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THE LOST GIRL
na. The dawning mountains were wonderful, dim-green and
mauve and rose, the ground rang with frost. Along the roads
many peasants were trooping to market, women in their best
dresses, some of thick heavy silk with the white, full-sleeved
bodices, dresses green, lavender, dark-red, with gay kerchiefs
on the head: men muffl ed in cloaks, treading silently in their
pointed skin sandals: asses with loads, carts full of peasants,
a belated cow.
The market was lovely, there in the crown of the pass, in
the old town, on the frosty sunny morning. Bulls, cows, sheep,
pigs, goats stood and lay about under the bare little trees
on the platform high over the valley: some one had kindled
a great fi re of brush-wood, and men crowded round, out of the
blue frost. From laden asses vegetables were unloaded, from
little carts all kinds of things, boots, pots, tin-ware, hats, sweetthings, and heaps of corn and beans and seeds. By eight o’clock
in the December morning the market was in full swing: a great
crowd of handsome mountain people, all peasants, nearly all
in costume, with different head-dresses.
Ciccio and Pancrazio and Alvina went quietly about. They
bought pots and pans and vegetables and sweet-things and
thick rush matting and two wooden arm-chairs and one old
soft arm-chair, going quietly and bargaining modestly among
the crowd, as Anglicized Italians do.
The sun came on to the market at about nine o’clock, and
then, from the terrace of the town gate, Alvina looked down
on the wonderful sight of all the coloured dresses of the peasant women, the black hats of the men, the heaps of goods, the
squealing pigs, the pale lovely cattle, the many tethered ass-
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DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
es – and she wondered if she would die before she became
one with it altogether. It was impossible for her to become one
with it altogether. Ciccio would have to take her to England
again, or to America. He was always hinting at America.
But then, Italy might enter the war. Even here it was the
great theme of conversation. She looked down on the seethe
of the market. The sun was warm on her. Ciccio and Pancrazio
were bargaining for two cowskin rugs: she saw Ciccio standing
with his head rather forward. Her husband! She felt her heart
die away within her.
All those other peasant women, did they feel as she did? –
the same sort of acquiescent passion, the same lapse of life? She
believed they did. The same helpless passion for the man, the
same remoteness from the world’s actuality? Probably, under
all their tension of money and money-grubbing and vindictive mountain morality and rather horrible religion, probably
they felt the same. She was one with them. But she could never
endure it for a life-time. It was only a test on her. Ciccio must
take her to America, or England – to America preferably.
And even as he turned to look for her, she felt a strange
thrilling in her bowels: a sort of trill strangely within her, yet
extraneous to her. She caught her hand to her fl ank. And Ciccio was looking up for her from the market beneath, searching with that quick, hasty look. He caught sight of her. She
seemed to glow with a delicate light for him, there beyond all
the women. He came straight towards her, smiling his slow,
enigmatic smile. He could not bear it if he lost her. She knew
how he loved her – almost inhumanly, elementally, without
communication. And she stood with her hand to her side, her
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THE LOST GIRL
face frightened. She hardly noticed him. It seemed to her she
was with child. And yet in the whole market-place she was
aware of nothing but him.
“We have bought the skins,” he said. “Twenty-seven lire
each.”
She looked at him, his dark skin, his golden eyes – so near
to her, so unifi ed with her, yet so incommunicably remote.
How far off was his being from hers!
“I believe I’m going to have a child,” she said.
“Eh?” he ejaculated quickly. But he had understood. His
eyes shone weirdly on her. She felt the strange terror and loveliness of his passion. And she wished she could lie down there
by that town gate, in the sun, and swoon for ever unconscious.
Living was almost too great a demand on her. His yellow, luminous eyes watched her and enveloped her. There was nothing
for her but to yield, yield, yield. And yet she could not sink to
earth.
She saw Pancrazio carrying the skins to the little cart,
which was tilted up under a small, pale-stemmed tree on the
platform above the valley. Then she saw him making his way
quickly back through the crowd, to rejoin them.
“Did you feel something?” said Ciccio.
“Yes – here – !” she said, pressing her hand on her side as
the sensation trilled once more upon her consciousness. She
looked at him with remote, frightened eyes.
“That’s good – ” he said, his eyes full of a triumphant, incommunicable meaning.
“Well! – And now,” said Pancrazio, coming up, “shall we
go and eat something?”
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DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
They jogged home in the little fl at cart in the wintry afternoon. It was almost night before they had got the ass untackled from the shafts, at the wild lonely house where Pancrazio
left the cart. GiovannI was there with the lantern. Ciccio went
on ahead with Alvina, whilst the others stood to load up the
ass by the high-way.
Ciccio watched Alvina carefully. When they were over the
river, and among the dark scrub, he took her in his arms and
kissed her with long, terrible passion. She saw the snow-ridges
fl are with evening, beyond his cheek. They had glowed dawn
as she crossed the river outwards, they were white-fi ery now in
the dusk sky as she returned. What strange valley of shadow
was she threading? What was the terrible man’s passion that
haunted her like a dark angel? Why was she so much beyond
herself?
CHAPTER XVI
SUSPENSE
Christmas was at hand. There was a heap of maize cobs still
unstripped. Alvina sat with Ciccio stripping them, in the cornplace.
“Will you be able to stop here till the baby is born?” he
asked her.
She watched the fi lms of the leaves come off from the
burning gold maize cob under his fi ngers, the long, ruddy
cone of fruition. The heap of maize on one side burned like
hot sunshine, she felt it really gave off warmth, it glowed, it
burned. On the other side the fi lmy, crackly, sere sheaths were
also faintly sunny. Again and again the long, red-gold, full ear
of corn came clear in his hands, and was put gently aside. He
looked up at her, with his yellow eyes.
“Yes, I think so,” she said. “Will you?”
“Yes, if they let me. I should like it to be born here.”
“Would you like to bring up a child here?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t be happy here, so long,” he said, sadly.
“Would you?”
He slowly shook his head: indefi nite.
She was settling down. She had her room upstairs, her cups
and plates and spoons, her own things. Pancrazio had gone
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DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
back to his old habit, he went across and ate with GiovannI and Maria, Ciccio and Alvina had their meals in their pleasant room upstairs. They were happy alone. Only sometimes the
terrible infl uence of the place preyed on her.
However, she had a clean room of her own, where she
could sew and read. She had written to the matron and Mrs.
Tuke, and Mrs. Tuke had sent books. Also she helped Ciccio
when she could, and Maria was teaching her to spin the white
sheep’s wool into coarse thread.
This morning Pancrazio and GiovannI had gone off somewhere, Alvina and Ciccio were alone on the place, stripping
the last maize. Suddenly, in the grey morning air, a wild music
burst out: the drone of a bagpipe, and a man’s high voice half
singing, half yelling a brief verse, at the end of which a wild
fl ourish on some other reedy wood instrument. Alvina sat still
in surprise. It was a strange, high, rapid, yelling music, the very
voice of the mountains. Beautiful, in our musical sense of the
word, it was not. But oh, the magic, the nostalgia of the untamed, heathen past which it evoked.
“It is for Christmas,” said Ciccio. “They will come every day
now.”
Alvina rose and went round to the little balcony. Two men
stood below, amid the crumbling of fi nely falling snow. One,
the elder, had a bagpipe whose bag was patched with shirting:
the younger was dressed in greenish clothes, he had his face
lifted, and was yelling the verses of the unintelligible Christmas ballad: short, rapid verses, followed by a brilliant fl ourish
on a short wooden pipe he held ready in his hand. Alvina felt
he was going to be out of breath. But no, rapid and high came
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THE LOST GIRL
the next verse, verse after verse, with the wild scream on the
little new pipe in between, over the roar of the bagpipe. And
the crumbs of snow were like a speckled veil, faintly drifting
the atmosphere and powdering the littered threshold where
they stood – a threshold littered with faggots, leaves, straw,
fowls and geese and ass droppings, and rag thrown out from
the house, and pieces of paper.
The carol suddenly ended, the young man snatched off his
hat to Alvina who stood above, and in the same breath he was
gone, followed by the bagpipe. Alvina saw them dropping hurriedly down the incline between the twiggy wild oaks.
“They will come every day now, till Christmas,” said Ciccio.
“They go to every house.”
And sure enough, when Alvina went down, in the cold, silent house, and out to the well in the still crumbling snow, she
heard the sound far off, strange, yelling, wonderful: and the
same ache for she knew not what overcame her, so that she felt
one might go mad, there in the veiled silence of these mountains, in the great hilly valley cut off from the world.
Ciccio worked all day on the land or round about. He was
building a little earth closet also: the obvious and unscreened
place outside was impossible. It was curious how little he
went to Pescocalascio, how little he mixed with the natives.
He seemed always to withhold something from them. Only
with his relatives, of whom he had many, he was more free, in
a kind of family intimacy.
Yet even here he was guarded. His uncle at the mill, an unwashed, fat man with a wife who tinkled with gold and grime,
and who shouted a few lost words of American, insisted on
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DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
giving Alvina wine and a sort of cake made with cheese and
rice. Ciccio too was feasted, in the dark hole of a room. And the
two natives seemed to press their cheer on Alvina and Ciccio
whole-heartedly.
“How nice they are!” said Alvina when she had left. “They
give so freely.”
But Ciccio smiled a wry smile, silent.
“Why do you make a face?” she said.
“It’s because you are a foreigner, and they think you will go
away again,” he said.
“But I should have thought that would make them less
generous,” she said.
“No. They like to give to foreigners. They don’t like to give
to the people here. Giocomo puts water in the wine which he
sells to the people who go by. And if I leave the donkey in her
shed, I give Marta Maria something, or the next time she won’t
let me have it. Ha, they are – they are sly ones, the people
here.”
“They are like that everywhere,” said Alvina.
“Yes. But nowhere they say so many bad things about people as here – nowhere where I have ever been.”
It was strange to Alvina to feel the deep-bed-rock distrust
which all the hill-peasants seemed to have of one another.
They were watchful, venomous, dangerous.
“Ah,” said Pancrazio, “I am glad there is a woman in my
house once more.”
“But did nobody come in and do for you before?” asked Alvina. “Why didn’t you pay somebody?”
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THE LOST GIRL
“Nobody will come,” said Pancrazio, in his slow, aristocratic English. “Nobody will come, because I am a man, and if
somebody should see her at my house, they will all talk.”
“Talk!” Alvina looked at the deeply-lined man of sixty-six.
“But what will they say?”
“Many bad things. Many bad things indeed. They are not
good people here. All saying bad things, and all jealous. They
don’t like me because I have a house – they think I am too
much a signore. They say to me ‘Why do you think you are
a signore?’ Oh, they are bad people, envious, you cannot have
anything to do with them.”
“They are nice to me,” said Alvina.
“They think you will go away. But if you stay, they will say
bad things. You must wait. Oh, they are evil people, evil against
one another, against everybody but strangers who don’t know
them – ”
Alvina felt the curious passion in Pancrazio’s voice, the
passion of a man who has lived for many years in England
and known the social confi dence of England, and who, coming back, is deeply injured by the ancient malevolence of the
remote, somewhat gloomy hill-peasantry. She understood also
why he was so glad to have her in his house, so proud, why he
loved serving her. She seemed to see a fairness, a luminousness
in the northern soul, something free, touched with divinity
such as “these people here” lacked entirely.
When she went to Ossona with him, she knew everybody
questioned him about her and Ciccio. She began to get the drift
of the questions – which Pancrazio answered with reserve.
“And how long are they staying?”
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DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
This was an invariable, envious question. And invariably
Pancrazio answered with a reserved —
“Some months. As long as they like.”
And Alvina could feel waves of black envy go out against
Pancrazio, because she was domiciled with him, and because
she sat with him in the fl at cart, driving to Ossona.
Yet Pancrazio himself was a study. He was thin, and very
shabby, and rather out of shape. Only in his yellow eyes lurked
a strange sardonic fi re, and a leer which puzzled her. When
Ciccio happened to be out in the evening he would sit with
her and tell her stories of Lord Leighton and Millais and
Alma Tadema and other academicians dead and living. There
would sometimes be a strange passivity on his worn face, an
impassive, almost Red Indian look. And then again he would
stir into a curious, arch, malevolent laugh, for all the world
like a debauched old tom-cat. His narration was like this: either simple, bare, stoical, with a touch of nobility; or else satiric, malicious, with a strange, rather repellent jeering.
“Leighton – he wasn’t Lord Leighton then – he wouldn’t
have me to sit for him, because my fi gure was too poor, he didn’t
like it. He liked fair young men, with plenty of fl esh. But once,
when he was doing a picture – I don’t know if you know it? It
is a crucifi xion, with a man on a cross, and – ” He described
the picture. “No! Well, the model had to be tied hanging on
to a wooden cross. And it made you suffer! Ah!” Here the odd,
arch, diabolic yellow fl are lit up through the stoicism of Pancrazio’s eyes. “Because Leighton, he was cruel to his model. He
wouldn’t let you rest. ‘Damn you, you’ve got to keep still till
I’ve fi nished with you, you devil,’ so he said. Well, for this man
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