Читать книгу "Not I, but the Wind..." - Frieda von Richthofen Lawrence - Страница 32

How I want to recapture the gaiety of that adventurous walk into Italy, romantic Italy, with all its glamour and sunshine.

We arrived at Trento, but alas for the glamour! We could only afford a very cheap hotel and the marks on the walls, the doubtful sheets, and worst of all the W.C.’s were too much for me.

The people were strangers, I could not speak Italian, then.

So, one morning, much to Lawrence’s dismay, he found me sitting on a bench under the statue of Dante, weeping bitterly. He had seen me walk barefoot over icy stubble, laughing at wet and hunger and cold; it had all seemed only fun to me, and here I was crying because of the city-uncleanness and the W.C.’s. It had taken us about six weeks to get there.

We took the train to Riva on the Lago di Garda. It was an Austrian garrison town at that time. Elegant officers in biscuit-coloured trousers and pale-blue jackets walked about with equally elegant ladies. For the first time I looked at Lawrence and myself; two tramps with rucksacks! Lawrence’s trousers were frayed, Miriam’s trousers we called them, for he had bought them with “Miriam.” I had a reddish cotton crêpe dress all uneven waves at the skirt; the colour of the red velvet ribbon had run into my panama hat. I was grateful to the three ladies who took us into their pensione and, instead of fearing the worst for their silver, sent us yellow and blue figs and grapes to our room, where we cooked our meals on the spirit lamp for economy, in fear and trembling of the housemaid. Then we got our trunks.

My sister Johanna had sent me lovely clothes and hats, some “Paquins,” much too elegant for our circumstances; but we dressed up proudly and set forth in triumph.

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At Gargnano we found Villa Igea to spend the winter.

Lawrence for the first time had a place of his own. The first floor of a large villa, our windows looking over the lake, the road running underneath, opposite us the Monte Baldo in rosy sunsets. “Green star Sirius dribbling over the lake,” as Lawrence says in one of his poems.

Here began my first attempt at housekeeping. It was uphill work, in that big bare kitchen with the “fornelli” and the big copper pans. Often the stews and “fritti” had to be rescued, and he would come nobly from his work, never grumbling, when I called: “Lorenzo, the pigeons are burning, what shall I do?”

The first time I washed sheets was a disaster. They were so large and wet, their wetness was overwhelming. The kitchen floor was flooded, the table drenched, I dripped from hair to feet.

When Lawrence found me all misery he called: “The One and Only” (which name stood for the one and only phœnix, when I was uppish) “is drowning, oh, dear!” I was rescued and dried, the kitchen wiped and soon the sheets were hanging to dry in the garden where the “cachi” were hanging red from the trees. One morning he brought me breakfast in bed and in the Italian bedroom there was a spittoon and to my horror a scorpion was on it. To Lawrence’s surprise I said, when he killed it: “Birds of a feather flock together.”

“Ungrateful woman ... here I am the faithful knight killing the dragons and that’s all I get.”

One of our favourite walks was to Bogliacco, the next village on the Garda, where we drank wine and ate chestnuts with the Bersaglieri who seemed quiet and sad and didn’t say much. My window high up over the road was a joy to me. Bersaglieri came past in their running march with a gay spark of a tenente at their head, singing: “Tripoli sara’ Italiana.” Secretly people did their bargaining under my windows, at night the youths played their guitars; when I peeped Lawrence was cross.

He was then rewriting his “Sons and Lovers,” the first book he wrote with me, and I lived and suffered that book, and wrote bits of it when he would ask me: “What do you think my mother felt like then?” I had to go deeply into the character of Miriam and all the others; when he wrote his mother’s death he was ill and his grief made me ill too, and he said: “If my mother had lived I could never have loved you, she wouldn’t have let me go.” But I think he got over it; only, this fierce and overpowerful love had harmed the boy who was not strong enough to bear it. In after years he said: “I would write a different ‘Sons and Lovers’ now; my mother was wrong, and I thought she was absolutely right.”

I think a man is born twice: first his mother bears him, then he has to be reborn from the woman he loves. Once, sitting on the little steamer on the lake he said: “Look, that little woman is like my mother.” His mother, though dead, seemed so alive and there still to him.

Towards the end of “Sons and Lovers” I got fed up and turned against all this “house of Atreus” feeling, and I wrote a skit called: “Paul Morel, or His Mother’s Darling.” He read it and said, coldly: “This kind of thing isn’t called a skit.”

While we were at Villa Igea Lawrence wrote also “Twilight in Italy,” and most of the poems from “Look! We Have Come Through!”

His courage in facing the dark recesses of his own soul impressed me always, scared me sometimes.

In his heart of hearts I think he always dreaded women, felt that they were in the end more powerful than men. Woman is so absolute and undeniable. Man moves, his spirit flies here and there, but you can’t go beyond a woman. From her man is born and to her he returns for his ultimate need of body and soul. She is like earth and death to which all return.

Here is a poem: