Five Women Read online

  Once Homo met with a bad omen. His puttees had come undone and he was standing by a hedge winding them on again, when a peasant woman went by and said in a friendly way: "Let thy stockings be—it won't be long till nightfall." That was near Grigia's cottage. When he told Grigia, she made a scornful face and said: "People will talk, and brooks will run", but she swallowed hard, and her thoughts were elsewhere. Then he suddenly remembered a woman he had seen up here, whose bony face was like an Aztec's and who spent all her time sitting at her door, her black hair loose, hanging down below her shoulders, and with three healthy, round-cheeked children around her. Grigia and he unthinkingly passed by her every day, yet this was the only one of the local women whom he did not know, and oddly enough he had never asked about her either, although he was struck by her appearance: it was almost as though the healthiness of her children and the illness manifest in her face were impressions that always cancelled each other out. In his present mood he suddenly felt quite sure it was from here that the disturbing element must have come. He asked who she was, but Grigia crossly shrugged her shoulders and merely exclaimed: "She doesn't know what she says! With her it's a word here and a word over the mountains!" And she made a swift, energetic gesture, tapping her brow, as though she must instantly devalue anything that woman might have said.

  Since Grigia could not be persuaded to come again into any of the hay-barns around the village, Homo proposed going higher up the mountain with her. She was reluctant, and when at last she yielded, she said, in a tone that afterwards struck Homo as equivocal: "Well, then, if go we must."

  It was a beautiful morning that once again embraced the whole world; far beyond, there lay the sea of clouds and of mankind. Grigia was anxious to avoid passing any dwelling, and even when they were well away from the village she, who had always been delightfully reckless in all arrangements to do with their love-making, showed concern lest they should be seen by watchful eyes. Then he grew impatient and it occurred to him that they had just passed an old mine-shaft that his own people had soon given up trying to put back into use. There he drove Grigia in.

  As he turned to look back for the last time, there was snow on a mountain-peak and below it, golden in the sun, a little field of corn-stooks, with the white and blue sky over it all.

  Grigia made another remark that seemed strangely pointed. Noticing his backward glance, she said tenderly "Better leave the blue alone in the sky, so it'll keep fine." But he forgot to ask what she meant by this, for they were already intent on groping their way further into darkness, which seemed to be closing around them.

  Grigia went ahead, and when after a while the passage opened out into a small chamber, they stopped there and embraced. The ground underfoot seemed pleasantly dry and they lay down without Homo's feeling any of the civilised man's need to investigate it first by the light of a match. Once again Grigia trickled through him like soft, dry earth, and he felt her tensing in the dark, growing stiff with her pleasure. Then they lay side by side, without any urge to speak, gazing towards the little far-off rectangle beyond which daylight blazed white. And within him then Homo experienced over again his climb to this place, saw himself meeting Grigia beyond the village, then climbing, turning, and climbing, saw her blue stockings up to the orange border under the knee, her loose-hipped gait in those merry clogs, he saw them stopping outside the cavern, saw the landscape with the little golden field, and all at once in the brightness of the entrance beheld the image of her husband.

  He had never before thought of this man, who was in the company's employ. Now he saw the sharp poacher's face with the dark, cunning eyes of a hunter, and suddenly remembered too the only time he had heard him speak: it was after creeping into an old mine-shaft where nobody else had dared to go, and the man's words were: "I got into one fix after another. It's getting back that's hard."

  Swiftly Homo reached for his pistol, but at the same instant Lene Maria Lenzi's husband vanished and the darkness all around was as thick as a wall. He groped his way to the entrance, with Grigia clutching his sleeve. But he realised at once that the rock that had been rolled across the entrance was much heavier than anything he could shift unaided. And now too he knew why her husband had left them so much time: he himself needed time to make his plan and get a tree-trunk for a lever.

  Grigia knelt by the rock, pleading and raging. It was repulsive in its futility. She swore that she had never done anything wrong and would never again do anything wrong. She squealed like a pig and rushed at the rock senselessly, like a maddened horse. In the end Homo came to feel that this was only in accordance with Nature, but he himself, a civilised man, at first could not overcome his incredulity, could not face the fact that something irrevocable had really happened. He leaned against the rocky wall, his hands in his pockets, and listened to Grigia.

  Later he recognised his destiny. As in a dream he felt it descending upon him once again, through days, through weeks, through months, in the way sleep must begin when it will last a very long time. Gently he put one arm round Grigia and drew her back. He lay down beside her and waited for something. Previously he would perhaps have thought that in such a prison, with no escape, love must be sharp as teeth; but he quite forgot to think about Grigia. She had slipped away from him, or perhaps he from her, even though he could still feel her shoulder touching his. His whole life had slipped away from him, just so far that he could still tell it was there, but without being able to lay his hand upon it.

  For hours they did not stir. Days might have passed, and nights. Hunger and thirst lay behind them, like one eventful stage of the journey, and they grew steadily weaker, lighter, and more shut into themselves. Their half-consciousness was wide seas, their waking small islands. Once he started up, with glaring awareness, into one such small waking: Grigia was gone. Some certainty told him that it must have been only a moment earlier. He smiled ... telling him nothing of the way out ... meaning to leave him behind, as proof for her husband... ! He raised himself up on his elbow and looked about him. So he too discovered a faint, glimmering streak. He crawled a little nearer, deeper into the passage—they had always been looking in the other direction. Then he realised there was a narrow crevice there, which probably led out, obliquely, into the open air. Grigia had slender bones, yet even he, if he made an immense effort, might perhaps be able to worm his way through. It was a way out. But at this moment he was perhaps already too weak to return to life, or he had no wish to, or he had lost consciousness.

  At this same hour, all efforts having proved unavailing and the futility of the undertaking having been recognised, Mozart Amadeo Hoffingott, down in the valley, gave orders for work to cease.

  The Lady from Portugal

  In some old charters they were called the seigniors delle Catene, in others Herren von Ketten, both of which mean: of the Chains. They had come down from the North, stopping at the very threshold of the South. They proclaimed their loyalty now to the Guelph, now to the Ghibelline cause, as it suited them, and at bottom regarded themselves as owing no allegiance to anything or anyone but themselves.

  It was to one side of the great highway leading across the Brenner Pass into Italy, somewhere between Brixen and Trent, on an almost sheer, lone crag, that their castle stood, with a wild torrent coursing five hundred feet below it, raging so deafeningly that if a man put his head out of one of the windows, he could not have heard even the pealing of church bells in the room behind him. It was an impenetrable curtain of solid noise, through which no sound of the outer world could pass into the castle of the seigniors delle Catene. Only the gaze was unimpeded and, piercing that protective curtain, plunged headlong into the deep encircling panorama.

  All the lords delle Catene or von Ketten had the reputation of being keen and alert, and there was no advantage that escaped them as far as their arm could reach. And they were cruel as knives that always cut deep. They never turned red with anger or rosy with joy: in their anger they darkened, and in their joy they shone like gold—a shini
ng as perfect and as rare. All of them, without exception through the years and the centuries, were said also to resemble each other in this : that white threads early mingled with the brown hair of head and beard, and that every one of them died before his sixtieth year; and in this too, that the enormous strength each sometimes displayed seemed not to have its seat and origin in his body, which was slender and of medium stature, but to emanate from the eyes and forehead. This, however, was merely the legend among their overawed neighbours and their villeins. They took whatever they could get, going about it honestly or accomplishing it by violence or cunning as the case might be, but always imperturbably, inexorably. Each lived out his short life without haste, and for each the end was swift, death cutting him down when he had accomplished his task.

  It was the custom among the Kettens not to form ties of marriage with any of the nobility who held the surrounding manors, but to seek their brides far off, and rich brides too, in order not to be hindered in making their alliances and carrying on feuds as they chose. The Herr von Ketten who had brought home a beautiful Portuguese bride twelve years earlier was now in his thirtieth year. The marriage had been celebrated in her country, and the very youthful bride was expecting her confinement by the time the jingling procession of attendants and menials, horses, maidservants, baggage-mules, and dogs crossed the boundary of the Catene land. The year had passed like one long honeymoon. For all the Catene were brilliant cavaliers, yet they proved it only in the one year of their lives when they went wooing. The brides they chose were beautiful, for they wanted handsome sons, and without courtly graces they could not have won such wives abroad, where they did not count for so much as at home. But they themselves did not know whether it was in that one year that they revealed their true selves, or only in all the other years.

  A messenger came to meet the cavalcade, bearing weighty news; and though the bright-coloured garments and pennants still resembled a great butterfly, Herr von Ketten himself was changed. When he had galloped back to rejoin the company, he continued to ride slowly beside his wife as though he would not allow any other concern to press him, but his face had altered and was now forbidding as a bank of storm-clouds. Then suddenly, at a turn in the road, the castle towered up before them, scarcely a quarter of an hour's journey ahead, and with an effort he broke his silence.

  He told his wife he wished her to turn back and return to her native country The- cavalcade came to a halt. The Portuguese lady pleaded and insisted that they should ride on, urging that there would still be time to turn back when the reasons had been heard.

  The Bishops of Trent were mighty lords, and the Imperial courts pronounced in their favour. For generations the Kettens had been at feud with them over a question of territory, and sometimes they had invoked the law against each other, sometimes their demands and counter-demands had led to bloodshed, but always it had been the seigniors von Ketten who had been obliged to yield to their opponents' superior strength. In this one matter the gaze that missed no other chance of advantage waited in vain to glimpse it. And father handed on the task to son, and through the generations their pride continued to wait, and never relented.

  It was for this Herr von Ketten now that the luck seemed to have changed. He was dismayed to realise how nearly he had missed his chance. A strong party among the nobility was in rebellion against the Bishop, and it had been decided to make a surprise attack and take him prisoner. Ketten's return home might tip the scales in favour of the rebel party. Having been absent for more than a year, Ketten did not know how strong the Bishop's position was; but he did know this would be a long and fearful struggle that would last for years and that the outcome was uncertain, and he also knew it would be impossible to count on each of their party to the bitter end if they did not succeed in taking Trent at the very beginning. He resented it that his beautiful wife had, by her mere existence, almost caused him to miss the opportunity. True, as he rode at her side, keeping one pace to the rear, he delighted in her as much as ever; and she was still as mysterious to him as the many pearl necklaces that she possessed. A man could have crushed such little things like peas, weighing them in the hollow of his sinewy hand—so it seemed to him, as he rode beside her—and yet there they lay, incomprehensibly invulnerable. It was only that this enchantment had been displaced by the news he had received, had been thrust aside like winter's muffled dreams when all at once the boyishly naked, first, sunlight-solid days are there again. Years in the saddle lay ahead, and in them wife and child turned to strangers, vanished from ken.

  But meanwhile the cavalcade had reached the foot of the cliff on which the castle stood, and the lady from Portugal, having listened to all he had to say, once more declared that she would remain with him. How fiercely the castle reared into the height! Here and there on the rock-face a few stunted trees sprouted like sparse hair. The rising and falling of the line of wooded mountains was so violent that no one could have imagined that savagery who knew only the waves of the sea. The air was full of some spicy chill, and it was all like riding into a huge cauldron that had burst, spilling everywhere this alien green that it contained. But in the forest there was the stag, the bear, the wild boar, the wolf, and perhaps the unicorn. Further beyond, there was the realm of chamois and eagle. Unfathomed gorges harboured dragons. Many days' journey wide, many days' journey deep this forest was, where the only tracks were those where wild beasts made their way; and high above, where the crags towered, the realm of spirits began. There demons lurked amid the storm and the clouds. No Christian had ever set foot there, or if ever one had the audacity to try to scale those heights, ill-luck followed—stories that the maids told in hushed voices round the fire in winter, while the serving-men smirked in silence and shrugged their shoulders, because a man's life is full of dangers, and such adventures can easily befall one. But of all the tales the lady from Portugal heard, there was one that seemed strangest. Just as no one had ever yet reached the place where the rainbow ends, so too, they recounted, no one had ever yet succeeded in looking out over these great stone walls: there were always more walls beyond, and between them there were ravines like outspread blankets full of stones, stones as big as a house, and even the finest gravel underfoot was no smaller than a man's head. It was a world that was not really a world at all. Often in her dreams of this country, whence came the man she loved, she had imagined it as being of his own nature, and she had imagined the man's nature according to all that he had told her of his native country. Weary of the peacock-blue sea, she had expected a land tense with the unexpected, like the string of a drawn bow. Then, when she came face to face with the secret, she found it unimaginably hideous and longed to escape. The castle was like an agglomeration of hen-houses: stone piled on rock .. • dizzy walls where mould and lichen grew ... here rotting beams, there unseasoned, unhewn tree-trunks ... farming tools and war-gear, stable chains and axle-trees. But now that she was here, it was here that she belonged, and perhaps what she saw was not really hideous, perhaps it had a beauty of its own, like a man's ways, to which one had to become accustomed.

  Herr von Ketten watched his wife riding up the mountainside and could not bring himself to stop her. He felt no gratitude. Her action was something that neither bested his will nor yielded to it, but eluded him, luring him on into some other realm, making him ride after her in awkward silence, helpless as a lost soul.

  Two days later he was again in the saddle. And eleven years later it was still the same. Too rashly attempted, the attack on Trent had failed, costing the nobles a third of their force at the very start, and with it more than half their boldness. Herr von Ketten, though wounded in the retreat, did not at once return home. For two days he lay hidden in a peasant's hut, and then he rode from castle to castle, trying to reawaken his allies' fighting-spirit. Having come too late to take part in their councils and preparations, after this setback he clung to the plan as a dog will cling to a bull's ear. He expounded to the other knights what lay in store for them if the Bishop's for
ces made a counter-attack before their own ranks were closed again; he urged on the faint-hearted and the miserly, squeezing money out of them, bringing up reinforcements, providing arms—and finally was chosen to be their captain in the field. At first his wounds still bled so profusely that he had to change the bandages twice a day; and, riding and counselling and trying to make up for his earlier absence, he gave no thought to his lovely Portuguese bride, who was surely anxious for him.

  It was not until five days after he was wounded that he came to her, and then he remained only one day. She looked at him without asking questions, yet keenly, as one may follow the flight of an arrow, wondering if it will strike its mark.

  He gathered his men together, down to the meanest lad on whom he could lay hands, manned the castle to withstand a siege, issued commands, and saw to everything. That day was all a shouting of men-at-arms, a neighing of horses, hauling of beams, clang of iron and stone. In the night he rode away. He was kind and tender as to some noble creature that one admires, but his gaze went straight ahead as if from under a helmet, even when he wore none. At their leave-taking the lady from Portugal, suddenly overwhelmed by a woman's feelings, pleaded to be allowed, at least now, to bathe his wounds and bind them up afresh. But he refused and took leave of her more hastily than was necessary, laughing as he did so. And then she also laughed.

  The way the enemy fought out this campaign was violent wherever it could be so, as befitted the hard man of noble blood who wore the episcopal robes; but it was perhaps from these long womanish robes that he had also learnt to be supple, deceitful, and stubborn. Wealth and extensive possessions gradually proved what they could do, and ground was yielded only inch by inch, always only at the last moment, when rank and influence no longer sufficed to engage the help of allies. It was a way of fighting that avoided decisive action. As soon as resistance stiffened, there was a withdrawal; wherever it seemed to be slackening, there would be an onslaught. So it happened that sometimes a castle would be overrun and, if it had not been abandoned in time, all the inmates put to the sword. But at other times troops might be encamped in a district for weeks and nothing worse would happen than that some peasants' cow would be stolen or a few hens would have their necks twisted. The weeks lengthened into summer and winter, and the seasons revolved into years. Two powers were contending with each other, the one fierce and aggressive, but lacking in strength, the other resembling an indolent, soft, but dreadfully heavy body, made heavier still by the weight of time.