‘You were going to tell me something about the two American soldiers who came with you,’ said Simon.
‘Indeed I was,’ said the Count. ‘My attention was distracted for a moment by the fall of plaster – the cornice over there is also loose – but the case of the American soldiers is deeply interesting. They are, in fact, not Americans, but deserters from my old regiment who, by nefarious means of which I remain happily ignorant, acquired American uniform for a criminal purpose which, by pure chance, I was able to defeat. The senior of the two, the fat man, is Sergeant Vespucci, of whom you may have heard. Our dear Angelo knows him well. He and Angelo entered Rome together on the morning of its liberation.’
‘Vespucci?’ said Simon. ‘Yes, I think I’ve heard Angelo speak of him.’
‘What a scoundrel the man is,’ said the Count complacently, ‘and yet how much we could learn from him! For your true rascal is today your only true citizen of the world. He plunders all nations without pride in one or prejudice against another. He despises frontiers – and what an unmitigated nuisance a frontier is! We should all learn to hold them in contempt. In bygone times any educated man was free to live or travel where he chose, but now it is only your rascals who claim such a privilege; and there is nothing international in the world but villainy. Sergeant Vespucci, who certainly deserves to be shot, might serve a better purpose if he were given the chair of philosophy in one of our universities.’
‘He stole the lorry as well as the uniform, I suppose?’
‘Let me tell the story in my own way,’ said the Count. ‘I have in Rome a very dear friend, to whom I have been devoted for a number of years, called the Marchesa Dolce; whose circle of acquaintances is always large and sometimes influential. One of the latest to enter it is an American Colonel, now stationed in Rome. He is a man of great charm and his knowledge of the world has made him both wise and humane. He realizes that the war, almost certainly, will come to an end some day, and we shall then have to deal with the as yet unsolved problem of how to live together in peace. He is already doing what he can to ease the situation – into which we may be plunged without warning – by meeting some of our more liberal industrialists and discussing, quite informally, of course, the possibility of their resuming trade with his own firm. A prudent and far-sighted man is the Colonel. He, as an American, has access to many commodities, such as petrol and food and blankets, of which we are sadly in need; and we in our poverty have still an abundance of little pictures, objets d’art, and so forth, that he, being a man of culture, can appreciate. We have already made, through his agency, a number of transactions that, I like to think, have been beneficial to both sides.’
The Count paused to replenish his glass and Simon’s, and continued: ‘You can imagine how upset I was when the Colonel told me, only the other day, that the generosity and good-nature of his fellow-countrymen were being abused, and that some of our people, with a quite shocking impatience, were not waiting to be given such stores of food and clothing as the Americans could afford to exchange for little pictures and so on, but were actually stealing and exposing them for sale in the Black Market. The American Army, said the Colonel, was in fact being plundered by those whom it had come to liberate; and in consequence of its very grave losses the authorities had decided that in future they would have to take care of their stores. They had, in fact, adopted such a serious attitude that the Colonel himself was unable to bring the Marchesa Dolce a side of bacon, a sack of flour, and some cases of fruit that he had promised for her birthday.
‘Only a day or two later,’ the Count went on, ‘I made a discovery that seriously perturbed me. I had recently given Sergeant Vespucci permission to keep a lorry or two, that he used in business, in the courtyard of my house in Rome; of which I had been dispossessed but where, by the kindness of my butler, I still slept. I had met Vespucci some time before, and he had apologized so handsomely for deserting my regiment that I was persuaded to forgive him; more readily, I must confess, because I myself, at that particular time, had had very little control over it. Vespucci told me that he had set up, in a modest way, as what he called a Free Distributer, and naturally I was pleased to help him, as I would be to help any old soldier whom I found striving, with the small means at his command, to make a humble place for himself in a world that is too prone to neglect old soldiers. I was more than a little worried, however, after my conversation with the Colonel, to see one night Sergeant Vespucci driving into my courtyard, not one of the shabby vehicles that he had formerly used, but a brand-new American lorry.’
Don Agesilas was interrupted in his story by the return of the Countess, who came in and took the empty chair beside him. ‘I thought I’d come back and drink a glass of port wine with you,’ she said.
‘Nothing could give me more pleasure,’ said the Count, rising to receive her with surprise in his voice and wonder in his eye. He reached for the decanter.
‘I’m getting quite a taste for port wine,’ said the Countess. ‘I think it’s better for you than brandy.’
‘If drunk in the same quantity,’ said the Count, ‘brandy may produce unfortunate effects.’
‘That’s what I mean. And you can drink port wine without wincing: that’s another advantage. – But go on with what you were talking about; I didn’t intend to stop you.’
Don Agesilas found it difficult to conceal his astonishment at this unexpected development in his wife’s character, who in all their life together had been abstemious to a degree that he thought dangerous to her health. He watched her, fascinated, while she sipped her port, and with a growing admiration refilled her glass.
‘Go on,’ she repeated. ‘What were you talking about?’
‘I really cannot remember,’ said the Count.
‘Sergeant Vespucci,’ said Simon.
‘Ah, yes. Yes, Sergeant Vespucci. Well, to put it as briefly as possible, he and a friend of his – another deserter from my regiment, I am sorry to say – had procured American uniform, stolen a six-wheeled lorry and with the aid of accomplices of whom I know nothing, filled it with American goods from the nearest American dump. Then he had the gross impertinence to conceal his booty in the courtyard of my house, and I found myself in a very painful dilemma. It went against the grain to return such a treasury of viands to the military authorities who, from my own observation, were by no means undernourished; but if I let Vespucci sell his loot on the Black Market – and, to give him his due, he offered me a very generous share of the profit – I should be unable to meet my friend the Colonel without embarrassment and a little sensation of guilt. What was I to do? A few minutes’ reflection decided me, and I said to Vespucci: “Sergeant, you are a man of good feeling, and at the moment you are completely in my power. You call yourself a Free Distributer, and that is precisely what you are going to be. I am deeply concerned for the welfare of my people in Pontefiore. They have, as I hear, been plundered by the Germans and liberated by our Allies. They are in a sad plight and need comforting. We have here the wherewithal to comfort them. Your cargo, Vespucci, will go to Pontefiore!”– He protested, but ineffectually. I reminded him that I was still his Commanding Officer, and that though he had deserted with the rank of sergeant, I had the authority to reduce him to private. He has his pride, has Vespucci, and eventually he accepted my ruling. So northward we drove, that very night, and I am deeply happy to think that our arrival was so timely.’
‘I never thought, when I lived in Bradford, that one day I’d eat stolen meat and be glad of it,’ said the Countess.
‘Our troops,’ said Simon, ‘occasionally help themselves to the produce of your country. A few weeks ago, west of Lake Trasimene, they were living very well on roast goose. Then there was a slight epidemic of jaundice, and the rumour got about that it was due to eating Christmas dinners in the height of summer. It was only jaundice that saved the geese from total extinction,’
‘You can’t expect people to have much respect for property when they’re taught to have no res
pect for each other’s life,’ said the Countess. ‘Whenever there’s a war the first casualties are the Ten Commandments.’
‘Another glass of port?’ Don Agesilas suggested tactfully.
‘I don’t mind if I do,’ said the Countess. ‘And now tell me about Rome. What’s happened to all the Fascists?’
‘Many of them have become Communists,’ said the Count. ‘And really, can you blame them? After wearing a black shirt for twenty years, what a pleasure it must be to go out in a red muffler!’
‘That hardly seems a sufficient explanation,’ said Simon.
‘It would be sufficient for me,’ said the Count, ‘but then I am a frivolous person. Many of my Roman neighbours, I admit, are extremely serious – serious and simple – and some are not so simple. There are those who say to themselves, “There is always someone who cooks the joint, and others who dip their bread in the gravy. Yesterday the chef wore a black shirt, and so did we. But now, if red is to be the fashion, let us go out quickly and buy a new handkerchief”.’
Presently they retired to the small drawing-room above the garden. The windows had been blown out and the shutters broken, but the night was calm and the heavy curtains hung without motion to the floor.
The Countess halted on the threshold with an exclamation of surprise, and the others, looking over her shoulder, were momentarily startled to see, at ease in a tall chair, a man dressed in the sable uniform of the Schutzstaffel. They recognized him almost immediately, though he had contrived some alteration in his appearance, and slowly approaching regarded him with a puzzled and rather unfriendly curiosity. He had dyed his hair a dull yellow, and in place of his tortoise shell monocle wore one of frosted glass.
‘The sleeves are a little short,’ said Fest, ‘but otherwise the tunic fits very well. There were one or two small holes in it which needed repair, but I am quite skilful with a needle; you hardly notice them, do you?’
‘Why are you wearing those clothes?’ asked Simon.
‘You may call it a dress rehearsal,’ said Fest. ‘Tomorrow I am going to Florence, and from there, at the first opportunity, to Bologna.’
‘But Florence and Bologna are full of Germans,’ said the Countess.
‘That is why I am going.’
‘It’s madness,’ said Simon. ‘You’ll be caught immediately and shot out of hand. If you work with us, in a proper and orderly manner, you can do a great deal of good –’
‘But I have no desire to do good. I want to amuse myself, that is all. My hobby, my only pleasure in life nowadays, is to annoy the Germans, and since working with your organization I have often been handicapped by its narrowly utilitarian aims. My hobby demands freedom of choice and freedom of movement.’
‘The Germans,’ said the Count, ‘failed to find a small cellar in which I keep a few wines of some interest to myself, and so I can offer you this tolerable cognac, or this armagnac that I have often found uncommonly agreeable to one of my occasionally robust and youthful moods.’
‘The armagnac, without a doubt,’ said Fest.
‘I am inclined to praise your decision,’ said the Count. ‘No, I do not mean your choice of the armagnac – though I shall follow your example there – but your resolve to play a lone hand against the enemy. I am bored by the spectacle of people moving hither and thither in great masses. One cannot even be sorry for a horde of people. It is only the individual who rouses either interest or compassion. But the lone fighter, the solitary genius, the inconversable artist; the outlaw, the eccentric, and the anchorite; the craftsman with his single-handed skill, the wandering gipsy with his fiddle, the neighbourless shepherd proudly sufficient in his wilderness – all these are being crushed, as if beneath a landslide, by the regimented multitudes of today. It is a day of Great Powers, great causes, great events – and how dull they are! I want to go and watch a lapidary at work in his lonely room, cutting a solitary gem. I want to read, not some great overstuffed history of the world’s calamities, but the brief and well-told tale of one embittered man, moved by a single hatred, who cut his sweetheart’s throat in a deserted house. I want to turn my back upon mankind in order to see, against the great horizon on the other side, a man alone. Yes, my dear Fest, your proposal pleases me; though it is most unwise.’
‘I have had my fill of wisdom,’ said Fest, ‘and I want no more of it. For twenty years I was a serious person. I was a good man. I knew what was true and what was false, and I revered the truth. I saw where virtue pointed, where wisdom led, and I went that way. And at the end of the road the Gestapo was waiting for me. So now I am entitled to a holiday. A little holiday of unwisdom.’
‘I understand you perfectly,’ said the Count.
‘No!’ said Fest. ‘You do not understand. You cannot. Nobody can understand what we are like, we who have been tortured. We are different from you.’
‘I also,’ said the Count stiffly, ‘have been in a German prison.’
‘So?’
‘I was arrested in Rome. I was arrested again in Montenero, where I was very nearly shot in reprisal for one of your exploits.’
‘I remember, of course. And what did you think about when you were in prison?’
‘Generally about hot baths and food.’
‘You cannot have been very long in your prison. When a man has been hungry for a long time – but really hungry, very near starvation – he is no longer worried by the thought of food. He becomes proud and indifferent. You cannot bribe him. That is an important difference, is it not? But it occurs. And torture, if he can survive it long enough, makes him indifferent to fear and pain. He does not even scream when they hit him. When he is back in his cell he may scream, but not at the time. No, no. Then he can be impudent. He can say mischievous things to his torturers, and defy them. He gives them cheek. And when he goes back to his cell he does not think about hot baths and a big dinner, he thinks of one thing only: am I still sane?’
Fest removed his monocle and with a handkerchief wiped his eyes. ‘The blind one still weeps,’ he said. ‘May I have a little more of that good armagnac?’
No one spoke for a minute or two, and then Simon said, ‘You can take your revenge far more effectively by working with us.’
‘But then it would become your revenge,’ said Fest, ‘and I want my own, you see. I am quite selfish. No, you can do no good by argument, because we do not think alike. We are quite different people. – And now, if you will excuse me, I think I shall go to bed; for I must leave early to-morrow morning.’
‘Look here,’ said Simon –
‘No,’ said Fest. ‘I am looking in another direction.’ He bent and gravely kissed the Countess’s hand. ‘Good night,’ he said.
Again there was silence, till the Count murmured, ‘Poor fellow! I hadn’t realized till this evening that he himself is a German.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Simon, ‘he’s a German. We know all about him.’
‘He’s going too far with that hobby of his,’ said the Countess. ‘But that’s just like them. They always overdo things.’
‘He was in a concentration camp for two years before the war,’ said Simon. ‘When he was released he went to Switzerland, where his wife was waiting for him. They lived together for a few months, and then she left him. That upset him badly, and when the war began he went back to Germany with the simple purpose, apparently, of making trouble. He was arrested again, but escaped from a camp in East Prussia. The Polish Underground took care of him, and then he disappeared in the Balkans. He was a steward in a Danube river-steamer for a little while, and for some time he lived in Bucharest. But we first met him in Syria.’
‘He told me about his wife before you came here,’ said the Countess. ‘I’m sorry for him, but she had a lot to put up with too. He used to get up at night and play with the bedroom door. Just opening it and shutting it again. For a man who’d been locked up for years, he said, that was a very pleasant thing to do. But it got on his wife’s nerves, and I don’t wonder.’
; ‘I ought to stop him,’ said Simon. He rose and stood, irresolute, midway between his chair and the door. ‘It’s his own life, of course, and I suppose he has earned the right to do as he pleases with it. But he’s throwing it away.’
‘Socrates in his last hour,’ said the Count, ‘told his judges: “This is the time to say good-bye, and now we must part: you to live, and I to die. Which is the better, God only knows”.’
‘If Socrates said that, he was talking nonsense,’ declared the Countess. ‘Go and stop him.’
Simon followed Fest to his room, but when he got there he found it empty.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
‘HOW EXTRAORDINARY!’ said Angelo, speaking to himself, as he pulled a wallet from the pocket of a dead German and began to count the notes it contained. ‘Three thousand, four thousand, five thousand – he must have robbed somebody – six thousand, seven thousand – oh, but here is a fortune! And how truly astonishing to think that I have killed one of them at last, and I myself am still alive!’
He sat down beside his late enemy, in the comfortable knowledge that the flood-dyke behind him was an adequate protection against most of the missiles of war, and with a feeling of grateful wonder contemplated the scene of battle. It was horrible, of course, and he disliked the cold flat fields of the river-plain; but because he had endured so much in the company of this earth, and helped in the winning of it, he now regarded the drab untidy landscape almost with complacency. To some degree, and after a fashion, it was his.
Another winter had gone, and though every afternoon the bora blew from pale skies like a fluency of melting ice, the ground was dry and the sun rose clear in the morning. The winter had been harsh and wearisome, and the soldiers of the Allied Armies had spent it, in sad persistence and complaining valour, under mountain-snow and mountain-rain. The Germans had entrenched themselves from sea to sea across the Etruscan Apennines, and against their ramparts of concrete and steel and cloud-swept hill there had striven, week by week for the advantage of another mile, the polyglot forces of democracy, born of many lands and bred to divers habits, but all alike in that all could shiver and bleed. On the left of the line, by the western sea, there had been Brazilians and American negroes, and on the right, on the Adriatic shore, Greeks and Poles. In the mountains north of Florence men had given their orders to advance, and others had cursed them, in the accents of New England and the Middle West, in voices from the cornfields of Kansas and the cold plains of Nebraska, from the black soil of the deep South and the arrogant immensity of Texas. Voices from the Transvaal and the Cape had answered them, and to the eastward came a clamour of tongues from Hindustan. Soldiers had died with a sentence, half-spoken, of Urdu on their lips. They had called gently to each other in the night in Gurkhali and Mahratti, and heard the debate of comrades in the broad accent of Yorkshire, the lazy flow of Cotswold villages, the quick traffic of a London borough, and here and there the softness of Gaelic. Christchurch and Dunedin had spoken to Glasgow and Liverpool, Manitoba and Quebec to Warsaw and Athens. Pietermaritzburg had conversed with Little Rock, the Grampians with the Punjab, and tied each other’s wounds. Hardly since the confounding of the people at Babel had such a diversity of tongues been heard, and month by month their hopeful or their weary speech had sounded a little farther to the north, till now, in the cold bright air of spring, the languages and lingos, the argots and parley and paronyms of half the world, to the orchestration of their innumerable artillery, were shouting for the kill.
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