"What," asked Enderby carefully, "lies up yonder hill?"
"Come on." Vesta took his arm. "A little poetic curiosity, please. Come and find out."
Enderby now half-knew what lay at the top of the hill-street they now began to ascend, dodging new squealing arriving coaches, but he suffered himself to be led, passing smiling sellers of fruit and holy pictures. Enderby paused for a moment aghast, seeing a playing-card-sized portrait repeated more than fifty-two times: it seemed at first to be his stepmother in the guise of a holy man blessing his portrait-painter. And then it was not she.
Panting, he was led up to massy gates and a courtyard already thronged and electric. Behind himself and Vesta crowds still moved purposefully up. A trap, a trap: he would not be able to get out. But now there was a holy roar, tremendous, hill-shaking, and an amplified voice began to speak very fast Italian. The voice had no owner: the open ecstatic mouths drank the air, their black eyes searching for the voice above the high stucco buff walls, the window-shutters thrown open for the heat, trees and sky. Joy suffused their stubbled faces at the loud indistinct words. The cry started-"Viva, viva, viva!"-and was caught up. "So," said Enderby to Vesta, "it's him, is it?" She nodded. And now the French became excited, ear-cocking, lips parted in joy, as the voice seemed to announce fantastic departures by air: Toulon, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Avignon. "Bravo!" The vales redoubled to the hills, and they to heaven. "Bravo, bravo!" Enderby was terrified, bewildered. "What exactly is going on?" he cried. Now the voice began to speak American, welcoming contingents of pilgrims from Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Delaware. And Enderby felt chill hands clasp his hot body all over as he saw the rhythmical signals of a cheer-leader, a young man in a new jersey with a large blue-woven P.
"Rhode Island," said the voice. "Kentucky, Texas."
"Rah, rah, rah!" came the cheers. "The Pope, the Pope, the Pope!"
"Oh God, no," moaned Enderby. "For Christ's sake let me get out of here." He tried to push, with feeble excuse-mes, but the crowd behind was dense, the eyes up to the hills, and he trod on a little French girl's foot and made her cry.
"Harry," said Vesta sharply, "you just stay where you are."
"Mississippi, California, Oklahoma." It was like something from a sort of holy Walt Whitman.
"Rah, rah, rah! The Pope, the Pope, the Pope!"
"Oh Christ," sobbed Enderby, "please let me get out, please. I'm not well, I'm ill, I've got to get to a lavatory."
"The Church Militant is here," said Vesta nastily, "and all you want is a lavatory."
"I do, I do." Enderby, his eyes full of tears, was now grappling with a redolent Spaniard who would not let him pass. The French child still cried, pointing up at Enderby. Suddenly there was a sort of exordium to prayer and everybody began to kneel in the dust of the courtyard. Enderby became a kind of raging schoolmaster in a sea of stunted children. She too knelt; Vesta knelt; she got down on her knees with the rest of them. "Get up!" bawled Enderby, and, like a sergeant, "Get off your bloody knees!"
"Kneel down," she ordered, her eyes like powerful green poisons. "Kneel down. Everybody's looking at you."
"Oh my God," wept Enderby, praying against the current, and he began to try to get out again, lifting his legs as though striding through treacle. He trod on knees, skirts, even shoulders, and was cursed roundly even by some who prayed with frightening sincerity, their eyes dewy with prayer. Stumbling, himself cursing, goose-stepping clumsily, laying episcopal palms on heads, he cut through the vast cake of kneelers and reached, almost vomiting, blind with sweat, the gate and the hill-road. As he staggered down the hill, past the smiling vendors, he muttered to himself, "I was a bloody fool to come." From the top of the hill came the sound of a great Amen.
3
"Cefil Uensdi," said the man. "Totnam Otispar. Cardiff Siti." He had a surprised lion-face, though hairless, with a few wavy filaments crawling over his otherwise bare scalp. Staring all the time at Enderby as though convinced Enderby wished to mesmerize him and too polite (a) to object that he did not wish to be mesmerized and (b) to announce that the mesmerism was ineffectual, he ever and anon brought, with a bold arm gesture, a cigarette-end to his lips, drawing on this with a desperate groan as if it were a sole source of oxygen and he dying.
"Tutti buoni," nodded Enderby over his wine. "All football very good."
The man gripped Enderby's left forearm and gave a mirthless grin of deep deep blood-brotherhood's understanding. They were sitting at rough trestle-tables in the open air. Here Frascati had reached its last gasp of cheapness-golden gallons for a few bits of tinkly metal. "Ues Bromic," the man went on in his litany. "Mancesita, lunaiti. Uolveramiton Uanarar." This, though more heartening than the geographical manifests up the hill, was beginning to weary Enderby. He wondered vaguely if perhaps that was what Etruscan had sounded like. Up on the main road, beyond the dark and nameless trees that were a wall to this sky-roofed tavern, the pilgrims could be heard coming back to their buses, walking slowly and with dignity now after the comic freewheeling down the hill. If Vesta had any sense at all she would know where to find him. Not that, in his present mood, he cared much whether she found him or not. Next to the lion-faced man with the football litany lolled a patriot who did not believe that Mussolini was really dead: like King Arthur he would rise with unsheathed sword to avenge his country's new wrongs. This man said that the English had always been the friends of Mussolini; Italian and Briton together had fought to expel the foul Tedesco. He bunched one side of his face often at Enderby, raising his thumb like an emperor at the games, winking in complicity. There were other drinkers on the periphery, some with bad un-southern teeth, one carrying on his shoulder an ill-kempt parrot that squawked part of a Bellini aria. There was also a very buxom girl, a country beauty called Bice, who brought round the wine. Enderby did not, would not, lack company. He only wished his Italian were better. But "Blackburn Rovers" he fed to the litanist and "Newcastle United"; to the patriot "Addis Ababa" and "La Fanciulla del Golden West". Meanwhile thunder flapped with extreme gentleness on the other side of the lake. "Garibaldi," he said. "Long live Italian Africa!"
When Vesta at last arrived the pleasant dirty drinking-yard at once was disinfected into a background for a Vogue fashion pose. She looked tired, but her calm and elegance fluttered all present, making even the roughest drinkers consider removing their caps. Some, remembering that they were Italian, said dutifully, "Molto bella" and made poulterer's pinching gestures to the air. Without preamble she said to Enderby, "I knew I'd find you in some such place as this. I'm fed up. I'm sick to death. You seem to be doing your utmost to make a farce out of our honeymoon and a fool out of me."
"Sit down," invited Enderby. "Do sit down. Have some of this nice Frascati." He bowed her towards a dry and fairly clean part of the bench on which he had been sitting. The litanist, grasping that she was Inglese, assuming a passion for football in her accordingly, said, ingratiatingly, "Arse an all," meaning a football team. Vesta would not sit. She said:
"No. You're to come with me and look for this coach. What I have to say to you must wait till we get back to Rome. I don't want to risk breaking down in public."