englishwoman had not said it was by Piero della Francesca it would have given him great pleasure to recognize the master’s work. But she, there was no reason to doubt it, had been lying. Why should she tell the truth to him, her enemy? He finished his glass of brandy, and went out.
Under the supervision of Peiss and Hofmeister his company – it was much depleted – was hard at work. Preparations were being made for t
he demolition of the bridge, and packages of a red explosive lay on an abutment wall. ‘We’ve got none too much,’ said Peiss. ‘This old masonry was built to last.’
‘Make a proper job of it,’ said Schlemmer.
Some of the houses at the far end of the village offered a wide field of fire, and German soldiers were reinforcing the ceilings of their outer rooms with timber. Schlemmer walked away from the village, down a slope that would be hidden from the approaching enemy, and chose positions for his mortars. He returned to the castle, sent for the Countess, and said to her, ‘There is no one in the village but old men and women, and small children. Where are the young people hiding?’
‘There are no young people here,’ she said. ‘They have all been taken for work of some kind or another.’
‘By us?’
‘By you or the Republicans.’
‘Is that true?’
‘If I swore it was true a hundred times you wouldn’t believe me.’
Schlemmer stared at her for a few seconds without speaking, then turned abruptly and went back to his men. He gave orders that no one was to leave the village, but all its inhabitants must stay indoors, and continued his direction of the preparations for defence till it began to grow dark.
At dinner he was taciturn, and Hofmeister and Peiss, following his example, also ate silently. But despite the lack of conversation the meal was slow and deliberate, for Schlemmer from time to time would push away his plate, and leaning on his forearms stare unspeaking into a web of thought. They drank between them five bottles of red wine and half a bottle of brandy. ‘The same cognac as you gave me for breakfast,’ Schlemmer had ordered.
Then, rousing himself, he repeated with clarity and exactitude his instructions for battle, if the battle should come before morning, and saying good night, went to his room in the old part of the castle.
The electric light was still working, and because the shutters had been closed for several hours the air was stuffy. He undressed, poured himself another glass of brandy, and sat gazing at Piero’s Adoration. ‘If it is genuine it is good in the highest degree,’ he muttered. ‘But if it is a copy, it cannot be so good. I should know which it is, but I do not know. Why do I not know? Why cannot I say with certainty This is good , or This is not so good ?’
The difficulty of answering this question induced a little self-pity, and he thought querulously of the Countess. ‘It is her fault,’ he said to himself. ‘If she had not told me a lie, I should know what to think. They tell lies too cleverly, the English. They have no scruples, they are unfair.’
Quietly, and without pain, he began to cry, and remembered how in his childhood he had often wakened crying at night. But in spite of that he had been happy as a boy, and now his early years seemed all to have been lived in sunlight or among green trees. There were gleams of yellow and gold in his memory, of oranges and honey and the dining-room curtains on a morning of summer wind. He thought of his mother’s large white arms, and his father’s stubble hair. His father had been a professor at Freiburg, and he one of five children. He remembered the ridiculous family procession to church, every week, all in stiff clothes, and his father’s cigar on the homeward walk. One Sunday there had been a strange preacher, a distinguished visitor to the university, who had slowly climbed the pulpit stair and before beginning his sermon had stood, for a long time as it seemed, looking from one to another of his congregation. Then quietly, as if disclosing a secret, he had said, ‘ Seid stille, und erkennt, dass ich Gott bin .’ ‘Be still,’ the strange pastor had repeated, ‘and know that I am God.’ Believing the words to be a statement of fact, he, still a child, had been badly frightened.
When he grew up he had quarrelled with his father, and later his father had been imprisoned because he held dangerous political views, and called himself a Liberal. His father had been a talkative man, given to expounding with great energy his views on every subject conceivable to man, but readily silenced by his wife’s voice. ‘Now Heinrich,’ she would say, ‘you are becoming tiresome. It may be so, and it may not be so. You should not go too far. Let us talk now of something else.’
‘How do I know,’ cried Schlemmer, starting from his chair, ‘if it is good or not? How do I know, how do I know?’
He heard his own voice, and became cautious. ‘Quiet now,’ he murmured, ‘be quiet. Take a sleeping draught, that’s the thing. You’ve been out in the sun too long, your eyebrows are white as bleaching clothes. Take a sleeping draught.’
He filled the claret glass with brandy and drank it too quickly. He filled it again, took a little more, and hiccuped. Then, turning out the light, lay down and with hoarse breathing fell asleep.
In the last darkness before dawn he woke in fear. A nightmare that he could not remember had evicted him from sleep, and for a little while he lay in a panic, not knowing where he was. Then he found the switch, and light fell on Piero’s Madonna, on the confident Child and the adoring Shepherds.
Schlemmer sat up frowning, biting his nails, and began to study the picture as though he had been wakened for the single purpose of learning its meaning. Though the child is confident, he thought, it is the mother who really knows its purpose. The shepherds, who are the base of the triangle, are eager to believe; but the mother, whose head is the apex, knows. That is quite clear. Nor is there any suggestion that she has been at pains to acquire her knowledge. It has come to her naturally, or she has heard a voice saying Seid stille , und erkennt, dass ich Gott bin . She is very grave, but she is happy.
‘She is happy,’ he said aloud, and a moment later, with a violent shudder, he screamed, ‘It is a myth, the whole story is only a myth, and in any case the Englishwoman lied! It is not even the original, it is merely a copy!’
His breast heaved, he sat gazing at the picture. ‘It is not true,’ he whispered. ‘It cannot be true. For if it is true – no, no! It must not be true!’
In the shuttered room the air was hot and still. The walls enclosed a little space in which all the light fell on Piero’s Madonna, and she with a mild sublimity looked under white eyelids at the innocent assurance of her Son.
‘It is not true, it is not true!’ screamed Schlemmer, and stretching a shaking hand to the bedside table took from it a clumsy Schmeisser pistol and opened fire on the adoring shepherds.
The stuttering bullets raced up and down the picture, and before the last echo was dead there were voices at the door. Lieutenant Hofmeister was shouting, asking what had happened, and the Countess in a breathless voice as hoarse as a grasshopper was making the same inquiry of the Lieutenant.
Schlemmer opened the door and coldly inquired, ‘What do you want here?’
‘You are safe?’ exclaimed Hofmeister. ‘Who is in there? What has been happening?’
‘I wished to see if you were alert. Is Peiss also at his post?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘That is good. You can go now.’
‘If you are going to behave in that way again,’ said the Countess, ‘will you give me warning?’
‘Do not refer to my behaviour!’ shouted Schlemmer. ‘It is you: your lies – but no! You are of no importance now. Your day is over. You also can go.’
He locked his door again, turned out the light, and opened the window. He smelt the acrid pistol fumes as they drifted out, and breathed deeply of the morning air. Ten minutes later he lay down and slept soundly till his servant wakened him.
A little before noon a dispatch-rider appeared and gave Schlemmer a written order to withdraw his company from Pontefiore before midnight, and prepare for defence another position some three or four miles to the north of it. He read his instructions moodily, and sent for Peiss. ‘Get ready to move,’ he said.
‘Already? What for?’
Schlemmer showed him the order.
‘It’s always the same,’ said Peiss. ‘They don’t know their own minds, that’s the trouble. You sweat your soul out, digging and working, and then all your effort’s wasted.’
; ‘We should get bombed in the morning, if we stayed,’ said Schlemmer.
‘I don’t think they saw us.’
‘They always see us.’
An aeroplane on reconnaissance, high in the blue sky, had flown to and fro above Pontefiore early that morning. The Germans had made no movement while they were under observation, and all their defensive works had been well concealed; but the appearance of a second aeroplane, an hour later, had made Schlemmer complain that the camouflage was still insufficient.
Now he said, ‘There are some good draught-oxen in this village. We shall take them with us.’
‘There’s plenty of pigs too.’
‘Have some of the oxen harnessed and put what pigs you want in the carts. We shall move as soon as it is dark. Now I shall go and look at this other village, and see what work we must do there. And Peiss –’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘You can tell the soldiers that I am not fond of Pontefiore, and if in the process of withdrawing there should be some damage to property, I shall have no time to listen to complaints.’
When he returned in the early evening, he walked for some little while in the castle grounds and found much to admire in the gentle formality with which they had been planned and planted. He admired the ingenuity of the topia-rist, and thought the art a pleasing one. In front of him two living peacocks strutted nervously down a path between a pair of enormous peacock-images cut from the dense foliage of yew trees. The path was lined with other trees that had been clipped to the likeness of double candle-shades, and led to a stone balcony that overlooked a pool where among water-lilies goldfish swam, and a Triton in hoary stone blew his shell upon the bank. The lower terrace, patterned with a doubled design of dwarf hedges, was enclosed by a semi-circle of tall cypresses, all of equal stature, and beyond them the great slopes of Tuscany were clothed with the mellow evening light.
It has taken a long time, he thought, to make this beauty. From the beginning the hills were there, and the valleys divided them, but they were bare and meaningless before man came, with his art and purpose, to give them significance and define their form. The Etruscans did so much, the Romans more, and at the Renaissance they began again. They were good husbandmen who lived here. They desired beauty and they created it. It is a country I also could live in, if we possessed it. I am sorry to leave it.
Private Angelo Page 17