Chapter 33

Christophe was in sympathy with these men who strive less to seem than to be, and, under the recent veneer of an ultramodern industrialism, keep clearly marked the most reposeful features of the old Europe of peasants and townsmen. Among them he had found a few good friends, grave, serious, and faithful, who hold isolated and immured in them regrets for the past; they were looking on at the gradual disappearance of the old Switzerland with a sort of religious fatalism and Calvinistic pessimism; great gray souls. Christophe seldom saw them. His old wounds were apparently healed: but they had been too deep wholly to be cured. He was fearful of forming new ties with men. It was something for this reason that he liked to dwell in a country where it was easy to live apart, a stranger amid a throng of strangers. For the rest he rarely stayed long in any one place; often he changed his lair: he was like an old migratory bird which needs space, and has its country in the air ... _"Mein Reich ist in der Luft."_

An evening in summer.

He was walking in the mountains above a village. He was striding along with his hat in his hand, up a winding road. He came to a neck where the road took a double turn, and passed into shadow between two slopes; on either side were nut-trees and pines. It was like a little shut-in world. On either hand the road seemed to come to an end, cut off at the edge of the void. Beyond were blue distance and the gleaming air. The peace of evening came down like a gentle rain.

They came together each at the same moment turning the bend at either end of the neck. She was dressed in black, and stood out against the clear sky: behind her were two children, a boy and a girl, between six and eight, who were playing and picking flowers. They recognized each other at a distance of a few yards. Their emotion was visible in their eyes; but neither brought it into words; each gave only an imperceptible movement. He was deeply moved: she ... her lips trembled a little. They stopped. Almost in a whisper:

"Grazia!"

"You here!"

They held out their hands and stood without a word. Grazia was the first to make an effort to break the silence. She told him where she lived, and asked him where he was staying. Question and answer were mechanical, and they hardly listened, heard later, when their hands had parted: they were absorbed in gazing at each other. The children came back to her. She introduced them. He felt hostile towards them, and looked at them with no kindness, and said nothing: he was engrossed with her, occupied only in studying her beautiful face that bore some marks of suffering and age. She was embarrassed by his gaze, and said:

"Will you come, this evening?"

And she gave the name of her hotel.

He asked her where her husband was. She pointed to her black dress. He was too much moved to say more, and left her awkwardly. But when he had taken a few strides he came back to the children, who were picking strawberries, and took them roughly in his arms and kissed them, and went away.

In the evening he went to the hotel, and found her on the veranda, with the blinds drawn. They sat apart. There were very few people about, only two or three old people. Christophe was irritated by their presence. Grazia looked at him, and he looked at her, and murmured her name over and over again.

"Don't you think I have changed?" she asked.

His heart grew big.

"You have suffered," he said.

"You too," she answered pityingly, scanning the deep marks of agony and passion in his face.

They were at a loss for words.

"Please," he said, a moment later, "let us go somewhere else. Could we not find somewhere to be alone and talk?"

"No, my dear. Let us stay here. It is good enough here. No one is heeding us at all."

"I cannot talk freely here."

"That is all the better."

He could not understand why. Later, when in memory he went over their conversation, he thought she had not trusted him. But she was instinctively afraid of emotional scenes: unconsciously she was seeking protection from any surprise of their hearts: the very awkwardness of their intimacy in a public room, so sheltering the modesty of her secret emotions, was dear to her.

In whispers, with long intervals of silence, they sketched their lives in outline. Count Berény had been killed in a duel a few months ago; and Christophe saw that she had not been very happy with him. Also, she had lost a child, her first-born. She made no complaint, and turned the conversation from herself to question Christophe, and, as he told her of his tribulations, she showed the most affectionate compassion. Bells rang. It was Sunday evening. Life stood still.

She asked him to come again next day but one. He was hurt that she should be so little eager to see him again. In his heart happiness and sorrow were mingled.

Next day, on some pretext, she wrote and asked him to come. He was delighted with her little note. This time she received him in her private room. She was with her two children. He looked at them, still a little uneasily, but very tenderly. He thought the little girl--the elder of the two--very like her mother: but he did not try to match the boy's looks. They talked about the country, the times, the books lying open on the table:--but their eyes spoke of other things. He was hoping to be able to talk more intimately when a hotel acquaintance came in. He marked the pleasure and politeness with which Grazia received the stranger: she seemed to make no difference between her two visitors. He was hurt by it, but could not be angry with her. She proposed that they should all go for a walk and he accepted; the presence of the other woman, though she was young and charming, paralyzed him: his day was spoiled.

He did not see Grazia again for two days. During that time he lived but for the hours he was to spend with her.--Once more his efforts to speak to her were doomed to failure. While she was very gentle and kind with him, she could not throw off her reserve. All unconsciously Christophe added to her difficulty by his outbursts of German sentimentality, which embarrassed her and forced her instinct into reaction.

He wrote her a letter which touched her, saying that life was so short! Their lives were already so far gone! Perhaps they would have only a very little time in which to see each other, and it was pitiful, almost criminal, not to employ it in frank converse.

She replied with a few affectionate words, begging him to excuse her for her distrust, which she could not avoid, since she had been so much hurt by life: she could not break her habitual reserve: any excessive display, even of a genuine feeling, hurt and terrified her. But well she knew the worth of the friendship that had come to her once more: and she was as glad of it as he. She asked him to dine with her that evening.

His heart was brimming with gratitude. In his room, lying on his bed, he sobbed. It was the opening of the flood-gates of ten years of solitude: for, since Olivier's death, he had been utterly alone. Her letter gave the word of resurrection to his heart that was so famished for tenderness. Tenderness!... He thought he had put it from him: he had been forced to learn how to do without it! Now he felt how sorely he needed it, and the great stores of love that had accumulated in him....

It was a sweet and blessed evening that they spent together.... He could only speak to her of trivial subjects, in spite of their intention to hide nothing from each other. But what goodly things he told her through the piano, which with her eyes she invited him to use to tell her what he had to say! She was struck by the humility of the man whom she had known in his violence and pride. When he went away the silent pressure of their hands told them that they had found each other, and would never lose what they had regained.--It was raining, and there was not a breath of wind. His heart was singing.

She was only able to stay a few days longer, and she did not postpone her departure for an hour. He dared not ask her to do so, nor complain. On their last day they went for a walk with the children; there came a moment when he was so full of love and happiness that he tried to tell her so: but, with a very gentle gesture, she stopped him and smiled:

"Hush! I feel everything that you could say."

They sat down at the turn of the road where they had met. Still smiling she looked down into the valley below: but it was not the valley that she saw. He looked at the gentle face marked with the traces of bitter suffering: a few white tresses showed in her thick black hair. He was filled with a pitying, passionate adoration of this beloved creature who had travailed and been impregnated with the suffering of the soul. In every one of the marks of time upon her the soul was visible.--And, in a low, trembling voice, he craved, as a precious favor, which she granted him, a white hair from her head.

* * * * *

She went away. He could not understand why she would not have him accompany her. He had no doubt of her feeling for him, but her reserve disconcerted him. He could not stay alone in that place, and set out in another direction. He tried to occupy his mind with traveling and work. He wrote to Grazia. She answered him, two or three week later, with very brief letters, in which she showed her tranquil friendship, knowing neither impatience nor uneasiness. They hurt him and he loved them. He would not admit that he had any right to reproach her; their affection was too recent, too recently renewed. He was fearful of losing it. And yet every letter he had from her breathed a calm loyalty which should have made him feel secure. But she was so different from him!...

They had agreed to meet in Rome, towards the end of the autumn. Without the thought of seeing her, the journey would have had little charm for Christophe. His long isolation had made him retiring: he had no taste for that futile hurrying from place to place which is so dear to the indolence of modern men and women. He was fearful of a change of habit, which is dangerous to the regular work of the mind. Besides, Italy had no attractions for him. He knew it only in the villainous music of the Verists and the tenor arias to which every now and then the land of Virgil inspires men of letters on their travels. He felt towards Italy the hostility of an advanced artist, who has too often heard the name of Rome invoked by the worst champions of academic routine. Finally, the old leaven of instinctive antipathy which ever lies fermenting in the hearts of the men of the North towards the men of the South, or at least towards the legendary type of rhetorical braggart which, in the eyes of the men of the North, represents the men of the South. At the mere thought of it Christophe disdainfully curled his lip.... No, he had no desire for the more acquaintance of the musicless people--(for, in the music of modern Europe, what is the place of their mandolin tinkling and melodramatic posturing declamation?).--And yet Grazia belonged to this people. To join her again, whither and by what devious ways would Christophe not have gone? He would win through by shutting his eyes until he came to her.

* * * * *

He was used to shutting his eyes. For so many years the shutters of his soul had been closed upon his inward life. Now, in this late autumn, it was more necessary than ever. For three weeks together it had rained incessantly. Then a gray pall of impenetrable mists had hung over the valleys and towns of Switzerland, dripping and wet. His eyes had forgotten the sunlight. To rediscover in himself its concentrated energy he had to begin by clothing himself in night, and, with his eyes closed, to descend to the depths of the mine, the subterranean galleries of his dreams. There in the seams of coal slept the sun of days gone by. But as the result of spending his life crouching there, digging, he came out burned, stiff in back and knees, with limbs deformed, half petrified, dazed eyes, that, like a bird's, could see keenly in the night. Many a time Christophe had brought up from the mine the fire he had so painfully extracted to warm the chill of heart. But the dreams of the North smack of the warmth of the fireside and the closed room. No man notices it while he lives in it: dear is that heavy air, dear the half-light and the soul's dreams in the drowsy head. We love the things we have. We must be satisfied with them!...

When, as he passed the barrier of the Alps, Christophe, dozing in a corner of the carriage, saw the stainless sky and the limpid light falling upon the slopes of the mountains, he thought he must be dreaming. On the other side of the wall he had left a darkened sky and a fading day. So sudden was the change that at first he felt more surprise than joy. It was some time before his drowsy soul awoke and began slowly to expand and burst the crust that was upon it, and his heart could free itself from the shadows of the past. But as the day wore on, the mellow light took his soul into its arms, and, wholly forgetting all that had been, he drank greedily of the delight of seeing.

Through the plains of Milan. The eye of day mirrored in the blue canals, a network of veins through the downy rice fields. Mountains of Vinci, snowy Alps soft in their brilliance, ruggedly encircling the horizon, fringed with red and orange and greeny gold and pale blue. Evening falling on the Apennines. A winding descent by little sheer hills, snakelike curving, in a repeating, involved rhythm like a farandole.--And suddenly, at the bottom of the slope, like a kiss, the breath of the sea and the smell of orange-trees. The sea, the Latin sea and its opal light, whereon, swaying, were the sails of little boats like wings folded back....

By the sea, at a fishing-village, the train stopped for a while. It was explained to the passengers that there had been a landslip, as a result of the heavy rains, in a tunnel between Genoa and Pisa: all the trains were several hours late. Christophe, who was booked through to Rome, was delighted by the accident which provoked the loud lamentations of his fellow-passengers. He jumped down to the platform and made use of the stoppage to go down to the sea, which drew him on and on. The sea charmed him so that when, a few hours later, the engine whistled as it moved on, Christophe was in a boat, and, as the train passed, shouted: "Good-by!" In the luminous night, on the luminous sea, he sat rocking in the boat, as it passed along the scented coast with its promontories fringed with tiny cypress-trees. He put up at a village and spent there five days of unbroken joy. He was like a man issuing from a long fast, hungrily eating. With all his famished senses he gulped down the splendid light.... Light, the blood of the world, that flows in space like a river of life, and through our eyes, our lips, our nostrils, every pore of our skins, filters through to the depths of our bodies, light, more necessary to life than bread,--he who sees thee stripped of thy northern veils, pure, burning, naked, marvels how ever he could have lived without knowing thee, and deeply feels that he can never live more without possessing thee....

For five days Christophe was drunk with the sun. For five days he forgot--for the first time--that he was a musician. The music of his soul was merged into light. The air, the sea, the earth: the brilliant symphony played by the sun's orchestra. And with what innate art does Italy know how to use that orchestra! Other peoples paint from Nature: the Italians collaborate with her: they paint with sunlight. The music of color. All is music, everything sings. A wall by the roadside, red, fissured with gold: above it, two cypress-trees with their tufted crests: and all around the eager blue of the sky. A marble staircase, white, steep, narrow, climbing between pink walls against the blue front of a church. Any one of their many-colored houses, apricot, lemon, cedrate, shining among the olive-trees, has the effect of a marvelous ripe fruit among the leaves. In Italy seeing is sensual: the eyes enjoy color, as the palate and the tongue delight in a juicy, scented fruit. Christophe flung himself at this new repast with eager childlike greed: he made up for the asceticism of the gray visions to which till then he had been condemned. His abounding nature, stifled by Fate, suddenly became conscious of powers of enjoyment which he had never used: they pounced on the prey presented to them; scents, colors, the music of voices, bells and the sea, the kisses of the air, the warm bath of light in which his ageing, weary soul began to expand.... Christophe had no thought of anything. He was in a state of beatific delight, and only left it to share his joy with those he met: his boatman, an old fisherman, with quick eyes all wrinkled round, who wore a red cap like that of a Venetian senator;--his only fellow-boarder, a Milanese, who ate macaroni and rolled his eyes like Othello: fierce black eyes filled with a furious hatred; an apathetic, sleepy man;--the waiter in the restaurant, who, when he carried a tray, bent his neck, and twisted his arms and his body like an angel of Bernini;--the little Saint John, with sly, winking eyes, who begged on the road, and offered the passers-by an orange on a green branch. He would hail the carriage-drivers, sitting huddled on their seats, who every now and then would, in a nasal, droning, throaty voice, intone the thousand and one couplets. He was amazed to find himself humming _Cavalleria Rusticana_. He had entirely forgotten the end of his journey. Forgotten, too, was his haste to reach the end and Grazia....

Forgotten altogether was she until the day when the beloved image rose before him. Was it called up by a face seen on the road or a grave, singing note in a voice? He did not know. But a time came when, from everything about him, from the circling, olive-clad hills, from the high, shining peaks of the Apennines, graven by the dense shadows and the burning sun, and from the orange-groves heavy with flowers and fruit, and the deep, heaving breath of the sea, there shone the smiling face of the beloved. Through the countless eyes of the air, her eyes were upon him. In that beloved earth she flowered, like a rose upon a rose-tree.

Then he regained possession of himself. He took the train for Rome and never stopped. He had no interest in the old memories of Italy, or the cities of the art of past ages. He saw nothing of Rome, nor wanted to: and what he did see at first, in passing, the styleless new districts, the square blocks of buildings, gave him no desire to see more.

As soon as he arrived he went to see Grazia. She asked him:

"How did you come? Did you stop at Milan or Florence?"

"No," he said. "Why should I?"

She laughed.

"That's a fine thing to say! And what do you think of Rome?"

"Nothing," he said. "I haven't seen it!"

"Not yet?"

"Nothing. Not a single monument. I came straight to you from my hotel."

"You don't need to go far to see Rome.... Look at that wall opposite.... You only need to see its light."

"I only see you," he said.

"You are a barbarian. You only see your own ideas. When did you leave Switzerland?"

"A week ago."

"What have you been doing since then?"

"I don't know. I stopped, by chance, at a place by the sea. I never noticed its name. I slept for a week. Slept, with my eyes open. I do not know what I have seen, or what I have dreamed. I think I was dreaming of you. I know that it was very beautiful. But the most lovely part of it all is that I forgot everything...."

"Thank you!" she said.

(He did not listen.)

"... Everything," he went on. "Everything that was then, everything that had been before. I am a new man. I am beginning to live again."

"It is true," she said, looking into his laughing eyes. "You have changed since we last met."

He looked at her, too, and found her no less different from his memory of her. Not that she had changed in two months, but he was seeing her with new eyes. Yonder, in Switzerland, the image of old days, the faint shadow of the girl Grazia, had flitted between his gaze and this new actual beloved. Now, in the sun of Italy, the dreams of the North had melted away: in the clear light of day he saw her real soul and body. How far removed she was from the little, wild, imprisoned girl of Paris, how far from the woman with the smile like Saint John, whom he had met one evening, shortly after her marriage, only to lose her again! Out of the little Umbrian Madonna had flowered a lovely Roman lady:

_Color verus, corpus solidum et succi plenum._

Her figure had taken on an harmonious fullness: her body was bathed in a proud languor. The very genius of tranquillity hovered in her presence. She had that greed of sunny silence, and still contemplation, the delightful joy in the peace of living which the people of the North will never really know. What especially she had preserved out of the past was her great kindness which inspired all her other feelings. But in her luminous smile many new things were to be read: a melancholy indulgence, a little weariness, much knowledge of the ways of men, a fine irony, and tranquil common sense. The years had veiled her with a certain coldness, which protected her against the illusions of the heart; rarely could she surrender herself; and her tenderness was ever on the alert, with a smile that seemed to know and tell everything, against the passionate impulses that Christophe found it hard to suppress. She had her weaknesses, moments of abandonment to the caprice of the minute, a coquetry at which she herself mocked but never fought against. She was never in revolt against things, nor against herself: she had come to a gentle fatalism, and she was altogether kind, but a little weary.

* * * * *

She entertained a great deal, and--at least, in appearance--not very selectively: but as, for the most part, her intimates belonged to the same world, breathed the same atmosphere, had been fashioned by the same habits, they were homogeneous and harmonious enough, and very different from the polite assemblages that Christophe had known in France and Germany. The majority were of old Italian families, vivified here and there by foreign marriages; they all had a superficial cosmopolitanism and a comfortable mixture of the four chief languages, and the intellectual baggage of the four great nations of the West. Each nation brought into the pool its personal characteristic, the Jews their restlessness and the Anglo-Saxons their phlegm, but everything was quickly absorbed in the Italian melting-pot. When centuries of great plundering barons have impressed on a race the haughty and rapacious profile of a bird of prey, the metal may change, but the imprint remains the same. Many of the faces that seemed the most pronouncedly Italian, with a Luini smile, or the voluptuous, calm gaze of a Titian, flowers of the Adriatic, or the plains of Lombardy, had blossomed on the shrubs of the North transplanted to the old Latin soil. Whatever colors be spread on the palette of Rome, the color which stands out is always Roman.