_On the Lago di Garda_
_1_
THE SPINNER AND THE MONKS
The Holy Spirit is a Dove, or an Eagle. In the Old Testament it was an
Eagle; in the New Testament it is a Dove.
And there are, standing over the Christian world, the Churches of the
Dove and the Churches of the Eagle. There are, moreover, the Churches
which do not belong to the Holy Spirit at all, but which are built to
pure fancy and logic; such as the Wren Churches in London.
The Churches of the Dove are shy and hidden: they nestle among trees,
and their bells sound in the mellowness of Sunday; or they are gathered
into a silence of their own in the very midst of the town, so that one
passes them by without observing them; they are as if invisible,
offering no resistance to the storming of the traffic.
But the Churches of the Eagle stand high, with their heads to the skies,
as if they challenged the world below. They are the Churches of the
Spirit of David, and their bells ring passionately, imperiously, falling
on the subservient world below.
The Church of San Francesco was a Church of the Dove. I passed it
several times in the dark, silent little square, without knowing it was
a church. Its pink walls were blind, windowless, unnoticeable, it gave
no sign, unless one caught sight of the tan curtain hanging in the door,
and the slit of darkness beneath. Yet it was the chief church of
the village.
But the Church of San Tommaso perched over the village. Coming down the
cobbled, submerged street, many a time I looked up between the houses
and saw the thin old church standing above in the light, as if it
perched on the house-roofs. Its thin grey neck was held up stiffly,
beyond was a vision of dark foliage, and the high hillside.
I saw it often, and yet for a long time it never occurred to me that it
actually existed. It was like a vision, a thing one does not expect to
come close to. It was there standing away upon the house-tops, against a
glamour of foliaged hillside. I was submerged in the village, on the
uneven, cobbled street, between old high walls and cavernous shops and
the houses with flights of steps.
For a long time I knew how the day went, by the imperious clangour of
midday and evening bells striking down upon the houses and the edge of
the lake. Yet it did not occur to me to ask where these bells rang. Till
at last my everyday trance was broken in upon, and I knew the ringing of
the Church of San Tommaso. The church became a living connexion with me.
So I set out to find it, I wanted to go to it. It was very near. I could
see it from the piazza by the lake. And the village itself had only a
few hundreds of inhabitants. The church must be within a stone's throw.
Yet I could not find it. I went out of the back door of the house, into
the narrow gully of the back street. Women glanced down at me from the
top of the flights of steps, old men stood, half-turning, half-crouching
under the dark shadow of the walls, to stare. It was as if the strange
creatures of the under-shadow were looking at me. I was of
another element.
The Italian people are called 'Children of the Sun'. They might better
be called 'Children of the Shadow'. Their souls are dark and nocturnal.
If they are to be easy, they must be able to hide, to be hidden in lairs
and caves of darkness. Going through these tiny chaotic backways of the
village was like venturing through the labyrinth made by furtive
creatures, who watched from out of another element. And I was pale, and
clear, and evanescent, like the light, and they were dark, and close,
and constant, like the shadow.
So I was quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the
village. I could not find my way. I hurried towards the broken end of a
street, where the sunshine and the olive trees looked like a mirage
before me. And there above me I saw the thin, stiff neck of old San
Tommaso, grey and pale in the sun. Yet I could not get up to the church,
I found myself again on the piazza.
Another day, however, I found a broken staircase, where weeds grew in
the gaps the steps had made in falling, and maidenhair hung on the
darker side of the wall. I went up unwillingly, because the Italians
used this old staircase as a privy, as they will any deep side-passage.
But I ran up the broken stairway, and came out suddenly, as by a
miracle, clean on the platform of my San Tommaso, in the
tremendous sunshine.
It was another world, the world of the eagle, the world of fierce
abstraction. It was all clear, overwhelming sunshine, a platform hung in
the light. Just below were the confused, tiled roofs of the village, and
beyond them the pale blue water, down below; and opposite, opposite my
face and breast, the clear, luminous snow of the mountain across the
lake, level with me apparently, though really much above.
I was in the skies now, looking down from my square terrace of cobbled
pavement, that was worn like the threshold of the ancient church. Round
the terrace ran a low, broad wall, the coping of the upper heaven where
I had climbed.
There was a blood-red sail like a butterfly breathing down on the blue
water, whilst the earth on the near side gave off a green-silver smoke
of olive trees, coming up and around the earth-coloured roofs.
It always remains to me that San Tommaso and its terrace hang suspended
above the village, like the lowest step of heaven, of Jacob's ladder.
Behind, the land rises in a high sweep. But the terrace of San Tommaso
is let down from heaven, and does not touch the earth.
I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries
of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous creature. My
senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced darkness. My
skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if
it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical
contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the
enclosure. It was a thick, fierce darkness of the senses. But my
soul shrank.
I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the
marvellous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed to
distil me into itself.
Across, the heavy mountain crouched along the side of the lake, the
upper half brilliantly white, belonging to the sky, the lower half dark
and grim. So, then, that is where heaven and earth are divided. From
behind me, on the left, the headland swept down out of a great,
pale-grey, arid height, through a rush of russet and crimson, to the
olive smoke and the water of the level earth. And between, like a blade
of the sky cleaving the earth asunder, went the pale-blue lake, cleaving
mountain from mountain with the triumph of the sky.
Then I noticed that a big, blue-checked cloth was spread on the parapet
before me, over the parapet of heaven. I wondered why it hung there.
Turning round, on the other side of the terrace, under a caper-bush that
hung like a blood-stain from the grey wall above her, stood a little
grey woman whose fingers were busy. Like the grey church, she made me
feel as if I were not in existence. I was wandering by the parapet of
heaven, looking down. But she stood back against the solid wall, under
the caper-bush, unobserved and unobserving. She was like a fragment of
earth, she was a living stone of the terrace, sun-bleached. She took no
notice of me, who was hesitating looking down at the earth beneath. She
stood back under the sun-bleached solid wall, like a stone rolled down
and stayed in a crevice.
Her head was tied in a dark-red kerchief, but pieces of hair, like dirty
snow, quite short, stuck out over her ears. And she was spinning. I
wondered so much, that I could not cross towards her. She was grey, and
her apron, and her dress, and her kerchief, and her hands and her face
were all sun-bleached and sun-stained, greyey, bluey, browny, like
stones and half-coloured leaves, sunny in their colourlessness. In my
black coat, I felt myself wrong, false, an outsider.
She was spinning, spontaneously, like a little wind. Under her arm she
held a distaff of dark, ripe wood, just a straight stick with a clutch
at the end, like a grasp of brown fingers full of a fluff of blackish,
rusty fleece, held up near her shoulder. And her fingers were plucking
spontaneously at the strands of wool drawn down from it. And hanging
near her feet, spinning round upon a black thread, spinning busily, like
a thing in a gay wind, was her shuttle, her bobbin wound fat with the
coarse, blackish worsted she was making.
All the time, like motion without thought, her fingers teased out the
fleece, drawing it down to a fairly uniform thickness: brown, old,
natural fingers that worked as in a sleep, the thumb having a long grey
nail; and from moment to moment there was a quick, downward rub, between
thumb and forefinger, of the thread that hung in front of her apron, the
heavy bobbin spun more briskly, and she felt again at the fleece as she
drew it down, and she gave a twist to the thread that issued, and the
bobbin spun swiftly.
Her eyes were clear as the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were
dear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was like a
sun-worn stone.
'You are spinning,' I said to her.
Her eyes glanced over me, making no effort of attention.
'Yes,' she said.
She saw merely a man's figure, a stranger standing near. I was a bit of
the outside, negligible. She remained as she was, clear and sustained
like an old stone upon the hillside. She stood short and sturdy, looking
for the most part straight in front, unseeing, but glancing from time to
time, with a little, unconscious attention, at the thread. She was
slightly more animated than the sunshine and the stone and the
motionless caper-bush above her. Still her fingers went along the strand
of fleece near her breast.
'That is an old way of spinning,' I said.
'What?'
She looked up at me with eyes clear and transcendent as the heavens. But
she was slightly roused. There was the slight motion of the eagle in her
turning to look at me, a faint gleam of rapt light in her eyes. It was
my unaccustomed Italian.
'That is an old way of spinning,' I repeated.
'Yes--an old way,' she repeated, as if to say the words so that they
should be natural to her. And I became to her merely a transient
circumstance, a man, part of the surroundings. We divided the gift of
speech, that was all.
She glanced at me again, with her wonderful, unchanging eyes, that were
like the visible heavens, unthinking, or like two flowers that are open
in pure clear unconsciousness. To her I was a piece of the environment.
That was all. Her world was clear and absolute, without consciousness of
self. She was not self-conscious, because she was not aware that there
was anything in the universe except _her_ universe. In her universe I
was a stranger, a foreign _signore_. That I had a world of my own, other
than her own, was not conceived by her. She did not care.
So we conceive the stars. We are told that they are other worlds. But
the stars are the clustered and single gleaming lights in the night-sky
of our world. When I come home at night, there are the stars. When I
cease to exist as the microcosm, when I begin to think of the cosmos,
then the stars are other worlds. Then the macrocosm absorbs me. But the
macrocosm is not me. It is something which I, the microcosm, am not.
So that there is something which is unknown to me and which nevertheless
exists. I am finite, and my understanding has limits. The universe is
bigger than I shall ever see, in mind or spirit. There is that which
is not me.
If I say 'The planet Mars is inhabited,' I do not know what I mean by
'inhabited', with reference to the planet Mars. I can only mean that
that world is not my world. I can only know there is that which is not
me. I am the microcosm, but the macrocosm is that also which I am not.
The old woman on the terrace in the sun did not know this. She was
herself the core and centre to the world, the sun, and the single
firmament. She knew that I was an inhabitant of lands which she had
never seen. But what of that! There were parts of her own body which she
had never seen, which physiologically she could never see. They were
none the less her own because she had never seen them. The lands she had
not seen were corporate parts of her own living body, the knowledge she
had not attained was only the hidden knowledge of her own self. She
_was_ the substance of the knowledge, whether she had the knowledge in
her mind or not. There was nothing which was not herself, ultimately.
Even the man, the male, was part of herself. He was the mobile, separate
part, but he was none the less herself because he was sometimes severed
from her. If every apple in the world were cut in two, the apple would
not be changed. The reality is the apple, which is just the same in the
half-apple as in the whole.
And she, the old spinning-woman, was the apple, eternal, unchangeable,
whole even in her partiality. It was this which gave the wonderful clear
unconsciousness to her eyes. How could she be conscious of herself when
all was herself?
She was talking to me of a sheep that had died, but I could not
understand because of her dialect. It never occurred to her that I could
not understand. She only thought me different, stupid. And she talked
on. The ewes had lived under the house, and a part was divided off for
the he-goat, because the other people brought their she-goats to be
covered by the he-goat. But how the ewe came to die I could not
make out.
Her fingers worked away all the time in a little, half-fretful movement,
yet spontaneous as butterflies leaping here and there. She chattered
rapidly on in her Italian that I could not understand, looking meanwhile
into my face, because the story roused her somewhat. Yet not a feature
moved. Her eyes remained candid and open and unconscious as the skies.
Only a sharp will in them now and then seemed to gleam at me, as if to
dominate me.
Her shuttle had caught in a dead chicory plant, and spun no more. She
did not notice. I stooped and broke off the twigs. There was a glint of
blue on them yet. Seeing what I was doing, she merely withdrew a few
inches from the plant. Her bobbin hung free.
She went on with her tale, looking at me wonderfully. She seemed like
the Creation, like the beginning of the world, the first morning. Her
eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless.
Her thread broke. She seemed to take no notice, but mechanically picked
up the shuttle, wound up a length of worsted, connected the ends from
her wool strand, set the bobbin spinning again, and went on talking, in
her half-intimate, half-unconscious fashion, as if she were talking to
her own world in me.
So she stood in the sunshine on the little platform, old and yet like
the morning, erect and solitary, sun-coloured, sun-discoloured, whilst I
at her elbow, like a piece of night and moonshine, stood smiling into
her eyes, afraid lest she should deny me existence.
Which she did. She had stopped talking, did not look at me any more, but
went on with her spinning, the brown shuttle twisting gaily. So she
stood, belonging to the sunshine and the weather, taking no more notice
of me than of the dark-stained caper-bush which hung from the wall above
her head, whilst I, waiting at her side, was like the moon in the
daytime sky, overshone, obliterated, in spite of my black clothes.
'How long has it taken you to do that much?' I asked.
She waited a minute, glanced at her bobbin.
'This much? I don't know. A day or two.'
'But you do it quickly.'
She looked at me, as if suspiciously and derisively. Then, quite
suddenly, she started forward and went across the terrace to the great
blue-and-white checked cloth that was drying on the wall. I hesitated.
She had cut off her consciousness from me. So I turned and ran away,
taking the steps two at a time, to get away from her. In a moment I was
between the walls, climbing upwards, hidden.
The schoolmistress had told me I should find snowdrops behind San
Tommaso. If she had not asserted such confident knowledge I should have
doubted her translation of _perce-neige_. She meant Christmas roses all
the while.
However, I went looking for snowdrops. The walls broke down suddenly,
and I was out in a grassy olive orchard, following a track beside pieces
of fallen overgrown masonry. So I came to skirt the brink of a steep
little gorge, at the bottom of which a stream was rushing down its steep
slant to the lake. Here I stood to look for my snowdrops. The grassy,
rocky bank went down steep from my feet. I heard water tittle-tattling
away in deep shadow below. There were pale flecks in the dimness, but
these, I knew, were primroses. So I scrambled down.
Looking up, out of the heavy shadow that lay in the cleft, I could see,
right in the sky, grey rocks shining transcendent in the pure empyrean.
'Are they so far up?' I thought. I did not dare to say, 'Am I so far
down?' But I was uneasy. Nevertheless it was a lovely place, in the cold
shadow, complete; when one forgot the shining rocks far above, it was a
complete, shadowless world of shadow. Primroses were everywhere in nests
of pale bloom upon the dark, steep face of the cleft, and tongues of
fern hanging out, and here and there under the rods and twigs of bushes
were tufts of wrecked Christmas roses, nearly over, but still, in the
coldest corners, the lovely buds like handfuls of snow. There had been
such crowded sumptuous tufts of Christmas roses everywhere in the
stream-gullies, during the shadow of winter, that these few remaining
flowers were hardly noticeable.
I gathered instead the primroses, that smelled of earth and of the
weather. There were no snowdrops. I had found the day before a bank of
crocuses, pale, fragile, lilac-coloured flowers with dark veins,
pricking up keenly like myriad little lilac-coloured flames among the
grass, under the olive trees. And I wanted very much to find the
snowdrops hanging in the gloom. But there were not any.
I gathered a handful of primroses, then I climbed suddenly, quickly out
of the deep watercourse, anxious to get back to the sunshine before the
evening fell. Up above I saw the olive trees in the sunny golden grass,
and sunlit grey rocks immensely high up. I was afraid lest the evening
would fall whilst I was groping about like an otter in the damp and the
darkness, that the day of sunshine would be over.
Soon I was up in the sunshine again, on the turf under the olive trees,
reassured. It was the upper world of glowing light, and I was
safe again.
All the olives were gathered, and the mills were going night and day,
making a great, acrid scent of olive oil in preparation, by the lake.
The little stream rattled down. A mule driver 'Hued!' to his mules on
the Strada Vecchia. High up, on the Strada Nuova, the beautiful, new,
military high-road, which winds with beautiful curves up the
mountain-side, crossing the same stream several times in clear-leaping
bridges, travelling cut out of sheer slope high above the lake, winding
beautifully and gracefully forward to the Austrian frontier, where it
ends: high up on the lovely swinging road, in the strong evening
sunshine, I saw a bullock wagon moving like a vision, though the
clanking of the wagon and the crack of the bullock whip responded close
in my ears.
Everything was clear and sun-coloured up there, clear-grey rocks
partaking of the sky, tawny grass and scrub, browny-green spires of
cypresses, and then the mist of grey-green olives fuming down to the
lake-side. There was no shadow, only clear sun-substance built up to the
sky, a bullock wagon moving slowly in the high sunlight, along the
uppermost terrace of the military road. It sat in the warm stillness of
the transcendent afternoon.
The four o'clock steamer was creeping down the lake from the Austrian
end, creeping under the cliffs. Far away, the Verona side, beyond the
Island, lay fused in dim gold. The mountain opposite was so still, that
my heart seemed to fade in its beating as if it too would be still. All
was perfectly still, pure substance. The little steamer on the floor of
the world below, the mules down the road cast no shadow. They too were
pure sun-substance travelling on the surface of the sun-made world.
A cricket hopped near me. Then I remembered that it was Saturday
afternoon, when a strange suspension comes over the world. And then,
just below me, I saw two monks walking in their garden between the
naked, bony vines, walking in their wintry garden of bony vines and
olive trees, their brown cassocks passing between the brown vine-stocks,
their heads bare to the sunshine, sometimes a glint of light as their
feet strode from under their skirts.
It was so still, everything so perfectly suspended, that I felt them
talking. They marched with the peculiar march of monks, a long, loping
stride, their heads together, their skirts swaying slowly, two brown
monks with hidden hands, sliding under the bony vines and beside the
cabbages, their heads always together in hidden converse. It was as if I
were attending with my dark soul to their inaudible undertone. All the
time I sat still in silence, I was one with them, a partaker, though I
could hear no sound of their voices. I went with the long stride of
their skirted feet, that slid springless and noiseless from end to end
of the garden, and back again. Their hands were kept down at their
sides, hidden in the long sleeves, and the skirts of their robes. They
did not touch each other, nor gesticulate as they walked. There was no
motion save the long, furtive stride and the heads leaning together. Yet
there was an eagerness in their conversation. Almost like
shadow-creatures ventured out of their cold, obscure element, they went
backwards and forwards in their wintry garden, thinking nobody could
see them.
Across, above them, was the faint, rousing dazzle of snow. They never
looked up. But the dazzle of snow began to glow as they walked, the
wonderful, faint, ethereal flush of the long range of snow in the
heavens, at evening, began to kindle. Another world was coming to pass,
the cold, rare night. It was dawning in exquisite, icy rose upon the
long mountain-summit opposite. The monks walked backwards and forwards,
talking, in the first undershadow.
And I noticed that up above the snow, frail in the bluish sky, a frail
moon had put forth, like a thin, scalloped film of ice floated out on
the slow current of the coming night. And a bell sounded.
And still the monks were pacing backwards and forwards, backwards and
forwards, with a strange, neutral regularity.
The shadows were coming across everything, because of the mountains in
the west. Already the olive wood where I sat was extinguished. This was
the world of the monks, the rim of pallor between night and day. Here
they paced, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, in the
neutral, shadowless light of shadow.
Neither the flare of day nor the completeness of night reached them,
they paced the narrow path of the twilight, treading in the neutrality
of the law. Neither the blood nor the spirit spoke in them, only the
law, the abstraction of the average. The infinite is positive and
negative. But the average is only neutral. And the monks trod backward
and forward down the line of neutrality.
Meanwhile, on the length of mountain-ridge, the snow grew
rosy-incandescent, like heaven breaking into blossom. After all, eternal
not-being and eternal being are the same. In the rosy snow that shone in
heaven over a darkened earth was the ecstasy of consummation. Night and
day are one, light and dark are one, both the same in the origin and in
the issue, both the same in the moment, of ecstasy, light fused in
darkness and darkness fused in light, as in the rosy snow above
the twilight.
But in the monks it was not ecstasy, in them it was neutrality, the
under earth. Transcendent, above the shadowed, twilit earth was the rosy
snow of ecstasy. But spreading far over us, down below, was the
neutrality of the twilight, of the monks. The flesh neutralizing the
spirit, the spirit neutralizing the flesh, the law of the average
asserted, this was the monks as they paced backward and forward.
The moon climbed higher, away from the snowy, fading ridge, she became
gradually herself. Between the roots of the olive tree was a rosy-tipped
daisy just going to sleep. I gathered it and put it among the frail,
moony little bunch of primroses, so that its sleep should warm the rest.
Also I put in some little periwinkles, that were very blue, reminding me
of the eyes of the old woman.
The day was gone, the twilight was gone, and the snow was invisible as I
came down to the side of the lake. Only the moon, white and shining, was
in the sky, like a woman glorying in her own loveliness as she loiters
superbly to the gaze of all the world, looking sometimes through the
fringe of dark olive leaves, sometimes looking at her own superb,
quivering body, wholly naked in the water of the lake.
My little old woman was gone. She, all day-sunshine, would have none of
the moon. Always she must live like a bird, looking down on all the
world at once, so that it lay all subsidiary to herself, herself the
wakeful consciousness hovering over the world like a hawk, like a sleep
of wakefulness. And, like a bird, she went to sleep as the shadows came.
She did not know the yielding up of the senses and the possession of the
unknown, through the senses, which happens under a superb moon. The
all-glorious sun knows none of these yieldings up. He takes his way. And
the daisies at once go to sleep. And the soul of the old spinning-woman
also closed up at sunset, the rest was a sleep, a cessation.
It is all so strange and varied: the dark-skinned Italians ecstatic in
the night and the moon, the blue-eyed old woman ecstatic in the busy
sunshine, the monks in the garden below, who are supposed to unite both,
passing only in the neutrality of the average. Where, then, is the
meeting-point: where in mankind is the ecstasy of light and dark
together, the supreme transcendence of the afterglow, day hovering in
the embrace of the coming night like two angels embracing in the
heavens, like Eurydice in the arms of Orpheus, or Persephone embraced
by Pluto?
Where is the supreme ecstasy in mankind, which makes day a delight and
night a delight, purpose an ecstasy and a concourse in ecstasy, and
single abandon of the single body and soul also an ecstasy under the
moon? Where is the transcendent knowledge in our hearts, uniting sun and
darkness, day and night, spirit and senses? Why do we not know that the
two in consummation are one; that each is only part; partial and alone
for ever; but that the two in consummation are perfect, beyond the range
of loneliness or solitude?
