We were both still. She put her arms round her bright knee, and caressed it, lovingly, rather plaintively, with her mouth. The brilliant green dragons on her wrap seemed to be snarling at me.
‘And you regret him?’ I said at length.
‘No,’ she answered, scarcely heeding me. ‘I remember the way he unfastened his sword-belt and trappings from his loins, flung the whole with a jingle on the other bed —’
I was burning now with rage against Anita. Why should she love a man for the way he unbuckled his belt!
‘With him,’ she mused, ‘everything felt so inevitable.’
‘Even your never seeing him again,’ I retorted.
‘Yes!’ she said, quietly.
Still musing, dreaming, she continued to caress her own knees.
‘He said to me: “We are like the two halves of a walnut”.’ And she laughed slightly. ‘He said some lovely things to me — “Tonight, you’re an Answer”. And then: “Whichever bit of you I touch seems to startle me afresh with joy”. And he said he should never forget the velvety feel of my skin. — Lots of beautiful things he told me.’
Anita cast them over pathetically in her mind. I sat biting my finger with rage.
‘— And I made him have roses in his hair. He sat so still and good while I trimmed him up, and was quite shy. He had a figure nearly like yours —’
Which compliment was a last insult to me.
‘And he had a long gold chain, threaded with little emeralds, that he wound round and round my knees, binding me like a prisoner, never thinking.’
‘And you wish he had kept you prisoner,’ I said.
‘No,’ she answered. ‘He couldn’t!’
‘I see! You just preserve him as the standard by which you measure the amount of satisfaction you get from the rest of us.’
‘Yes,’ she said, quietly.
Then I knew she was liking to make me furious.
‘But I thought you were rather ashamed of the adventure?’ I said.
‘No,’ she answered, perversely.
She made me tired. One could never be on firm ground with her. Always, one was slipping and plunging on uncertainly. I lay still, watching the sunshine streaming white outside.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
‘The waiter will smile when we go down for coffee.’
‘No —tell me!’
‘It is half past nine.’
She fingered the string of her shift. ‘What were you thinking?’ she asked, very low.
‘I was thinking, all you want, you get.’
‘In what way?’
‘In love.’
‘And what do I want?’
‘Sensation.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes.’
She sat with her head drooped down.
‘Have a cigarette,’ I said. ‘And are you going to that place for sleighing today?’
‘Why do you say I only want sensation?’ she asked quietly.
‘Because it’s all you’ll take from a man. — You won’t have a cigarette?’
‘No thanks — and what else could I take —?’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Nothing, I suppose,’ I replied.
Still she picked pensively at her chemise string.
‘Up to now, you’ve missed nothing — you haven’t felt the lack of anything — in love,’ I said.
She waited awhile.
‘Oh yes, I have,’ she said gravely.
Hearing her say it, my heart stood still.
A CHAPEL AND A HAY HUT AMONG THE MOUNTAINS
I
IT is all very well trying to wander romantically in the Tyrol. Sadly I sit on the bed, my head and shoulders emerging from the enormous overbolster like a cherub from a cloud, writing out of sheer exasperation, while Anita lies on the other bed and is amused.
Two days ago it began to rain. When I think of it I wonder. The gutter of the heavens hangs over the Tyrolese Alps.
We set off with the iridescent cloud of romance ahead, leading us southwards from the Isar towards Italy. We haven’t got far. And the iridescent cloud, turned into a column of endless water, still endures around the house.
I omit the pathos of our setting forth, in the dimmery-glimmery light of the Isar Valley, before breakfast-time, with blue chicory flowers open like wonder on either side the road. Neither will I describe our crawling at dinnertime along the foot of the mountains, the rain running down our necks from the flabby straw hats, and dripping cruelly into one’s boots from the pent-house of our rucksacks. We entered ashamed into a wayside inn, where seven ruddy, joyous peasants, three of them handsome, made a bonfire of their hearts in honour of Anita, whilst I sat in a corner and dripped...
Yesterday I admit it was fine in the afternoon and evening. We made tea by a waterfall among yellow-dangling noli-me-tangere flowers, while an inquisitive lot of mountains poked their heads up to look, and a great green grasshopper, armoured like Ivanhoe, took a flying leap into eternity over a lovely, black-blue gentian. At least I saw him no more.
They had told us there was a footpath over the mountain, three and a half hours to Glashütte. There was a faint track, and a myriad of strawberries like ruddy stars be1ow, and a few dark bilberries. We climbed one great steep slope, and scrambled down beyond, into a pine wood There it was damp and dark and depressing. But one makes the best of things, when one sets out on foot. So we toiled on for an hour, traversing the side of a slope, black, wet, gloomy, looking through the fir-trees across the gulf at another slope, black and gloomy and forbidding, shutting us back. For two hours we slipped and struggled, and still there we were, clamped between these two black slopes, listening to the water that ran uncannily, noisily along the bottom of the trap.
We grew silent and hot with exertion and the dark monotony of the struggle. A rucksack also has its moments of treachery, close friend though it seems. You are quite certain of a delicate and beautiful balance on a slippery tree-root; you take the leap; then the ironic rucksack gives you a pull from behind, and you are grovelling.
And the path had been a path. The side of the dark slope, steep as a roof, had innumerable little bogs where waters tried to ooze out and call themselves streams, and could not. Across these bogs went an old bed of fir-boughs, dancy and treacherous. So, there was a path! Suddenly there were no more fir-boughs, and one stood lost before the squalor of the slope. I wiped my brow.
‘You so soon lose your temper,’ said Anita. So I stood aside, and yielded her the lead.
She blundered into another little track lower down.
‘You see!’ she said, turning round.
I did not answer. She began to hum a little tune, because her path descended. We slipped and struggled. Then her path vanished into the loudly-snorting, chuckling stream, and did not emerge.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘But where is it?’ she said with vehemence and pathos.
‘You see even your road ends in nowhere,’ I said.
‘I hate you when you preach,’ she flashed. ‘Besides it doesn’t end in nowhere.’
‘At any rate,’ I said, ‘we can’t sleep on the end of it.’
I found another track, but I entered on it delicately, without triumph. We went in silence. And it vanished into the same loudly-snorting stream.
‘Oh, don’t look like that!’ cried Anita. So I followed the bedraggled tail of her skirts once more up the wet, dark opposition of the slope. We found another path, and once more we lost the scent in the overjoyed stream.
‘Perhaps we’re supposed to go across,’ I said meekly, as we stood beside the waters.
‘I — why did I take a damp match of a man like you!’ she cried. ‘One could scratch you for ever and you wouldn’t strike.’
I looked at her, wondering, and turned to the stream, which was cunningly bethinking itself. There were chunks of rock, and spouts and combs and rattles of sly water. So I put my raincoat over my rucksack and ventured over.
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The opposite bank was very steep and high. We were swallowed in this black gorge, swallowed to the bottom, and gazing upwards I set off on all fours, climbing with my raincoat over my rucksack, cloakwise, to leave me free. I scrambled and hauled and struggled.
And from below came shriek upon shriek of laughter. I reached the top, and looked down. I could see nothing, only the whirring of laughter came up.
‘What is it?’ I called, but the sound was lost amid the cackle of the waters. So I crawled over the edge and sat in the gloomy solitude, extinguished.
Directly I heard a shrill, frightened call:
‘Where are you?’
My heart exulted and melted at the same moment.
‘Come along,’ I cried, satisfied that there was one spot in this gloomy solitude to call to.
She arrived, scared with the steep climb, and the fear of loneliness in this place.
‘I might never have found you again,’ she said.
‘I don’t intend you should lose me,’ I said. So she sat down, and presently her head began to nod with laughter, and her bosom shook with laughter, and she was laughing wildly without me.
‘Well, what?’ I said.
‘You — you looked like a camel — with a hump — climbing up,’ she shrieked.
‘We’d better be moving,’ I said. She slipped and laughed and struggled. At last we came to a beautiful savage road. It was the bed of some stream that came no more this way, a mass of clear boulders leading up the slope through the gloom.
‘We are coming out now,’ said Anita, looking ahead. I also was quite sure of it. But after an hour of climbing, we were still in the bed of clear boulders, between dark trees, among the toes of the mountains.
Anita spied a hunter’s hut, made of bark, and she went to investigate. Night was coming on.
‘I can’t get in,’ she called to me, obscurely.
‘Then come,’ I said.
It was too wet and cold to sleep out of doors in the woods. But instead of coming, she stooped in the dark twilight for strawberries. I waited like the shadow of wrath. But she, unconcerned, careless and happy in her contrariety, gathered strawberries among the shadows.
‘We must find a place to sleep in,’ I said. And my utter insistence took effect.
She realized that I was lost among the mountains, as well as she, that night and the cold and the great dark slopes were close upon us, and we were of no avail, even being two, against the coldness and desolation of the mountains.
So in silence we scrambled upwards, hand in hand. Anita was sure a dozen times that we were coming out. At last even she got disheartened.
Then, in the darkness, we spied a hut beside a path among the thinning fir-trees.
‘It will be a woodman’s hut,’ she said.
‘A shrine,’ I answered.
I was right for once. It was a wooden hut just like a model, with a black old wreath hanging on the door. There was a click of the latch in the cold, watchful silence of the upper mountains, and we entered.
By the grey darkness coming in from outside we made out the tiny chapel, candles on the altar and a whole covering of ex-voto pictures on the walls, and four little praying-benches. It was all close and snug as a box.
Feeling quite safe, and exalted in this rare, upper shadow, I lit the candles, all. Point after point of flame flowed out on the night. There were six. Then I took off my hat and my rucksack, and rejoiced, my heart at home.
The walls of the chapel were covered close with naked little pictures, all coloured, painted by the peasants on wood, and framed with little frames. I glanced round, saw the cows and the horses on the green meadows, the men on their knees in their houses, and I was happy as if I had found myself among the angels.
‘What wonderful luck!’ I said to Anita.
‘But what are we going to do?’ she asked.
‘Sleep on the floor — between the praying-desks. There’s just room.’
‘But we can’t sleep on a wooden floor,’ she said.
‘What better can you find?’
‘A hay hut. There must be a hay hut somewhere near. We can’t sleep here.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said.
But I was bound to look at the little pictures. I climbed on to a bench. Anita stood in the open doorway like a disconsolate, eternal angel. The light of the six dusky tapers glimmered on her discontented mouth. Behind her, I could see tips of fir branches just illuminated, and then the night.
She turned and was gone like darkness into the darkness. I heard her boots upon the stones. Then I turned to the little pictures I loved. Perched upon the praying-desks, I looked at one, and then another. They were picture-writings that seemed like my own soul talking to me. They were really little pictures for God, because horses and cows and men and women and mountains, they are His own language. How should He read German and English and Russian, like a schoolmaster? The peasants could trust Him to understand their pictures: they were not so sure that He would concern Himself with their written script.
I was looking at a pale blue picture. That was a bedroom, where a woman lay in bed, and a baby lay in a cradle not far away. The bed was blue, and it seemed to be falling out of the picture, so it gave me a feeling of fear and insecurity. Also, as the distance receded, the bedstead got wider, uneasily. The woman lay looking straight at me, from under the huge, blue-striped overbolster. Her pink face was round like a penny doll’s, with the same round stare. And the baby, like a pink-faced farthing doll, also stared roundly.
‘Maria hat geholfen E.G. — 1777.’
I looked at them. And I knew that I was the husband looking and wondering. G., the husband, did not appear himself. It was from the little picture on his retina that this picture was reproduced. He could not sum it up, and explain it, this vision of his wife suffering in child-birth, and then lying still and at peace with the baby in the cradle. He could not make head or tail of it. But at least he could represent it, and hang it up like a mirror before the eyes of God, giving the statement even if he could get no explanation. And he was satisfied. And so, perforce, was I, though my heart began to knock for knowledge.
The men never actually saw themselves unless in precarious conditions. When their lives were threatened, then they had a fearful flash of self-consciousness, which haunted them till they had represented it. They represented themselves in all kinds of ridiculous postures, at the moment when the accident occurred.
Joseph Rieck, for example, was in a toppling-backward attitude rather like a footballer giving a very high kick and losing his balance. But on his left ankle had fallen a great grey stone, that might have killed him, squashing out much blood, orange-coloured — or so it looked by the candle-light — whilst the Holy Mary stood above in a bolster-frame of clouds, holding up her hands in mild surprise.
‘Joseph Rieck
Gott sey Danck gasagt 1834.’
It was curious that he thanked God because a stone had fallen on his ankle. But perhaps the thanks were because it had not fallen on his head. Or perhaps because the ankle had got better, though it looked a nasty smash, according to the picture. It didn’t occur to him to thank God that all the mountains of the Tyrol had not tumbled on him the first day he was born. It doesn’t occur to any of us. We wait till a big stone falls on our ankle. Then we paint a vivid picture and say: ‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ and we thank God that we’ve escaped. All kinds of men were saying: ‘Gott sey Danck’; either because big stones had squashed them, or because trees had come down on them whilst they were felling, or else because they’d tumbled over cliffs, or got carried away in streams: all little events which caused them to ejaculate: ‘God be thanked, I’m still alive’.
Then some of the women had picture prayers that were touching, because they were prayers for other people, for their children and not for themselves. In a sort of cell kneeled a woman, wearing a Catherine of Russia kind of dress, opposite a kneeling man in Vicar of Wakefield attire. Between them, on the stone
wall, hung two long iron chains with iron rings dangling at the end. Above these, framed in an oval of bolster-clouds, Christ on the Cross, and above Him, a little Maria, short in stature, something like Queen Victoria, with a very blue cloth over her head, falling down her dumpy figure. She, the Holy Mother of heaven, looked distressed. The woman kneeling in the cell put up her hands, saying:
‘O Mutter Gottes von Rerelmos, Ich bitte mach mir mein Kind von Gefangenschaft los mach im von Eissen und Bandten frey wansz des Gottliche Willen sey.
Susanna Grillen 1783.’
I suppose Herr Grillen knew that it was not the affair of the Mutter Gottes. Poor Susanna Grillen! It was natural and womanly in her to identify the powers that be with the eternal powers. What I can’t see, is whether the boy had really done anything wrong, or whether he had merely transgressed some law of some duke or king or community. I suppose the poor thing did not know herself how to make the distinction. But evidently the father, knowing he was in temporal difficulty, was not very active in asking help of the eternal.
One must look up the history of the Tyrol for the 1783 period.
A few pictures were family utterances, but the voice which spoke was always the voice of the mother. Marie Schneeberger thanked God for healing her son. She kneeled on one side of the bedroom, with her three daughters behind her; Schneeberger kneeled facing her, with a space between them, and his one son behind him. The Holy Mary floated above the space of their thanks. The whole family united this time to bless the heavenly powers that the bad had not been worse. And, in the face of the divine power, the man was separate from the woman, the daughter from the son, the sister from the brother — one set on one side, one set on the other, separate before the eternal grace, or the eternal fear.
The last set of pictures thanked God for the salvation of property. One lady had six cows — all red ones — painted feeding on a meadow with rocks behind. All the cows I have seen in these parts have been dun or buff coloured. But these are red. And the goodwife thanks God very sincerely for restoring to her that which was lost for five days, viz, her six cows and the little cow-girl Kate. The little girl did not appear in the picture nor in the thanks: she was only mentioned as having been lost along with the cows. I do not know what became of her. Cows can always eat grass. I suppose she milked her beasts, and perhaps cranberries were ripe. But five days was a long time for poor Kathel.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 593