“It’s getting dark,” he shouted.
“Lovely big strawberries!” she screamed in reply.
“I’m going ahead.”
“Wait! Wait! I’ve found a patch.”
There she was stooping. But he strode ahead. It was getting dark. And he did not want to sleep on damp ground in the extreme mountain cold. So he went on without her. And she was frightened, and came half running, calling to him to wait.
“You see the night,” he said angrily.
“But such heavenly strawberries you never did taste.”
“Sleep with them then,” he said angrily, striding on. He was anxious for some sort of shelter.
They were on a rough, rocky track among trees. It was almost night, and ice-scent strong in the air. He was silent, and she was now frightened.
“We shall find a hay-hut on one of the Alps,” she said.
“Let us then,” he replied.
On they went in the next-to-darkness. And suddenly, at a bend of the road among thick trees, a little hut. They opened the door. It was a tiny chapel, with two benches that would seat four persons each, and a tiny altar. He struck a match and lighted the altar candles. The floor was boarded, and quite dry. If one moved the benches, two people could just lie there: it was just big enough.
All his anxiety disappeared. He looked at the doll which represented the virgin, at the hideous paper and rag flowers of the altar, and at the innumerable little ex voto pictures that hung on the walls.
“We can sleep here,” he said. “We are all right.”
“Where?” she said.
“On the floor.”
“I’m sure we could find a hay-hut if we went on.”
“I’m not going on.”
“Do think! It’s so uncomfortable here.”
“It’s dry and weather-tight. What more do you want.”
He took a candle from the altar and climbed on a bench, looking at the ex voto pictures. They were excellent naive little paintings on wood: a woman in a huge bed, and a man and his five children kneeling in a queue across the bedroom, with joined hands., and the virgin in a cloud coming through the ceiling: a field of catde just like a Noah’s ark set out: a man with a huge rock falling on his bent leg, and blood squashing out sky-high: a woman falling downstairs into her kitchen, and Mary, in a blue cloak, looking down in mild amazement from the ceiling beams: a man up to his waist in water, his arms thrown up, drowning, and Mary in a blue cloak on a white cloud high above: and so on and so on, a whole gallery. Gilbert was fascinated.
“Do come! Do let us find a hay-hut,” cried Johanna.
For some reason she was mad to sleep in one of the Alpine log hay-houses.
“We are well here,” he replied, standing on the bench with the candle. He glanced at her who stood outside by the bushes.
“No! No!” she said. “The hard floor.”
“But dry and warm. What more do you want.”
He had found a picture which fascinated him: a prison cell, with chains and fetters hanging on the wall, and Mary in a blue cloak prison-breaking through the roof. Then the verse.
“Du heilige IVlutter von Rerelmos Ich bitte mach mir mein Sohn von Gefangenschaft los.
Mach ihn von Eisen und Banden frei Wenn es dein Heilige Wille sei.
Anna Eichberg. 1775.”
Poor Anna Eichberg, with her son in prison in 1775, praying for him to the virgin. Why was he in prison? And whose prison. Gilbert felt he must know.
Johanna, returning from her excursion, saw through the open door of the wooden shrine how he stood on a seat with the candle and peered at this picture, and gaped and mused.
“I’ve found one,” she cried in triumph.
“Come and look,” he said.
“No. Come quick. I’ve found a lovely hay-hut.”
“I’m sure we’re better here.”
“No. No. Come.”
Reluctantly he obeyed. He blew out the candles and followed up the dark path. After a hundred yards it suddenly emerged in a great open darkness — the saddle of the pass — and twenty yards further on was the dark hay-house, built of logs, and roofed, but with a space of two yards between the roof and the top of the low log walls.
Gilbert climbed in and explored. In the higher, rear half the hay went practically to the roof. In the lower half it was a little less than the log walls.
“Isn’t it lovely! Isn’t it perfect,” cried Johanna.
They decided to eat. There were two bits of meat, and four little breads: all the rest eaten. An icy wind was blowing through the col. They went to the back of the hay-hut, and with difficulty got more or less out of the icy draught, so that they could fry the meat in the little saucepan over the spirit- flame. The night had become very dark. They crouched round the blue, restless flame of the spirit-machine, and heard the wind, and heard the meat faintly frizzle. Then they ate in the darkness, feeling the cold almost resound in the upper air.
They clambered up the ill-joining logs into the hut or barn. Gentle reader, never spend the night in an Alpine hay-hut if you have a chapel handy.
“Isn’t it lovely! Isn’t it perfect!” cried Johanna.
“Yes,” said Gilbert, who was growing colder each moment.
He carefully hung the knapsacks where he could lay hands on them: carefully placed the hats: then carefully buried his boots and Johanna’s shoes in the deep hay, in the faint hopes that the hay might dry them, for they were sodden. Then he took off his waistcoat and spread it for a sort of pillow for the two of them.
All this was done in pitch darkness, for how shall one strike matches in a barn of loose hay. Then the two buried themselves in a deep hole in the hay, and piled the hay above themselves, and thought they were all right. Johanna was in ecstasies. At last she had got away from her Marvell villa, Boston, and all civilisation, and was sleeping like a tramp. She wanted to be made love to there in the darkness of the hay: so she was made love to: and at length the two disposed themselves for sleep. They clung close together, and put the coats over them, and piled the hay above the coats.
“It’s lovely, lovely!” said Johanna.
But alas, gentle reader. Worse than fleas, worse even than mosquitoes on a sultry night is hay. It trickles insidiously in. It trickles and tickles your face, it goes in your ears and down your neck and is round your waist. The tickling becomes an intolerable irritation, then an inflammation.
Also a waistcoat is a bad pillowslip. You find your face in the arm-holes every other minute, in all the horror of hay in the night.
And then, gentle reader, there were chinks in the log walls, and there was the space above. So on top swept the ice wind. And below, through the chinks and through all the hay the icy point of the draught was slowly but surely and deadlily inserted.
Our tired pair of finches slept — but slept in the slowly trickling irritation of hay, and the slowly encroaching blade of ice-cold wind. Then they heard it rain — but for a mercy the roof was tight. They woke and woke and woke, and every time colder and colder and colder, and more and more irritated into frenzy by the filtering-in of the hay, on their faces, in their nostrils and ears, and under their clothing. To be cold, and galled with irritation. Oh gentle reader.
At last there was a sort of false dawn. And they got up. Gilbert put on his waistcoat and soddened boots — ice cold, ice cold. In the ghastly corpse-light of the dawn they looked out. They were at the top of a pass, in a sort of kettle among the mountains, peaks rising round. The rain, just a bit higher, was snow.
He hunted for sticks to make a fire for tea — all the spirit gone — and she went for water. Her shoes were so sodden she went barefoot — over the icy, piercing points of the mown Alp. A good penance for romance. At last she found water oozing up through the grass in a sort of marsh.
He coaxed a wretched fire between stones behind the log- house, as much out of the wind as possible. Then they drank tea and ate the last stale little breads — about two ounces each. That was the end of it
.
Dawn among the peaks around their Alp was ghastly grey. And in this ice-cold greyness, in sodden boots and skirt- bottoms, they set off, like two ghosts. And they had not gone a hundred yards before they saw a light — and someone with a lantern — and heard a cow moo.
It was a forlorn, dismal little summer farm, inhabited only for some months in the year. Drawing nearer, they saw in the dismal light of the increasing dawn a thin, stooping man moving with a lantern in the cow-house — then another man came out of the house, on the stone track through the filth. No, the second man was a woman — a thin, gaunt, extinguished looking woman, fairly young. She wore the big canvas trousers, tighter at the ankles, which the peasant women wear in the marshes. She was a rather weak man, save for her knob of dun-coloured hair screwed up behind.
Johanna and Gilbert went forward, in the morning-pallor. The man and the woman stood suspiciously. The farm was hardly more than a hovel — squalid. And the two figures seemed silence-extinguished. They made a great impression on Gilbert: like two wasted, stupefied, dreary birds, immured in that kettle of the pass in the cold.
Johanna asked the way. And the woman answered in a high, screaming voice, again like a desert bird. She pointed to a curving track. It was two hours. Evidently it was almost a violation to the woman to have to speak — the noise was a violation of the intolerable overshadowed, upper silence.
Gilbert was glad to drop on to the rock path, downwards, down a gorge, out of that moist Alp. Water roared and roared below. The black-blue greater gentian stood very tall, and the starry-white Grass of Parnassus opened its watery flowers.
Down the gorge they went. It was steep, and they moved fast, and at last grew quite hot. At about eight o’clock they came to a village of about four houses. At the first house — it was fairly large, and all lined with wood — they asked for coffee. Yes, they could have it. The woman was fresh-faced and pleasant. A boy was crying by the big green stove. Outside rain, mountain rain was falling.
At length came good hot milk and coffee. Then the man came in. He was a strapping, hard-looking mountaineer. He said he was a forester — the region was famous for chamois. The Crown Prince came every summer to shoot chamois. He brought photographs of the royal highness — and a letter which the prince had written him: Dear Karl. It was a simple, natural little letter.
“My sister knows the Kronprinz — she had dancing lessons with him,” said Johanna. So Karl, the forester was suitably impressed. And our pair of finches decided to go to bed. It was pouring with rain: that awful Alpine rain which comes straight down and seems like the wet creation of the world.
Oh a good, deep down bed, with down bolsters deep above one! Tired, inflamed with hay and cold, they slept in their separate beds, glad to be apart. In extremity, one is alone. We are born single and we die singly. All the better for all of us.
They got up at about two o’clock. The rain was falling like doomsday. At four there was a post-omnibus which ran to the Achen lake, to Scholastika. They decided to take it.
At least they had dry clothes. So they sat in the bumping omnibus with two other people, on clammy wash-leather seats, and they charged through deep valleys of everlasting rain.
It was a surprise to come to Scholastika — a dark, deep lake — and find summer visitors in the hotel — a small hotel, rough and countrified. But there was no bed. They were directed to a big farm-house, across a long flagged track through the marshy flat water-meadows heading the lake. Yes, and they got a room. Upstairs was an enormous wide corridor from which the doors opened. At one end was a broad balcony — at the other end a great barn full of hay and corn. So that as one came out of one’s bedroom door one turned towards the great cavern of hay. And if one went to the edge, one saw the horns of cattle below.
The bedroom was large, with old painted Tyrolese furniture, and great blue-and-white check overbolsters. Johanna insisted on going to bed at once. So there she lay, with her fine nose just emerging from under the great bolster.
Gilbert must go and forage for food. Again, in the yellowish evening he went across the meadow at the head of the gloomy lake. And at the hotel place he was given bread, eggs, cheese, and butter — and it all cost so little. He was in Austria, for the woman asked him for Krones and Hellers. She took German money just the same. Different the people seemed here — soft, vague, easy-going, not so fierce and hostile as the Bavarian highlanders. He was in Austria, in easy Austria. And the slight fear that hung over one in Germany — an instinctive uneasy resentment of all the officialdom — did not exist any more. Pleasant, easy, happy-go-lucky Austria!
He went home pleased. People had been nice with him. The things cost nothing. He had got methylated spirit. So there in the bedroom, whilst Johanna lay in bed, he made tea, and fried eggs in butter, and they had their meal. How- pleasant it was — with the wettish gold evening fading over the narrow-ended lake and the black mountains, and in the bedroom a smell of tea and fried eggs, and Johanna sitting up in bed and eating her food with joy, and more eggs spitting away in the little saucepan on the floor. Food, delicious food — how good it is when it comes haphazard, round the frail camp-fire of a little spirit-machine, in a safe bedroom far from everywhere, with yellow, wet evening falling over a rather sinister lake, and painted Tyrolese furniture, with roses and peasant tulips, looking on indoors.
Next morning they were off again, on foot. The lake was a very dark blue, ink blue, the trees tall, and some already turning gold. On the elevated road they went above the lake, right from one end to the other. And then the road plunged down-hill, towards the open.
They came in the afternoon to the wide, open place, where the railway went to Italy, and the imperial road. Here again it was warm and sweet and summery. Grapes and peaches were abundant in the shops. There was a strange touch of the south.
But now the luggage remained to be fetched from the frontier. Back along the line they travelled by the evening train, and they slept that night in steep, famous Kufstein, under its dark castle. Gilbert loved the mediaeval imperial feeling of these places. Old emperors of the Holy Roman Empire had left their mark. All seemed still feudal, feudal on an imperial scale.
At the station they hunted for their boxes. Johanna extracted her necessities, there in the vast shed of the customs deposit. And then they gave up their goods once more to the railway. Amazing reliable days of speed and easy management. Everything happened so easily, and yet so well. Wonderful lost world!
They went over the bridge, and Gilbert walked across, past the blue post, to the blue letter box just inside the German frontier. And there he posted his letters. Then they took the train back to their breaking-off point.
They decided to stay at Eckershofen, in the heart of the Tyrol. It was a village at the head of a long, big valley. Arrived finally, they looked for a room, and found one in a farmhouse at the end of the village, for about one-and-twopence a day. The house stood beside a rushing, deafening stream that roared beneath a bridge under the village street. At first Johanna and Gilbert heard nothing but the roar of rock-torn waters. But soon they began to be unaware of the noise.
In Eckershofen they decided to camp and rest for a time. They could still live for about fifteen shillings a week each. In their bedroom they made coffee in the morning. Sometimes they picnicked out for the day meals, sometimes they cooked little roasts of veal, or beef, or kidneys, over the spirit in the bedroom.
Gilbert was happy here. Three streams, and three valleys converged and met near the house. The great flat-sided slope came down from a great height across the valley, streaked with snow. The village with its low-roofed houses, seeming only just to have shaken the snow off itself and taken to the sun, was pleasant, congenial. There was a strange, mediaeval Catholicism everywhere. To see the peasants take off their hats and sink their heads as they passed the shrines and crucifixes was to be switched back into a dark, violent age. It was no lip-service, no formula. Nor was it the fetish-worship of the south. It was an almost Russia
n, dark mysticism, a worship of cruelty and pain and torture and death: a dark death worship. And startlingly frequent in the gloomy valleys and on the steep path-slopes were the Christs, old and young. Some were ancient Christs, of grey-silvery aged wood. Some were new, and terrible: life-sized, realistic, powerful young men, on the cross, in a death agony: white and distorted.
For the first time in his life a certain ancient root-fear awoke in Gilbert’s heart, or even deeper, in his bowels, as he came across these terrible crucifixes in the shadow and the roar of water by the roadside. He knew then, he knew once more the ancient Roman terror of the northern, tree-dark gods. He felt his breast bristle with the curious primeval horror of the great Hercynian wood, of the tree-worship of the Celts and the pristine, awful blond races. Here it lurked, as a sort of Satanism, in these valleys.
The high-road ended at Eckershofen. Beyond, only mule- tracks. And the muleteers with their strings of mules, fierce, bygone looking men, hueing and slashing up the hills, would suddenly change as they drew near a shrine or a crucifix. Suddenly a silence, a darkness, a shadow came over them. They advanced insidiously, taking off their hats to the great Christ. And then Gilbert’s heart stood still. He knew it was not Christ. It was an older, more fearful god, tree-terrible.
Even in the peasant greetings — Servusl or Gruss-Gott — he seemed to hear something — something pre-Roman, northern, frightening: the bristling of wolves in the darkness of the north night, the flash of the aurora borealis, the mystery of blond forgotten gods. Overhead always the looming of great heights. And mankind creeping furtive in the valleys, as if by some dread permission.
Once Gilbert and Johanna went into the common inn, at evening, where zithers were twanging and men were dancing the Schuhplattler in their heavy mountain shoes. There was a violent commotion, a violent noise, and a sense of violent animal spirits. Gilbert, with his fatal reserve, hung back from mingling. Besides he could not dance the dance. But Johanna, watching with bright excited face, was invited and accepted. In all the fume and dust she was carried into the dance by a lusty villager with long moustaches and a little Tyrolese hat. How powerful and muscular he was, the coarse male animal with his large, curious blue eyes! He caught her beneath the breasts with his big hands and threw her into the air, at the moment of dance crisis, and stamped his great shod feet like a bull. And Johanna gave a cry of unconsciousness, such as a woman gives in her crisis of embrace. And the peasant flashed his big blue eyes on her, and caught her again.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 297