Now, after a half century of delay, the American reader is at last, and under the best possible auspices, enabled to provide it.

 

 

Three Women

 

Grigia

 

 

There is a time in life when everything perceptibly slows down, as though one's life were hesitating to go on or trying to change its course. It may be that at this time one is more liable to disaster.

Homo had an ailing little son. After this illness had dragged on for a year, without being dangerous, yet also without improving, the doctor prescribed a long stay at a spa; but Homo could not bring himself to accompany his wife and child. It seemed to him it would mean being separated too long from himself, from his books, his plans, and his life. He felt his reluctance to be sheer selfishness, but perhaps it was rather more a sort of self-dissolution, for he had never before been apart from his wife for even as much as a whole day; he had loved her very much and still did love her very much, but through the child's coming this love had become frangible, like a stone that water has seeped into, gradually disintegrating it. Homo was very astonished by this new quality his life had acquired, this frangibility, for to the best of his knowledge and belief nothing of the love itself had ever been lost, and during all the time occupied with preparations for their departure he could not imagine how he was to spend the approaching summer alone. He simply felt intense repugnance at the thought of spas and mountain resorts.

So he remained alone at home, and on the second day he received a letter inviting him to join a company that was about to re-open the old Venetian gold-mines in the Val Fersena. The letter was from a certain Mozart Amadeo Hoffingott, whom he had met while travelling some years previously and with whom he had, during those few days, struck up a friendship.

Yet not the slightest doubt occurred to him whether the project was a sound one. He sent off two telegrams, one to tell his wife that he was, after all, leaving instantly and would send his address, the other accepting the proposal that he should join the company as its geologist and perhaps even invest a fairly large sum in the re-opening of the mines.

In P., a prosperous, compact little Italian town in the midst of mulberry-groves and vineyards, he joined Hoffingott, a tall, handsome, swarthy man of his own age who was always enormously active. He now learnt that the company was backed by immense American funds, and the project was to be carried out in great style. First of all a reconnaissance party was to go up the valley. It was to consist of the two of them and three other partners. Horses were bought, instruments were due to arrive any day, and workmen were being engaged.

Homo did not stay in the inn, but—he did not quite know why—in the house of an Italian acquaintance of Hoffingott's. There he was struck by three things. The beautiful mahogany beds were indescribably cool and soft. The wallpaper had an indescribably bewildering, maze-like pattern, at once banal and very strange. And there was a cane rocking-chair. Sitting in that chair, rocking and gazing at the wallpaper, one seemed to turn into a mere tangle of rising and falling tendrils that would grow within a couple of seconds from nothingness to their full size and then as rapidly disappear into themselves again.

In the streets the air was a blend of snow and the South. It was the middle of May. In the evening the place was lit by big arc-lights that hung from wires stretched across from house to house, so high that the streets below were like ravines of deep blue gloom, and there one picked one's way  along, while away up in the universe there was a spinning and hissing of white suns. By day one looked out over vineyards and woods. It was still all red, yellow, and green after the winter, and since the trees did not lose their leaves, the fading growth and the new were interlaced as in graveyard wreaths. Little red, blue, and pink villas still stood out very vividly among the trees, like scattered cubes inanimately manifesting to every eye some strange morphological law of which they themselves knew nothing. But higher up the woods were dark, and the mountain was called Selvot. Above the woods there was pasture-land, now still covered with snow, the broad, smooth, wavy lines of it running across the neighbouring mountains and up the steep little side-valley where the expedition was to go. When men came down from these mountains to sell milk and buy polenta, they sometimes brought great lumps of rock-crystal or amethyst, which was said to grow as profusely in many crevices up there as in other places flowers grow in the field, and these uncannily beautiful fairy-tale objects still further intensified his impression that behind the outward appearance of this district, this appearance that had the flickering remoteness and familiarity the stars sometimes have at night, there was hidden something that he yearningly awaited. When they rode into the mountain valley, passing Sant' Orsola at six o'clock, by a little stone bridge across a mountain rivulet overhung with bushes there were, if not a hundred, at least certainly a score of nightingales singing. It was broad daylight.

When they were well in the valley, they came to a fantastic place. It hung on the slope of a hill. The bridle-path that had brought them now began sheerly to leap from one huge flat boulder to the next, and flowing away from it, like streams meandering downhill, were a few short, steep lanes disappearing into the meadows.