It Was A Benediction To
Stretch Out All Supported By The Dry Earth, With My Little Side-Bag
For Pillow,
And to look at the clear night above the hills, and to
listen to the very distant music, and to
Wonder whether or not, in
this strange southern country, there might not be snakes gliding about
in the undergrowth. Caught in such a skein of influence I was soothed
and fell asleep.
For a little while I slept dreamlessly.
Just so much of my living self remained as can know, without
understanding, the air around. It is the life of trees. That
under-part, the barely conscious base of nature which trees and
sleeping men are sunk in, is not only dominated by an immeasurable
calm, but is also beyond all expression contented. And in its very
stuff there is a complete and changeless joy. This is surely what the
great mind meant when it said to the Athenian judges that death must
not be dreaded since no experience in life was so pleasurable as a
deep sleep; for being wise and seeing the intercommunion of things, he
could not mean extinction, which is nonsense, but a lapse into that
under-part of which I speak. For there are gods also below the earth.
But a dream came into my sleep and disturbed me, increasing life, and
therefore bringing pain. I dreamt that I was arguing, at first easily,
then violently, with another man. More and more he pressed me, and at
last in my dream there were clearly spoken words, and he said to me,
'You must be wrong, because you are so cold; if you were right you
would not be so cold.' And this argument seemed quite reasonable to me
in my foolish dream, and I muttered to him, 'You are right, I must be
in the wrong. It is very cold ...' Then I half opened my eyes and saw
the telegraph pole, the trees, and the lake. Far up the lake, where
the Italian Frontier cuts it, the torpedo-boats, looking for
smugglers, were casting their search-lights. One of the roving beams
fell full on me and I became broad awake. I stood up. It was indeed
cold, with a kind of clinging and grasping chill that was not to be
expressed in degrees of heat, but in dampness perhaps, or perhaps in
some subtler influence of the air.
I sat on the bank and gazed at the lake in some despair. Certainly I
could not sleep again without a covering cloth, and it was now past
midnight, nor did I know of any house, whether if I took the road I
should find one in a mile, or in two, or in five. And, note you, I was
utterly exhausted. That enormous march from Faido, though it had been
wisely broken by the siesta at Bellinzona, needed more than a few cold
hours under trees, and I thought of the three poor francs in my
pocket, and of the thirty-eight miles remaining to Milan.
The stars were beyond the middle of their slow turning, and I watched
them, splendid and in order, for sympathy, as I also regularly, but
slowly and painfully, dragged myself along my appointed road. But in a
very short time a great, tall, square, white house stood right on the
roadway, and to my intense joy I saw a light in one of its higher
windows. Standing therefore beneath, I cried at the top of my voice,
'Hola!' five or six times. A woman put her head out of the window into
the fresh night, and said, 'You cannot sleep here; we have no rooms,'
then she remained looking out of her window and ready to analyse the
difficulties of the moment; a good-natured woman and fat.
In a moment another window at the same level, but farther from me,
opened, and a man leaned out, just as those alternate figures come in
and out of the toys that tell the weather. 'It is impossible,' said
the man; 'we have no rooms.'
Then they talked a great deal together, while I shouted, _'Quid vis?
Non e possibile dormire in la foresta! e troppo fredo! Vis ne me
assassinare? Veni de Lugano - e piu - non e possibile ritornare!'_ and
so forth.
They answered in strophe and antistrophe, sometimes together in full
chorus, and again in semichorus, and with variations, that it was
impossible. Then a light showed in the chinks of their great door; the
lock grated, and it opened. A third person, a tall youth, stood in the
hall. I went forward into the breach and occupied the hall. He blinked
at me above a candle, and murmured, as a man apologizing 'It is not
possible.'
Whatever I have in common with these southerners made me understand
that I had won, so I smiled at him and nodded; he also smiled, and at
once beckoned to me. He led me upstairs, and showed me a charming bed
in a clean room, where there was a portrait of the Pope, looking
cunning; the charge for that delightful and human place was sixpence,
and as I said good-night to the youth, the man and woman from above
said good-night also. And this was my first introduction to the most
permanent feature in the Italian character. The good people!
When I woke and rose I was the first to be up and out. It was high
morning. The sun was not yet quite over the eastern mountains, but I
had slept, though so shortly yet at great ease, and the world seemed
new and full of a merry mind. The sky was coloured like that high
metal work which you may see in the studios of Paris; there was gold
in it fading into bronze, and above, the bronze softened to silver. A
little morning breeze, courageous and steady, blew down the lake and
provoked the water to glad ripples, and there was nothing that did not
move and take pleasure in the day.
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