At the mouth of the hut, Geoffrey was making the fire. The woman got out coffee from the box: Geoffrey set the tin to boil. They were arranging breakfast when Paula appeared. She was hatless. Bits of hay stuck in her hair, and she was white-faced — altogether, she did not show to advantage.
"Ah — you!" she exclaimed, seeing Geoffrey.
"Hello!" he answered. "You're out early."
"Where's Maurice?"
"I dunno, he should be back directly."
Paula was silent.
"When have you come?" she asked.
"I come last night, but I could see nobody about. I got up half an hour sin', an' put th' ladder up ready to take the stack-cloth up."
Paula understood, and was silent. When Maurice returned with the faggots, she was crouched warming her hands. She looked up at him, but he kept his eyes averted from her. Geoffrey met the eyes of Lydia, and smiled. Maurice put his hands to the fire.
"You cold?" asked Paula tenderly.
"A bit," he answered, quite friendly, but reserved. And all the while the four sat round the fire, drinking their smoked coffee, eating each a small piece of toasted bacon, Paula watched eagerly for the eyes of Maurice, and he avoided her. He was gentle, but would not give his eyes to her looks. And Geoffrey smiled constantly to Lydia, who watched gravely.
The German girl succeeded in getting safely into the Vicarage, her escapade unknown to anyone save the housemaid. Before a week was out, she was openly engaged to Maurice, and when her month's notice expired, she went to live at the farm.
Geoffrey and Lydia kept faith one with the other.
CHRISTS IN THE TIROL
THE real Tirol seems to come not far south of the Brenne and to extend right north to the Starnberger See. Even at Sterzing the rather gloomy atmosphere of the Tirolese Alps is dispersing, the approach of the south is felt. And strangely enough, the roadside crucifixes become less and less interesting after Sterzing. Walking from Munich down to Italy, I have looked at hundreds of Martertafeln, and now I miss them; these painted shrines on Lake Garda are not the same.
I, who see a tragedy in every cow, began by seeing one in th Secession pictures in Munich. All these new paintings seemed so shrill and restless. Those that were meant for joy shrieked joy, and sorrow was dished as a sensation, curiously, subtly spiced. I thought of some of our English artists, that seem to suck their sadness like a mournful lollipop. That is, at any rate, a more comfortable way. And then, for miles and endless miles, one must walk past crucifixes.
I got rather scared of them in the end. At first they were mostly factory-made, so that I did not notice them, any more than I noticed the boards with warnings, except just to observe they were there. And then, coming among the others carved in wood by the peasant artists, I began to notice. They create almost an atmosphere, an atmosphere of their own on the countryside.
The first I really saw, and the one that startled me into awareness, was in a marshy place at the foot of the mountains. A dead Christ hung in an old shrine. He was broad and handsome, he was a Bavarian peasant. I looked at his body and at his limbs, and recognized him almost as one of the men I had seen in the Gasthaus the evening before: a peasant farmer, working himself to the bone, but not giving in. His plain, rudimentary face stared straight in front, and the neck was stiffened. He might have said: “Yes, I am suffering. I look at you, and you can see me. Perhaps something will happen, will help. If not, I’ll stick it”. I loved him. He seemed stubborn and struggling from the root of his soul, his human soul. No Godship had been thrust upon him. He was human clay, a peasant Prometheus Christ, his poor soul bound in him, blind, but stubborn, struggling against the fact of the nails.
And after him, when I see so many Christs posing on the Cross, a la Guido Reni, I recognize them as the more conventional symbol, as devoid of personal meaning as is our St. George and the Dragon, and I go by.
But then there are so many Christs that are men, carved by men. In the Zemna valley, right in the middle of the Tirol, there are half-a-dozen crucifixes, evidently by the same worker. They have all got the same body and the same face, though one has a fair beard. The largest of them is more than life-size. He has a strangely brutal face, that aches with weariness of pain, and he looks as if he were just dead. He has fallen forwards on the cross, the weight of his full-grown mature body tearing his hands on the nails. And on his rather ugly, passionate mouth is despair and bitterness and death. The peasants, as they drive their pack-horses along the dark valley, take off their hats in passing, half afraid. It is sombre and damp, and there hangs the falling body of the man who has died in bitterness of spirit. There is something dreadful about the bitter despair of the crucifix. I think of the man that carved it. He was afraid. They were nearly all afraid, when they carved and erected these monuments to physical pain, just as the sturdy peasants are afraid, as they take off their hats in the mountain gloom.
They are afraid of physical pain. It terrifies them. They raise, in their startled helplessness of suffering, these Christs, these human attempts at deciphering the riddle of pain. In the same way, more or less, they paint the little pictures of some calamity — a man drowned in a stream, or killed by a falling tree — and nail it up near the spot where the accident occurred. There are thousands of these pictures, painted just as a child would do them. A man is seen immersed in water up to the waist, his hands in the air. The water flows wildly, a bridge stands serenely, the man must either have his feet on the bottom or must be performing some rare swimming miracle. But it says the bridge broke beneath him and he was drowned. Yet he is seen hallooing wildly, the water not up to his breast. His neighbour painted the picture, partly out of a curious love of sensational mishap, partly out of genuine dread lest a bridge should fall under himself also. His family nailed the picture to the tree at the end of the broken bridge, partly to get prayers for his soul, partly to insist on the fact that “in the midst of life we are in death”. And we, as we look at it — when we are not amused — wonder if we have as great a horror and terror of death and pain as these people have; or if our horror and terror are only a little more complex; and if all art is not a kind of accustoming ourselves to the idea of suffering and death, so that we can more and more comprehend them, even if we do not really understand.
I can do with all the Christs that have a bit of fight in them, or some stillness of soul. But I hate the Christs who just suffer, or who just whine. Some of them look up to heaven, turn their eyes skyward and pull down the corners of their mouths. Then I say: “You haven’t got it bad enough, my dear fellow. Your cross isn’t much more than an ailment for you to whine about”. Some of them look pale and done-for, and I think: “Poor devil, he hadn’t got much spunk”. And then, some are just nothing. Indeed, I used to think I never should see a Christus who was anything but neutral. In their attempts at drawing Jesus the artists have made so many bloodless creatures, neither man nor woman, and a good deal less interesting than either. They have extracted so many mundane qualities, that they have left nothing but a fishy neutrality, usually with curled hair, and offered it to us as a picture of Jesus.
I return to my peasant Christs, that I love. I have mentioned the stubborn, Prometheus Christ, and the bitter, despairing Christ, and the Christ like a pale, dead young man who has suffered too much, and the rather sentimental Christ: all of them men, and rather real.
Then, in a tiny glass case beside a high-road in the mountains, sits another Christ that half makes me laugh and half makes me want to sit down and weep. His little head rests on his hand, his elbow on his knee, and he meditates, half wearily. I am strongly reminded of Walther von der Vogelweide, and the German mediæval spirit. Detached, he sits and dreams and broods, in his little golden crown of thorns and his little red flannel cloak, that some peasant woman has stitched. “Couvre- toi de gloire — couvre-toi de flannelle”, I think to myself. But he sits and dreams and broods. I think he is the forefather of the warm-hearted German philosopher and professor.
&n
bsp; Beyond the Brenner, there seems again a kind of falsity in the Christs. The wayside chapels became fearfully ornate and florid, the Christus neutral, or sensational. There is in a chapel near St. Jakob the most ghastly Christus it is possible to imagine. He is seated, after the crucifixion, and in the most dreadful bloody mess. His eyes, which are turned slightly to look at you, are bloodshot till they are scarlet and glistening, and the very iris seems crimsoned. Where the skin is torn away at the wounds, the living red muscles are bare, and one can almost see the intestines, red with blood, bulging from the hole in the side. And the misery, and the almost low hate, the almost criminal look on the bloody disfigured face, is shocking. That is a Christ of the new, sensational sort.
I have not seen anyone salute the Christus, south of the Brenner, in the Austrian Tirol. There is a queer feeling about Austria, as if it were waiting to take its impression from some other nation. On the Franco-German frontier, one feels two distinct and antagonistic nationalities, mixing but not mingling. But Austria merges into Germany on one side, and merges into Italy on the other, till one looks for Austria, and wonders where it is. And Austria seems to be looking for itself. Its soldiers have no more nationality than the Chocolate Soldier’s, and the Austrian official uniform is worthy of an essay to itself. It creates a dandy and a decent fellow, but no impression of office. At the back of the German official is Germany, at the back of an Austrian official — a gentle deprecation.
So, in Austria, I have seen a fallen Christus. It was on the Taufen, not so very far from Meran. I was looking at the snow, and descending through the cold morning air, when I noticed a little Christus shed, very old. It was all of aged, silvery-grey wood, covered on the top with a thicket of grey-green lichen. And on the rocks at the foot of the cross was the armless Christus who had tumbled down, and lay on his back, in a weird attitude. It was one of the old peasant Christs, carved out of wood, with the curious long, wedge-shaped shins that are characteristic. The arms had broken off at the shoulders, and hung on their nails, as the ex voto limbs are hung in the shrines. But these dangled from their palms, upside-down, the muscles carved in wood looking startling. And the icy-cold wind blew them backwards and forwards. I dared not touch the fallen image, nor the arms. I wish a priest would go and make it right. And I wish he would wash off the nasty and sensational streams of blood that flow from the brow and knees and feet, hundreds of red stripes, down the body of so many Austrian Christs. They hide the man, and make a messy horror.
And I suppose most of the carvers of these wayside crucifixes were right. There was a Christ who rebelled against his suffering, and one who was bitter with a sense of futility, and one who gave in to his misery, and one who hated the persecutors, and one who dreamed wistfully, all on the same cross. And perhaps there was one who was peaceful in his sense of right, and one who was ashamed for having let the crowd make beasts of themselves, batten on his suffering, and one who thought: “I am of you, I might be among you, yelling at myself in the same cruel way. But I am not, and that is something — ”.
All those Christs, like a populace, hang in the mountains under their little sheds. And perhaps they are falling, one by one. And I suppose our Christs in England are such as Hamlet and Tom Jones and Jude the Obscure.
SECOND BEST
“Oh, I’m tired!” Frances exclaimed petulantly, and in the same instant she dropped down on the turf, near the hedge-bottom. Anne stood a moment surprised, then, accustomed to the vagaries of her beloved Frances, said:
“Well, and aren’t you always likely to be tired, after travelling that blessed long way from Liverpool yesterday?” and she plumped down beside her sister. Anne was a wise young body of fourteen, very buxom, brimming with common sense. Frances was much older, about twenty-three, and whimsical, spasmodic. She was the beauty and the clever child of the family. She plucked the goose-grass buttons from her dress in a nervous, desperate fashion. Her beautiful profile, looped above with black hair, warm with the dusky-and-scarlet complexion of a pear, was calm as a mask, her thin brown hand plucked nervously.
“It’s not the journey,” she said, objecting to Anne’s obtuseness. Anne looked inquiringly at her darling. The young girl, in her self-confident, practical way, proceeded to reckon up this whimsical creature. But suddenly she found herself full in the eyes of Frances; felt two dark, hectic eyes flaring challenge at her, and she shrank away. Frances was peculiar for these great, exposed looks, which disconcerted people by their violence and their suddenness.
“What’s a matter, poor old duck?” asked Anne, as she folded the slight, wilful form of her sister in her arms. Frances laughed shakily, and nestled down for comfort on the budding breasts of the strong girl.
“Oh, I’m only a bit tired,” she murmured, on the point of tears.
“Well, of course you are, what do you expect?” soothed Anne. It was a joke to Frances that Anne should play elder, almost mother to her. But then, Anne was in her unvexed teens; men were like big dogs to her: while Frances, at twenty-three, suffered a good deal.
The country was intensely morning-still. On the common everything shone beside its shadow, and the hillside gave off heat in silence. The brown turf seemed in a low state of combustion, the leaves of the oaks were scorched brown. Among the blackish foliage in the distance shone the small red and orange of the village.
The willows in the brook-course at the foot of the common suddenly shook with a dazzling effect like diamonds. It was a puff of wind. Anne resumed her normal position. She spread her knees, and put in her lap a handful of hazel nuts, whity-green leafy things, whose one cheek was tanned between brown and pink. These she began to crack and eat. Frances, with bowed head, mused bitterly.
“Eh, you know Tom Smedley?” began the young girl, as she pulled a tight kernel out of its shell.
“I suppose so,” replied Frances sarcastically.
“Well, he gave me a wild rabbit what he’d caught, to keep with my tame one — and it’s living.”
“That’s a good thing,” said Frances, very detached and ironic.
“Well, it is! He reckoned he’d take me to Ollerton Feast, but he never did. Look here, he took a servant from the rectory; I saw him.”
“So he ought,” said Frances.
“No, he oughtn’t! and I told him so. And I told him I should tell you — an’ I have done.”
Click and snap went a nut between her teeth. She sorted out the kernel, and chewed complacently.
“It doesn’t make much difference,” said Frances.
“Well, ‘appen it doesn’t; but I was mad with him all the same.”
“Why?”
“Because I was; he’s no right to go with a servant.”
“He’s a perfect right,” persisted Frances, very just and cold.
“No, he hasn’t, when he’d said he’d take me.”
Frances burst into a laugh of amusement and relief.
“Oh, no; I’d forgot that,” she said, adding, “And what did he say when you promised to tell me?”
“He laughed and said, ‘he won’t fret her fat over that.’“
“And she won’t,” sniffed Frances.
There was silence. The common, with its sere, blonde-headed thistles, its heaps of silent bramble, its brown-husked gorse in the glare of sunshine, seemed visionary. Across the brook began the immense pattern of agriculture, white chequering of barley stubble, brown squares of wheat, khaki patches of pasture, red stripes of fallow, with the woodland and the tiny village dark like ornaments, leading away to the distance, right to the hills, where the check-pattern grew smaller and smaller, till, in the blackish haze of heat, far off, only the tiny white squares of barley stubble showed distinct.
“Eh, I say, here’s a rabbit hole!” cried Anne suddenly. “Should we watch if one comes out? You won’t have to fidget, you know.”
The two girls sat perfectly still. Frances watched certain objects in her surroundings: they had a peculiar, unfriendly look about them: the weight of greenish
elderberries on their purpling stalks; the twinkling of the yellowing crab-apples that clustered high up in the hedge, against the sky: the exhausted, limp leaves of the primroses lying flat in the hedge-bottom: all looked strange to her. Then her eyes caught a movement. A mole was moving silently over the warm, red soil, nosing, shuffling hither and thither, flat, and dark as a shadow, shifting about, and as suddenly brisk, and as silent, like a very ghost of joie de vivre. Frances started, from habit was about to call on Anne to kill the little pest. But, to-day, her lethargy of unhappiness was too much for her. She watched the little brute paddling, snuffing, touching things to discover them, running in blindness, delighted to ecstasy by the sunlight and the hot, strange things that caressed its belly and its nose. She felt a keen pity for the little creature.
“Eh, our Fran, look there! It’s a mole.”
Anne was on her feet, standing watching the dark, unconscious beast. Frances frowned with anxiety.
“It doesn’t run off, does it?” said the young girl softly. Then she stealthily approached the creature. The mole paddled fumblingly away. In an instant Anne put her foot upon it, not too heavily. Frances could see the struggling, swimming movement of the little pink hands of the brute, the twisting and twitching of its pointed nose, as it wrestled under the sole of the boot.
“It does wriggle!” said the bonny girl, knitting her brows in a frown at the eerie sensation. Then she bent down to look at her trap. Frances could now see, beyond the edge of the boot-sole, the heaving of the velvet shoulders, the pitiful turning of the sightless face, the frantic rowing of the flat, pink hands.
“Kill the thing,” she said, turning away her face.
“Oh — I’m not,” laughed Anne, shrinking. “You can, if you like.”
“I don’t like,” said Frances, with quiet intensity.
After several dabbling attempts, Anne succeeded in picking up the little animal by the scruff of its neck. It threw back its head, flung its long blind snout from side to side, the mouth open in a peculiar oblong, with tiny pinkish teeth at the edge. The blind, frantic mouth gaped and writhed. The body, heavy and clumsy, hung scarcely moving.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 602