We twisted up and up the wild hillside, past the old castle of the town, past the last villa, between trees and rocks. We saw no one. The whole hill belongs to the monastery. At last at twilight we turned the corner of the oak wood and saw the monastery like a huge square fortress-palace of the sixteenth century crowning the near distance. Yes, and there was M— just stepping through the huge old gateway and hastening down the slope to where the carriage must stop. He was bare-headed, and walking with his perky, busy little stride, seemed very much at home in the place. He looked up to me with a tender, intimate look as I got down from the carriage. Then he took my hand.
‘So very glad to see you,’ he said. ‘I’m so pleased you’ve come.’
And he looked into my eyes with that wistful, watchful tenderness rather like a woman who isn’t quite sure of her lover. He had a certain charm in his manner; and an odd pompous touch with it at this moment, welcoming his guest at the gate of the vast monastery which reared above us from its buttresses in the rock, was rather becoming. His face was still pink, his eyes pale blue and sharp, but he looked greyer at the temples.
‘Give me your bag,’ he said. ‘Yes do – and come along. Don Bernardo is just at Evensong, but he’ll be here in a little while. Well now, tell me all the news.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Lend me five francs to finish paying the driver – he has no change.’
‘Certainly, certainly,’ he said, giving the five francs.
I had no news – so asked him his.
‘Oh, I have none either,’ he said. ‘Very short of money, that of course is no news.’ And he laughed his little laugh. ‘I’m so glad to be here,’ he continued. ‘The peace, and the rhythm of the life is so beautiful! I’m sure you’ll love it.’
We went up the slope under the big, tunnel-like entrance and were in the grassy courtyard, with the arched walk on the far sides, and one or two trees. It was like a grassy cloister, but still busy. Black monks were standing chatting, an old peasant was just driving two sheep from the cloister grass, and an old monk was darting into the little post-office which one recognized by the shield with the national arms over the doorway. From under the far arches came an old peasant carrying a two-handed saw.
And there was Don Bernardo, a tall monk in a black, well-shaped gown, young, good-looking, gentle, hastening forward with a quick smile. He was about my age, and his manner seemed fresh and subdued, as if he were still a student. One felt one was at college with one’s college mates.
We went up the narrow stair and into the long, old, naked white corridor, high and arched. Don Bernardo had got the key of my room: two keys, one for the dark antechamber, one for the bedroom. A charming and elegant bedroom, with an engraving of English landscape, and outside the net curtain a balcony looking down on the garden, a narrow strip beneath the walls, and beyond, the clustered buildings of the farm, and the oak woods and arable fields of the hill summit: and beyond again, the gulf where the world’s valley was, and all the mountains that stand in Italy on the plains as if God had just put them down ready made. The sun had already sunk, the snow on the mountains was full of a rosy glow, the valleys were full of shadow. One heard, far below, the trains shunting, the world clinking in the cold air.
‘Isn’t it wonderful! Ah, the most wonderful place on earth!’ said M—. ‘What now could you wish better than to end your days here? The peace, the beauty, the eternity of it.’ He paused and sighed. Then he put his hand on Don Bernardo’s arm and smiled at him with that odd, rather wistful smirking tenderness that made him such a quaint creature in my eyes.
‘But I’m going to enter the order. You’re going to let me be a monk and be one of you, aren’t you, Don Bernardo?’
‘We will see,’ smiled Don Bernardo. ‘When you have begun your studies.’
‘It will take me two years,’ said M—. ‘I shall have to go to the college in Rome. When I have got the money for the fees –’ He talked away, like a boy planning a new rôle.
‘But I’m sure Lawrence would like to drink a cup of tea,’ said Don Bernardo. He spoke English as if it were his native language. ‘Shall I tell them to make it in the kitchen, or shall we go to your room?’
‘Oh, we’ll go to my room. How thoughtless of me! Do forgive me, won’t you?’ said M—, laying his hand gently on my arm. ‘I’m so awfully sorry, you know. But we get so excited and enchanted when we talk of the monastery. But come along, come along, it will be ready in a moment on the spirit-lamp.’
We went down to the end of the high, white, naked corridor. M— had a quite sumptuous room, with a curtained bed in one part, and under the window his writing-desk with papers and photographs, and nearby a sofa and an easy table, making a little sitting-room, while the bed and toilet things, pomades and bottles were all in the distance, in the shadow. Night was fallen. From the window one saw the world far below, like a pool the flat plain, a deep pool of darkness with little twinkling lights, and rows and bunches of light that were the railway station.
I drank my tea, M— drank a little liqueur, Don Bernardo in his black winter robe sat and talked with us. At least he did very little talking. But he listened and smiled and put in a word or two as we talked, seated round the table on which stood the green-shaded electric lamp.
The monastery was cold as the tomb. Couched there on the top of its hill, it is not much below the winter snow-line. Now by the end of January all the summer heat is soaked out of the vast, ponderous stone walls, and they become masses of coldness cloaking around. There is no heating apparatus whatsoever – none. Save the fire in the kitchen, for cooking, nothing. Dead, silent, stone cold everywhere.
At seven we went down to dinner. Capri in the daytime was hot, so I had brought only a thin old dust-coat. M— therefore made me wear a big coat of his own, a coat made of thick, smooth black cloth, and lined with black sealskin, and having a collar of silky black seal skin. I can still remember the feel of the silky fur. It was queer to have him helping me solicitously into this coat, and buttoning it at the throat for me.
‘Yes, it’s a beautiful coat. Of course!’ he said. ‘I hope you find it warm.’
‘Wonderful,’ said I. ‘I feel as warm as a millionaire.’
‘I’m so glad you do,’ he laughed.
‘You don’t mind my wearing your grand coat?’ I said.
‘Of course not! Of course not! It’s a pleasure to me if it will keep you warm. We don’t want to die of cold in the monastery, do we? That’s one of the mortifications we will do our best to avoid. What? Don’t you think? Yes, I think this coldness is going almost too far. I had that coat made in New York fifteen years ago. Of course in Italy –’ he said It’ly – ‘I’ve never worn it, so it is as good as new. And it’s a beautiful coat, fur and cloth of the very best. And the tailor.’ He laughed a little, self-approving laugh. He liked to give the impression that he dealt with the best shops, don’t you know, and stayed in the best hotels, etc. I grinned inside the coat, detesting best hotels, best shops, and best overcoats. So off we went, he in his grey overcoat and I in my sealskin millionaire monster, down the dim corridor to the guests’ refectory. It was a bare room with a long white table. M— and I sat at the near end. Further down was another man, perhaps the father of one of the boy students. There is a college attached to the monastery.
We sat in the icy room, muffled up in our overcoats. A lay-brother with a bulging forehead and queer, fixed eyes waited on us. He might easily have come from an old Italian picture. One of the adoring peasants. The food was abundant – but alas, it had got cold in the long cold transit from the kitchen. And it was roughly cooked, even if it was quite wholesome. Poor M— did not eat much, but nervously nibbled his bread. I could tell the meals were a trial to him. He could not bear the cold food in that icy, empty refectory. And his phthisickiness offended the lay-brothers. I could see that his little pomposities and his ‘superior’ behaviour and his long stay made them have that old monastic grudge against him, silent but very obstinate and eff
ectual – the same now as six hundred years ago. We had a decanter of good red wine – but he did not care for much wine. He was glad to be peeling the cold orange which was dessert.
After dinner he took me down to see the church, creeping like two thieves down the dimness of the great, prison-cold white corridors, on the cold flag floors. Stone cold: the monks must have invented the term. These monks were at Compline. So we went by our two secret little selves into the tall dense nearly-darkness of the church. M—, knowing his way about here as in the cities, led me, poor wondering worldling, by the arm through the gulfs of the tomb-like place. He found the electric light switches inside the church, and stealthily made me a light as we went. We looked at the lily marble of the great floor, at the pillars, at the Benvenuto Cellini casket, at the really lovely pillars and slabs of different coloured marbles, all coloured marbles, yellow and grey and rose and green and lily white, veined and mottled and splashed: lovely, lovely stones – And Benvenuto had used pieces of lapis lazuli, blue as cornflowers. Yes, yes, all very rich and wonderful.
We tiptoed about the dark church stealthily, from altar to altar, and M— whispered ecstasies in my ear. Each time we passed before an altar, whether the high altar or the side chapels, he did a wonderful reverence, which he must have practised for hours, bowing waxily down and sinking till his one knee touched the pavement, then rising like a flower that rises and unfolds again, till he had skipped to my side and was playing cicerone once more. Always in his grey overcoat, and in whispers: me in the big black overcoat, millionairish. So we crept into the chancel and examined all the queer fat babies of the choir stalls, carved in wood and rolling on their little backs between monk’s place and monk’s place – queer things for the chanting monks to have between them, these shiny, polished, dark brown fat babies, all different, and all jolly and lusty. We looked at everything in the church – and then at everything in the ancient room at the side where surplices hang and monks can wash their hands.
Then we went down to the crypt, where the modern mosaics glow in wonderful colours, and sometimes in fascinating little fantastic trees and birds. But it was rather like a scene in the theatre, with M— for the wizard and myself a sort of Parsifal in the New York coat. He switched on the lights, the gold mosaic of the vaulting glittered and bowed, the blue mosaic glowed out, the holy of holies gleamed theatrically, the stiff mosaic figures posed around us. To tell the truth I was glad to get back to the normal human room and sit on a sofa huddled in my overcoat, and look at photographs which M— showed me: photographs of everywhere in Europe. Then he showed me a wonderful photograph of a picture of a lovely lady – asked me what I thought of it, and seemed to expect me to be struck to bits by the beauty. His almost sanctimonious expectation made me tell the truth, that I thought it just a bit cheap, trivial. And then he said, dramatic:
‘That’s my mother.’
It looked so unlike anybody’s mother, much less M—’s, that I was startled. I realized that she was his great stunt, and that I had put my foot in it. So I just held my tongue. Then I said, for I felt he was going to be silent forever:
‘There are so few portraits, unless by the really great artists, that aren’t a bit cheap. She must have been a beautiful woman.’
‘Yes, she was,’ he said curtly. And we dropped the subject.
He locked all his drawers very carefully, and kept the keys on a chain. He seemed to give the impression that he had a great many secrets, perhaps dangerous ones, locked up in the drawers of his writing-table there. And I always wonder what the secrets can be, that are able to be kept so tight under lock and key.
Don Bernardo tapped and entered. We all sat round and sipped a funny liqueur which I didn’t like. M— lamented that the bottle was finished. I asked him to order another and let me pay for it. So he said he would tell the postman to bring it up next day from the town. Don Bernardo sipped his tiny glass with the rest of us, and he told me, briefly, his story – and we talked politics till nearly midnight. Then I came out of the black overcoat and we went to bed.
In the morning a fat, smiling, nice old lay-brother brought me my water. It was a sunny day. I looked down on the farm cluster and the brown fields and the sere oak woods of the hill-crown, and the rocks and bushes savagely bordering it round. Beyond, the mountains with their snow were blue-glistery with sunshine, and seemed quite near, but across a sort of gulf. All was still and sunny. And the poignant grip of the past, the grandiose, violent past of the Middle Ages, when blood was strong and unquenched and life was flamboyant with splendours and horrible miseries, took hold of me till I could hardly bear it. It was really agony to me to be in the monastery and to see the old farm and the bullocks slowly working in the fields below, and the black pigs rooting among weeds, and to see a monk sitting on a parapet in the sun, and an old, old man in skin sandals and white bunched, swathed legs come driving an ass slowly to the monastery gate, slowly, with all that lingering nonchalance and wildness of the Middle Ages, and yet to know that I was myself, child of the present. It was so strange from M—’s window to look down on the plain and see the white road going straight past a mountain that stood like a loaf of sugar, the river meandering in loops, and the railway with glistening lines making a long black swoop across the flat and into the hills. To see trains come steaming, with white smoke flying. To see the station like a little harbour where trucks like shipping stood anchored in rows in the black bay of railway. To see trains stop in the station and tiny people swarming like flies! To see all this from the monastery, where the Middle Ages live on in a sort of agony, like Tithonus, and cannot die, this was almost a violation to my soul, made almost a wound.
Immediately after coffee we went down to Mass. It was celebrated in a small crypt chapel underground, because that was warmer. The twenty or so monks sat in their stalls, one monk officiating at the altar. It was quiet and simple, the monks sang sweetly and well, there was no organ. It seemed soon to pass by. M— and I sat near the door. He was very devoted and scrupulous in his going up and down. I was an outsider. But it was pleasant – not too sacred. One felt the monks were very human in their likes and their jealousies. It was rather like a group of dons in the dons’ room at Cambridge, a cluster of professors in any college. But during Mass they, of course, just sang their responses. Only I could tell some watched the officiating monk rather with ridicule – he was one of the ultra-punctilious sort, just like a don. And some boomed their responses with a grain of defiance against some brother monk who had earned dislike. It was human, and more like a university than anything. We went to Mass every morning, but I did not go to Evensong.
After Mass M— took me round and showed me everything of the vast monastery. We went into the Bramante Courtyard, all stone, with its great well in the centre, and the colonnades of arches going round, full of sunshine, gay and Renaissance, a little bit ornate but still so jolly and gay, sunny pale stone waiting for the lively people, with the great flight of pale steps sweeping up to the doors of the church, waiting for gentlemen in scarlet trunk-hose, slender red legs, and ladies in brocade gowns, and page-boys with fluffed, golden hair. Splendid, sunny, gay Bramante Courtyard of lively stone. But empty. Empty of life. The gay red-legged gentry dead forever. And when pilgrimages do come and throng in, it is horrible artisan excursions from the great town, and the sordidness of industrialism.
We climbed the little watchtower that is now an observatory, and saw the vague and unshaven Don Giovanni among all his dust and instruments. M— was very familiar and friendly, chattering in his quaint Italian, which was more wrong than any Italian I have ever heard spoken; very familiar and friendly, and a tiny bit deferential to the monks, and yet, and yet – rather patronizing. His little pomposity and patronizing tone coloured even his deferential yearning to be admitted to the monastery. The monks were rather brief with him. They no doubt have their likes and dislikes greatly intensified by the monastic life.
We stood on the summit of the tower and looked at the world be
low: the town, the castle, the white roads coming straight as judgment out of the mountains north, from Rome, and piercing into the mountains south, toward Naples, traversing the flat, flat plain. Roads, railway, river, streams, a world in accurate and lively detail, with mountains sticking up abruptly and rockily, as the old painters painted it. I think there is no way of painting Italian landscape except that way – that started with Lorenzetti and ended with the sixteenth century.
We looked at the ancient cell away under the monastery, where all the sanctity started. We looked at the big library that belongs to the State, and at the smaller library that belongs still to the abbot, I was tired, cold, and sick among the books and illuminations. I could not bear it any more. I felt I must be outside, in the sun, and see the world below, and the way out.
That evening I said to M—:
‘And what was the abyss, then?’
‘Oh well, you know,’ he said, ‘it was a cheque which I made out at Anzio. There should have been money to meet it, in my bank in New York. But it appears the money had never been paid in by the people that owed it me. So there was I in a very nasty hole, an unmet cheque, and no money at all in Italy. I really had to escape here. It is an absolute secret that I am here, and it must be, till I can get this business settled. Of course I’ve written to America about it. But as you see, I’m in a very nasty hole. That five francs I gave you for the driver was the last penny I had in the world: absolutely the last penny. I haven’t even anything to buy a cigarette or a stamp.’ And he laughed chirpily, as if it were a joke. But he didn’t really think it a joke. Nor was it a joke.
I had come with only two hundred lire in my pocket, as I was waiting to change some money at the bank. Of this two hundred I had one hundred left or one hundred and twenty-five. I should need a hundred to get home. I could only give M— the twenty-five, for the bottle of drink. He was rather crestfallen. But I didn’t want to give him money this time: because he expected it.
The Bad Side of Books Page 12