Life with a Capital L Read online

  ‘The monks keep their peasants humble,’ I said to M—.

  ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘Don’t you think they are quite right? Don’t you think they should be humble?’ And he bridled like a little turkey-cock on his hind legs.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if there’s any occasion for humility, I do.’

  ‘Don’t you think there is occasion?’ he cried. ‘If there’s one thing worse than another, it’s this equality that has come into the world. Do you believe in it yourself?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe in equality. But the problem is, wherein does superiority lie.’

  ‘Oh,’ chirped M— complacently. ‘It lies in many things. It lies in birth and in upbringing and so on, but it is chiefly in mind. Don’t you think? Of course I don’t mean that the physical qualities aren’t charming. They are, and nobody appreciates them more than I do. Some of the peasants are beautiful creatures, perfectly beautiful. But that passes. And the mind endures.’

  I did not answer. M— was not a man one talked far with. But I thought to myself, I could not accept M—’s superiority to the peasant. If I had really to live always under the same roof with either one of them, I would have chosen the peasant. If I had had to choose, I would have chosen the peasant. Not because the peasant was wonderful and stored with mystic qualities. No, I don’t give much for the wonderful mystic qualities in peasants. Money is their mystery of mysteries, absolutely. No, if I chose the peasant it would be for what he lacked rather than for what he had. He lacked that complacent mentality that M— was so proud of, he lacked all the trivial trash of glib talk and more glib thought, all the conceit of our shallow consciousness. For his mindlessness I would have chosen the peasant: and for his strong blood-presence. M— wearied me with his facility and his readiness to rush into speech, and for the exhaustive nature of his presence. As if he had no strong blood in him to sustain him, only this modern parasitic lymph which cries for sympathy all the time.

  ‘Don’t you think yourself that you are superior to that peasant?’ he asked me, rather ironically. He half expected me to say no.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I replied. ‘But I think most middle-class, most so-called educated people are inferior to the peasant. I do that.’

  ‘Of course,’ said M— readily. ‘In their hypocrisy –’ He was great against hypocrisy – especially the English sort.

  ‘And if I think myself superior to the peasant, it is only that I feel myself like the growing tip, or one of the growing tips of the tree, and him like a piece of the hard, fixed tissue of the branch or trunk. We’re part of the same tree: and it’s the same sap,’ said I.

  ‘Why, exactly! Exactly!’ cried M—. ‘Of course! The Church would teach the same doctrine. We are all one in Christ – but between our souls and our duties there are great differences.’

  It is terrible to be agreed with, especially by a man like M—. All that one says, and means, turns to nothing.

  ‘Yes,’ I persisted. ‘But it seems to me the so-called culture, education, the so-called leaders and leading-classes today, are only parasites – like a great flourishing bush of parasitic consciousness flourishing on top of the tree of life, and sapping it. The consciousness of today doesn’t rise from the roots. It is just parasitic in the veins of life. And the middle and upper classes are just parasitic upon the body of life which still remains in the lower classes.’

  ‘What!’ said M— acidly. ‘Do you believe in the democratic lower classes?’

  ‘Not a bit,’ said I.

  ‘I should think not, indeed!’ he cried complacently.

  ‘No, I don’t believe the lower classes can ever make life whole again, till they do become humble, like the old peasants, and yield themselves to real leaders. But not to great negators like Lloyd George or Lenin or Briand.’

  ‘Of course! of course!’ he cried. ‘What you need is the Church in power again. The Church has a place for everybody.’

  ‘You don’t think the Church belongs to the past?’ I asked.

  ‘Indeed I don’t, or I shouldn’t be here. No,’ he said sententiously, ‘the Church is eternal. It puts people in their proper place. It puts women down into their proper place, which is the first thing to be done –’

  He had a great dislike of women, and was very acid about them. Not because of their sins, but because of their virtues: their economies, their philanthropies, their spiritualities. Oh, how he loathed women. He had been married, but the marriage had not been a success. He smarted still. Perhaps his wife had despised him, and he had not quite been able to defeat her contempt.

  So, he loathed women, and wished for a world of men. ‘They talk about love between men and women,’ he said. ‘Why it’s all a fraud. The woman is just taking all and giving nothing, and feeling sanctified about it. All she tries to do is to thwart a man in whatever he is doing. No, I have found my life in my friendships. Physical relationships are very attractive, of course, and one tries to keep them as decent and all that as one can. But one knows they will pass and be finished. But one’s mental friendships last for ever.’

  ‘With me, on the contrary,’ said I. ‘If there is no profound blood-sympathy, I know the mental friendship is trash. If there is real, deep blood response, I will stick to that if I have to betray all the mental sympathies I ever made, or all the lasting spiritual loves I ever felt.’

  He looked at me, and his face seemed to fall. Round the eyes he was yellow and tired and nervous. He watched me for some time.

  ‘Oh!’ he said, in a queer tone, rather cold. ‘Well, my experience has been the opposite.’

  We were silent for some time.

  ‘And you,’ I said, ‘even if you do manage to do all your studies and enter the monastery, do you think you will be satisfied?’

  ‘If I can be so fortunate, I do really,’ he said. ‘Do you doubt it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Your nature is worldly, more worldly than mine. Yet I should die if I had to stay up here.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, curiously.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. The past, the past. The beautiful, the wonderful past, it seems to prey on my heart, I can’t bear it.’

  He watched me closely.

  ‘Really!’ he said stoutly. ‘Do you feel like that? But don’t you think it is a far preferable life up here than down there? Don’t you think the past is far preferable to the future, with all this socialismo and these communisti and so on?’

  We were seated, in the sunny afternoon, on the wild hill-top high above the world. Across the stretch of pale, dry, standing thistles that peopled the waste ground, and beyond the rocks was the ruined convent. Rocks rose behind us, the summit. Away on the left were the woods which hid us from the great monastery. This was the mountain top, the last foothold of the old world. Below we could see the plain, the straight white road, straight as a thought, and the more flexible black railway with the railway station. There swarmed the ferrovieri like ants. There was democracy, industrialism, socialism, the red flag of the communists and the red, white and green tricolor of the fascisti. That was another world. And how bitter, how barren a world! Barren like the black cinder-track of the railway, with its two steel lines.

  And here above, sitting with the little stretch of pale, dry thistles around us, our back to a warm rock, we were in the Middle Ages. Both worlds were agony to me. But here, on the mountain top was worst: the past, the poignancy of the not-quite-dead past.

  ‘I think one’s got to go through with the life down there – get somewhere beyond it. One can’t go back,’ I said to him.

  ‘But do you call the monastery going back?’ he said. ‘I don’t. The peace, the eternity, the concern with things that matter. I consider it the happiest fate that could happen to me. Of course it means putting physical things aside. But when you’ve done that – why, it seems to me perfect.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re too worldly.’

  ‘But the monastery is worldly too. We’re not Trappists. Why the monaster
y is one of the centres of the world – one of the most active centres.’

  ‘Maybe. But that impersonal activity, with the blood suppressed and going sour – no, it’s too late. It is too abstract – political maybe –’

  ‘I’m sorry you think so,’ he said, rising. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘You’ll never be a monk here, M—. You see if you are.’

  ‘You don’t think I shall?’ he replied, turning to me. And there was a catch of relief in his voice. Really, the monastic state must have been like going to prison for him.

  ‘You haven’t a vocation,’ I said.

  ‘I may not seem to have, but I hope I actually have.’

  ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘Of course, if you’re so sure,’ he laughed, putting his hand on my arm.

  He seemed to understand so much, round about the questions that trouble one deepest. But the quick of the question he never felt. He had no real middle, no real centre bit to him. Yet, round and round about all the questions, he was so intelligent and sensitive.

  We went slowly back. The peaks of those Italian mountains in the sunset, the extinguishing twinkle of the plain away below, as the sun declined and grew yellow; the intensely powerful mediæval spirit lingering on this wild hill summit, all the wonder of the mediæval past; and then the huge mossy stones in the wintry wood, that was once a sacred grove; the ancient path through the wood, that led from temple to temple on the hill summit, before Christ was born; and then the great Cyclopean wall one passes at the bend of the road, built even before the pagan temples; all this overcame me so powerfully this afternoon, that I was almost speechless. That hill-top must have been one of man’s intense sacred places for three thousand years. And men die generation after generation, races die, but the new cult finds root in the old sacred place, and the quick spot of earth dies very slowly. Yet at last it too dies. But this quick spot is still not quite dead. The great monastery couchant there, half empty, but also not quite dead. And M— and I walking across as the sun set yellow and the cold of the snow came into the air, back home to the monastery! And I feeling as if my heart had once more broken: I don’t know why. And he feeling his fear of life, that haunted him, and his fear of his own self and its consequences, that never left him for long. And he seemed to walk close to me, very close. And we had neither of us anything more to say.

  Don Bernardo was looking for us as we came up under the archway, he hatless in the cold evening, his black dress swinging voluminous. There were letters for M—. There was a small cheque for him from America – about fifty dollars – from some newspaper in the Middle West that had printed one of his articles. He had to talk with Don Bernardo about this.

  I decided to go back the next day. I could not stay any longer. M— was very disappointed, and begged me to remain. ‘I thought you would stay a week at least,’ he said. ‘Do stay over Sunday. Oh do!’ But I couldn’t, I didn’t want to. I could see that his days were a torture to him – the long, cold days in that vast quiet building, with the strange and exhausting silence in the air, and the sense of the past preying on one, and the sense of the silent, suppressed scheming struggle of life going on still in the sacred place.

  It was a cloudy morning. In the green courtyard the big Don Anselmo had just caught the little Don Lorenzo round the waist and was swinging him over a bush, like lads before school. The Prior was just hurrying somewhere, following his long fine nose. He bade me good-bye; pleasant, warm, jolly, with a touch of wistfulness in his deafness. I parted with real regret from Don Bernardo.

  M— was coming with me down the hill – not down the carriage road, but down the wide old paved path that swoops so wonderfully from the top of the hill to the bottom. It feels thousands of years old. M— was quiet and friendly. We met Don Vincenzo, he who has the care of the land and crops, coming slowly, slowly uphill in his black cassock, treading slowly with his great thick boots. He was reading a little book. He saluted us as we passed. Lower down a strapping girl was watching three merino sheep among the bushes. One sheep came on its exquisite slender legs to smell of me, with that insatiable curiosity of a pecora. Her nose was silken and elegant as she reached it to sniff at me, and the yearning, wondering, inquisitive look in her eyes, made me realize that the Lamb of God must have been such a sheep as this.

  M— was miserable at my going. Not so much at my going, as at being left alone up there. We came to the foot of the hill, on to the town highroad. So we went into a little cave of a wine-kitchen to drink a glass of wine. M— chatted a little with the young woman. He chatted with everybody. She eyed us closely – and asked if we were from the monastery. We said we were. She seemed to have a little lurking antagonism round her nose, at the mention of the monastery. M— paid for the wine – a franc. So we went out on the highroad, to part.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I can only give you twenty lire, because I shall need the rest for the journey –’

  But he wouldn’t take them. He looked at me wistfully. Then I went on down to the station, he turned away uphill. It was market in the town, and there were clusters of bullocks, and women cooking a little meal at a brazier under the trees, and goods spread out on the floor to sell, and sacks of beans and corn standing open, clustered round the trunks of the mulberry trees, and wagons with their shafts on the ground. The old peasants in their brown homespun frieze and skin sandals were watching for the world. And there again was the Middle Ages.

  It began to rain, however. Suddenly it began to pour with rain, and my coat was wet through, and my trouser-legs. The train from Rome was late – I hoped not very late, or I should miss the boat. She came at last: and was full. I had to stand in the corridor. Then the man came to say dinner was served, so I luckily got a place and had my meal too. Sitting there in the dining-car, among the fat Neapolitans eating their macaroni, with the big glass windows steamed opaque and the rain beating outside, I let myself be carried away, away from the monastery, away from M—, away from everything.

  At Naples there was a bit of sunshine again, and I had time to go on foot to the Immacolatella, where the little steamer lay. There on the steamer I sat in a bit of sunshine, and felt that again the world had come to an end for me, and again my heart was broken. The steamer seemed to be making its way away from the old world, that had come to another end in me.

  It was after this I decided to go to Sicily. In February, only a few days after my return from the monastery, I was on the steamer for Palermo, and at dawn looking out on the wonderful coast of Sicily. Sicily, tall, forever rising up to her gem-like summits, all golden in dawn, and always glamorous, always hovering as if inaccessible, and yet so near, so distinct. Sicily unknown to me, and amethystine-glamorous in the Mediterranean dawn: like the dawn of our day, the wonder-morning of our epoch.

  I had various letters from M—. He had told me to go to Girgenti. But I arrived in Girgenti when there was a strike of sulphur-miners, and they threw stones. So I did not want to live in Girgenti. M— hated Taormina – he had been everywhere, tried everywhere, and was not, I found, in any good odour in most places. He wrote however saying he hoped I would like it. And later he sent the Legion manuscript. I thought it was good, and told him so. It was offered to publishers in London, but rejected.

  In early April I went with my wife to Syracuse for a few days: lovely, lovely days, with the purple anemones blowing in the Sicilian fields, and Adonis-blood red on the little ledges, and the corn rising strong and green in the magical, malarial places, and Etna flowing now to the northward, still with her crown of snow. The lovely, lovely journey from Catania to Syracuse, in spring, winding round the blueness of that sea, where the tall pink asphodel was dying, and the yellow asphodel like a lily showing her silk. Lovely, lovely Sicily, the dawn-place, Europe’s dawn, with Odysseus pushing his ship out of the shadows into the blue. Whatever had died for me, Sicily had then not died: dawn-lovely Sicily, and the Ionian sea.

  We came back, and the world was lovely: our own house abov
e the almond trees, and the sea in the cove below. Calabria glimmering like a changing opal away to the left, across the blue, bright straits and all the great blueness of the lovely dawn-sea in front, where the sun rose with a splendour like trumpets every morning, and me rejoicing like a madness in this dawn, day-dawn, life-dawn, the dawn which is Greece, which is me.

  Well, into this lyricism suddenly crept the serpent. It was a lovely morning, still early. I heard a noise on the stairs from the lower terrace, and went to look. M— on the stairs, looking up at me with a frightened face.

  ‘Why!’ I said. ‘Is it you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘A terrible thing has happened.’

  He waited on the stairs, and I went down. Rather unwillingly, because I detest terrible things, and the people to whom they happen. So we leaned on the creeper-covered rail of the terrace, under festoons of creamy bignonia flowers, and looked at the pale blue, ethereal sea.

  ‘When did you get back?’ said he.

  ‘Last evening.’

  ‘Oh! I came before. The contadini said they thought you would come yesterday evening. I’ve been here several days.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘At the San Domenico.’

  The San Domenico being then the most expensive hotel here, I thought he must have money. But I knew he wanted something of me.

  ‘And are you staying some time?’

  He paused a moment, and looked round cautiously.

  ‘Is your wife there?’ he asked, sotto voce.

  ‘Yes, she’s upstairs.’

  ‘Is there anyone who can hear?’

  ‘No – only old Grazia down below, and she can’t understand anyhow.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, stammering. ‘Let me tell you what’s happened. I had to escape from the monastery. Don Bernardo had a telephone message from the town below, that the carabinieri were looking for an Americano – my name – Of course you can guess how I felt, up there! Awful! Well –! I had to fly at a moment’s notice. I just put two shirts in a handbag and went. I slipped down a path – or rather, it isn’t a path – down the back of the hill. Ten minutes after Don Bernardo had the message I was running down the hill.’