There were hundreds of cattle painted standing on meadows like a child’s Noah’s Ark toys arranged in groups: a group of red cows, a group of brown horses, a group of brown goats, a few grey sheep; as if they had all been summoned into their classes. Then Maria in her cloud-frame blessed them. But standing there so hieroglyphic, the animals had a symbolic power. They did not merely represent property. They were the wonderful animal life which man must take for food. Arrayed there in their numbers, they were almost frightening, as if they might overthrow us, like an army.
Only one woman had had an accident. She was seen falling downstairs, just landing at the bottom into her peaceful kitchen where the kitten lay asleep by the stove. The kitten slept on, but Mary in a blue mantle appeared through the ceiling, mildly shocked and deprecating.
Alone among all the women, the women who had suffered childbirth or had suffered through some child of their own, was this housewife who had fallen downstairs into the kitchen where the cat slept peacefully. Perhaps she had not any children. However that may be, her position was ignoble, as she bumped on the bottom stair.
There they all were, in their ex-voto pictures that I think the women had ordered and paid for, these peasants of the valley below, pictured in their fear. They lived under the mountains where always was fear. Sometimes they knew it to close on a man or a woman. Then there was no peace in the heart of this man till the fear had been pictured, till he was represented in the grip of terror, and till the picture had been offered to the Deity, the dread, unnamed Deity; whose might must be acknowledged, whilst in the same picture the milder divine succour was represented and named and thanked. Deepest of all things, among the mountain darknesses, was the ever-felt fear. First of all gods was the unknown god who crushed life at any moment, and threatened it always. His shadow was over the valleys. And a tacit acknowledgement and propitiation of Him were the ex-voto pictures, painted out of fear and offered to Him unnamed. Whilst upon the face of them all was Mary the divine Succour, She, who had suffered, and knew. And that which had suffered and known, had prevailed, and was openly thanked. But that which had neither known nor suffered, the dread unnamed, which had aimed and missed by a little, this must be acknowledged covertly. For his own soul’s sake, man must acknowledge his own fear, acknowledge the power beyond him.
Whilst I was reading the inscriptions high up on the wall, Anita came back. She stood below me in her weatherbeaten panama hat, looking up dissatisfied. The light fell warm on her face. She was discontented and excited.
‘There’s a gorgeous hay hut a little farther on,’ she said.
‘Hold me a candle a minute, will you?’ I said.
‘A great hay hut full of hay, in an open space. I climbed in—’
‘Do you mind giving me a candle for a moment?’
‘But no — come along —’
‘I just want to read this — give me a candle.’ In a silence of impatience, she handed me one of the tapers. I was reading a little inscription.
‘Won’t you come?’ she said.
‘We could sleep well here,’ I said. ‘It is so dry and secure.’
‘Why!’ she cried irritably. ‘Come to the hay hut and see.’
‘In one moment,’ I said.
She turned away.
‘Isn’t this altar adorable!’ she cried. ‘Lovely little paper roses, and ornaments.’
She was fingering some artificial flowers, thinking to put them in her hair. I jumped down, saying I must finish reading my pictures in the morning. So I gathered the rucksack and examined the cash-box by the door. It was open and contained six kreutzers. I put in forty pfennigs, out of my poor pocket, to pay for the candles. Then I called Anita away from the altar trinkets, and we closed the door, and were out in the darkness of the mountains.
II
I resented being dragged out of my kapelle into the black and dismal night. In the chapel were candles and a boarded floor. And the streams in the mountains refuse to run anywhere but down the paths made by man. Anita said: ‘You cannot imagine how lovely your chapel looked, as I came on it from the dark, its row of candles shining, and all the inside warm!’
‘Then why on earth didn’t you stay there?’ I said.
‘But think of sleeping in a hay hut,’ she cried.
‘I think a kapelle is much more soul stirring,’ I insisted.
‘But much harder to the bones,’ she replied.
We struggled out on to a small meadow, between the mountain tops. Anita called it a kettle. I presumed then that we had come in by the spout and should have to get out by the lid. At any rate, the black heads of the mountains poked up all round, and I felt tiny, like a beetle in a basin.
The hay hut stood big and dark and solid, on the clear grass.
‘I know just how to get in,’ said Anita, who was full of joy now we were going to be uncomfortably situated. ‘And now we must eat and drink tea.’
‘Where’s your water?’ I asked.
She listened intently. There was a light swishing of pine-trees on the mountain side.
‘I hear it,’ she said.
‘Somewhere down some horrid chasm,’ I answered.
‘I will go and look,’ she said.
‘Well,’ I answered, ‘you needn’t go hunting on a hill-side where there isn’t the faintest sign of a rut or watercourse.’
We spoke sotto voce, because of the darkness and the stillness. I led down the meadow, nearly breaking my neck over the steepest places. Now I was very thirsty, and we had only a very little schnapps.
‘There is sure to be water in the lowest place,’ I said. She followed me stealthily and with glee. Soon we squelched in a soft place.
‘A confounded marsh,’ I said.
‘But,’ she answered, ‘I hear it trickling.’
‘What’s the good of its trickling, if it’s nasty.’
‘You are consoling,’ she mocked.
‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘it rises here. So if we can get at the Quelle —’
I don’t know why ‘Quelle’ was necessary, instead of ‘source’, but it was. We paddled up the wet place, and in the darkness found where the water welled out. Having filled our can, and our boots by the way, we trudged back. I slipped and spilled half the water.
‘This,’ said Anita, ‘makes me perfectly happy.’
‘I wish it did me,’ I replied.
‘Don’t you like it, dear?’ she said, grieved.
My feet were soddened and stone cold. Everywhere was wet, and very dark.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘But the chapel —’
So we sat at the back of the hut, where the wind didn’t blow so badly, and we made tea and ate sausage. The wind wafted the flame of the spirit lamp about, drops of rain began to fall. In the pitch dark, we lost our sausage and the packet of tea among the logs.
‘At last I’m perfectly happy,’ Anita repeated.
I found it irritating to hear her. I was looking for the tea. Before we had finished this precious meal, the rain came pelting down. We hurried the things into our rucksacks and bundled into the hut. There was one little bread left for morning.
The hut was as big as a small cottage. It was made of logs laid on top of one another, but they had not been properly notched, so there were stripes of light all round the Egyptian darkness. And in a hay hut one dares not strike a light.
‘There’s the ladder to the big part,’ said Anita.
The front compartment was only one-quarter occupied with hay: the back compartment was full nearly to the ceiling. I climbed up the ladder, and felt the hay, putting my hand straight into a nasty messy place where the water had leaked in among the hay from the roof.
‘That’s all puddly, and the man’ll have his whole crop rotten if he doesn’t watch it,’ I said. ‘It’s a stinkingly badly-made hay hut.’
‘Listen to the rain,’ whispered Anita.
It was rattling on the roof furiously. Then, although there were slots of light, and a hundred horse-power
draught tearing across the hut, I was glad to be inside the place.
‘Hay,’ I remarked after a while, ‘has two disadvantages. It tickles like all the creeping insects, and it is porous to the wind.’
‘“Porous to the wind”,’ mocked Anita.
‘It is,’ I said.
There was a great preparation. All valuables, such as hair-pins and garters and pfennigs and hellers and trinkets and collar studs, I carefully collected in my hat. It was pitch dark. I laid the hat somewhere. We took off our soddened shoes and stockings. Imagining they would somehow generate heat and dry better, I pushed the boots into the wall of hay. Then I hung up various draggled garments, hoping they would dry.
‘I insist on your tying up your head in a hanky, and on my spreading my waistcoat for a pillow-cloth,’ I said.
Anita humbly submitted. She was too full of joy to refuse. We had no blankets, nothing but a Burberry each.
‘A good large hole,’ I said, ‘as large as a double grave. And I only hope it won’t be one.’
‘If you catch cold,’ said Anita, ‘I shall hate you.’
‘And if you catch cold,’ I answered, ‘I s’ll nurse you tenderly.’
‘You dear!’ she exclaimed, affectionately.
We dug like two moles at the grave.
‘But see the mountains of hay that come out,’ she said.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘you can amuse your German fancy by putting them back again, and sleeping underneath them.’
‘How lovely!’ she cried.
‘And how much lovelier a German fat bolster would be.’
‘Don’t!’ she implored. ‘Don’t spoil it.’
‘I’d sleep in a lobster-pot to please you,’ I said.
‘I don’t want you to please me, I want you to be pleased,’ she insisted.
‘God help me, I will be pleased,’ I promised.
At first it was pretty warm in the trough, but every minute I had to rub my nose or my neck. This hay was the most insidious, persistent stuff. However much I tried to fend it off, one blade tickled my nostrils, a seed fell on my eyelid, a great stalk went down my neck. I wrestled with it like a Hercules, to keep it at bay, but in vain. And Anita merely laughed at my puffs and snorts.
‘Evidently,’ I said, ‘you have not so sensitive a skin as I.’
‘Oh no — not so delicate and fine,’ she mocked.
‘In fact, you can’t have,’ I said, sighing. But presently, she also sighed.
‘Why,’ she said, ‘did you choose a waistcoat for a pillow? I’ve always got my face in one of the armholes.’
‘You should arrange it better,’ I said.
We sighed, and suffered the fiendish ticklings of the hay. Then I suppose we slept, in a sort of fitful fever.
I was awakened by the cracks of thunder. Anita clutched me. It was fearfully dark. Like a great whip clacking, the thunder cracked and spattered over our hut, seemed to rattle backwards and forwards from the mountain peaks.
‘Something more for your money,’ I groaned, too sleepy to live.
‘Does thunder strike hay huts?’ Anita asked.
‘Yes, it makes a dead set at them — simply preys on hay huts, does thunder,’ I declared.
‘Now you needn’t frighten me,’ she reproached.
‘Go to sleep,’ I commanded.
But she wouldn’t. There was Anita, there was thunder, and lightning, then a raging wind and cataracts of rain, and the slow, persistent, evil tickling of the hay seeds, all warring on my sleepiness. Occasionally I got a wink. Then it began to get cold, with the icy wind rushing in through the wide slots between the logs of the walls. The miserable hay couldn’t even keep us warm. Through the chinks of it penetrated the vicious wind. And Anita would not consent to be buried, she would have her shoulders and head clear. So of course we had little protection. It grew colder and colder, miserably cold. I burrowed deeper and deeper. Then I felt Anita’s bare feet, and they were icy.
‘Woman,’ I said, ‘poke your wretched head in, and be covered up, and save what modicum of animal heat you can generate.’
‘I must breathe,’ she answered crossly.
‘The hay is quite well aerated,’ I assured her.
At last it began to get dawn. Slots of grey came in place of slots of blue-black, all round the walls. There was twilight in the crate of a hay hut. I could distinguish the ladder and the rucksacks. Somewhere outside, I thought, drowsily, a boy was kicking a salmon tin down the street; till it struck me as curious, and I remembered it was only the sound of a cow-bell, or a goat-bell.
‘It’s morning,’ said Anita.
‘Call this morning?’ I groaned.
‘Are you warm, dear?’
‘Baked.’
‘Shall we get up?’
‘Yes. At all events we can be one degree more wretched and cold.’
‘I’m perfectly happy,’ she persisted.
‘You look it,’ I said.
Immediately she was full of fear.
‘Do I look horrid?’ she asked.
She was huddled in her coat: her tousled hair was full of hay.
I pulled on my boots and clambered through the square opening.
‘But come and look!’ I exclaimed.
It had snowed terrifically during the night; not down at our level, but a little higher up. We were on a grassy place, about half a mile across, and all round us was the blackness of pine-woods, rising up. Then suddenly in the middle air, it changed, and great peaks of snow balanced, intensely white, in the pallid dawn. All the upper world around us belonged to the sky; it was wonderfully white, and fresh, and awake with joy. I felt I had only to run upwards through the pine-trees, then I could tread the slopes that were really sky-slopes, could walk up the sky.
‘No!’ cried Anita, in protest, her eyes filling with tears. ‘No!’
We had quite a solemn moment together, all because of that snow. And the fearfully gentle way we talked and moved, as if we were the only two people God had made, touches me to remember.
‘Look!’ cried Anita.
I thought at least the Archangel Gabriel was standing beside me. But she only meant my breath, that froze while on the air. It reminded me.
‘And the cold!’ I groaned. ‘It fairly reduces one to an ash.’
‘Yes, my dear — we must drink tea,’ she replied solicitously. I took the can for water. Everything looked so different in the morning. I could find the marsh, but not the water bubbling up. Anita came to look for me. She was barefoot, because her boots were wet. Over the icy mown meadow she came, took the can from me, and found the spring. I went back and prepared breakfast. There was one little roll, some tea, and some schnapps. Anita came with water, balancing it gingerly. She had a distracted look.
‘Oh, how it hurts!’ she cried. ‘The ice-cold stubbles, like blunt icy needles, they did hurt!’
I looked at her bare feet and was furious with her.
‘No one,’ I cried, ‘but a lunatic, would dream of going down there barefoot under these conditions —’
‘“Under these conditions”,’ she mocked.
‘It ought to have hurt you more,’ I cried. ‘There is no crime but stupidity.’
‘“Crime but stupidity”,’ she echoed, laughing at me.
Then I went to look at her feet.
We ate the miserable knob of bread, and swallowed the tea. Then I bullied Anita into coming away. She performed a beautiful toilet that I called the ‘brave Tyrolese’, and at last we set out. The snow all above us was laughing with brightness. But the earth, and our boots, were soddened.
‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ cried Anita.
‘Yes — with feet of clay,’ I answered. ‘Wet, raw clay!’
Sobered, we squelched along an indefinite track. Then we spied a little, dirty farm-house, and saw an uncouth-looking man go into the cow-sheds.
‘This,’ I said, ‘is where the villains and robbers live.’
Then we saw the woman. She was wearing the
blue linen trousers that peasant women wear at work.
‘Go carefully,’ said Anita. ‘Perhaps she hasn’t performed her toilet.’
‘I shouldn’t think she’s got one to perform,’ I replied.
It was a deadly lonely place, high up, cold, and dirty. Even in such a frost, it stank bravely beneath the snow peaks. But I went softly.
Seeing Anita, the woman came to the door. She was dressed in blue overalls, trousers and bodice, the trousers tight round the ankles, nearly like the old-fashioned leg-of-mutton sleeves. She was pale, seemed rather deadened, as if this continuous silence acted on her like a deadening drug. Anita asked her the way. She came out to show us, as there was no track, walking before us with strides like a man, but in a tired, deadened sort of way. Her figure was not ugly, and the nape of her neck was a woman’s, with soft wisps of hair. She pointed us the way down.
‘How old was she?’ I asked Anita, when she had gone back.
‘How old do you think?’ replied Anita.
‘Forty to forty-five.’
‘Thirty-two or three,’ answered Anita.
‘How do you know, any more than I?’
‘I am sure.’
I looked back. The woman was going up the steep path in a mechanical, lifeless way. The brilliant snow glistened up above, in peaks. The hollow green cup that formed the farm was utterly still. And the woman seemed infected with all this immobility and silence. It was as if she were gradually going dead, because she had no place there. And I saw the man at the cow-shed door. He was thin, sandy moustaches; and there was about him the same look of distance, as if silence, loneliness, and the mountains deadened him too.
We went down between the rocks, in a cleft where a river rushed. On every side, streams fell and bounded down. Some, coming over the sheer wall of a cliff drifted dreamily down like a roving rope of mist. All round, so white and candid, were the flowers they call Grass of Parnassus, looking up at us, and the regal black-blue gentian reared themselves here and there.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 594