curious negative magnetism arrested my mind, prevented it from working,
the moment I turned it towards these Italians.
I do not know why it was. But I could never write to them, or think of
them, or even read the paper they gave me though it lay in my drawer for
months, in Italy, and I often glanced over six lines of it. And often,
often my mind went back to the group, the play they were rehearsing, the
wine in the pleasant café, and the night. But the moment my memory
touched them, my whole soul stopped and was null; I could not go on.
Even now I cannot really consider them in thought.
I shrink involuntarily away. I do not know why this is.
_The Return Journey_
When one walks, one must travel west or south. If one turns northward or
eastward it is like walking down a cul-de-sac, to the blind end.
So it has been since the Crusaders came home satiated, and the
Renaissance saw the western sky as an archway into the future. So it is
still. We must go westwards and southwards.
It is a sad and gloomy thing to travel even from Italy into France. But
it is a joyful thing to walk south to Italy, south and west. It is so.
And there is a certain exaltation in the thought of going west, even to
Cornwall, to Ireland. It is as if the magnetic poles were south-west and
north-east, for our spirits, with the south-west, under the sunset, as
the positive pole. So whilst I walk through Switzerland, though it is a
valley of gloom and depression, a light seems to flash out under every
footstep, with the joy of progression.
It was Sunday morning when I left the valley where the Italians lived. I
went quickly over the stream, heading for Lucerne. It was a good thing
to be out of doors, with one's pack on one's back, climbing uphill. But
the trees were thick by the roadside; I was not yet free. It was Sunday
morning, very still.
In two hours I was at the top of the hill, looking out over the
intervening valley at the long lake of Zurich, spread there beyond with
its girdle of low hills, like a relief-map. I could not bear to look at
it, it was so small and unreal. I had a feeling as if it were false, a
large relief-map that I was looking down upon, and which I wanted to
smash. It seemed to intervene between me and some reality. I could not
believe that that was the real world. It was a figment, a fabrication,
like a dull landscape painted on a wall, to hide the real landscape.
So I went on, over to the other side of the hill, and I looked out
again. Again there were the smoky-looking hills and the lake like a
piece of looking-glass. But the hills were higher: that big one was the
Rigi. I set off down the hill.
There was fat agricultural land and several villages. And church was
over. The churchgoers were all coming home: men in black broadcloth and
old chimney-pot silk hats, carrying their umbrellas; women in ugly
dresses, carrying books and umbrellas. The streets were dotted with
these black-clothed men and stiff women, all reduced to a Sunday
nullity. I hated it. It reminded me of that which I knew in my boyhood,
that stiff, null 'propriety' which used to come over us, like a sort of
deliberate and self-inflicted cramp, on Sundays. I hated these elders in
black broadcloth, with their neutral faces, going home piously to their
Sunday dinners. I hated the feeling of these villages, comfortable,
well-to-do, clean, and proper.
And my boot was chafing two of my toes. That always happens. I had come
down to a wide, shallow valley-bed, marshy. So about a mile out of the
village I sat down by a stone bridge, by a stream, and tore up my
handkerchief, and bound up the toes. And as I sat binding my toes, two
of the elders in black, with umbrellas under their arms, approached from
the direction of the village.
They made me so furious, I had to hasten to fasten my boot, to hurry on
again, before they should come near me. I could not bear the way they
walked and talked, so crambling and material and mealy-mouthed.
<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>