Piacenza. Friday, May 19th
It's a queer thing that I write a date. Perhaps in this disoriented life one thinks, if I can say what day it is, then...
Three dots to signify I don't know what I mean. But we have been driving all day from Lerici over the Appenines and it now cold, cloistral, highly uncomfortable, in a vast galleried Italian inn, so ill provided with chairs that now at this present moment we are squatted, L. in a hard chair by his bed, I on the bed, in order to take advantage of the single light which burns between us. L. is writing directions to the Press. I am about to read Goldoni.
Lerici is hot and blue and we had a room with a balcony. There were Misses and Mothers - misses who had lost all chance of life long ago, and could with a gentle frown, a frown of mild sadness, confront a whole meal - arranged for the English - in entire silence, dressed as if for cold Sunday supper in Wimbledon. Then there's the retired Anglo-Indian, who takes shall we say Miss Toutchet for a walk, a breezy red faced man, very fond of evensong at the Abbey. She goes to the Temple; where "my brother" has rooms. Et cetera. Et cetera. Of the Appenines I have nothing to say - save that up on the top they're like the inside of a green umbrella: spine after spine: and clouds caught on the point of the stick. And so Down to Parma; hot, stony, noisy; with shops that don't keep maps; and so on along a racing road, to Piacenza, at which we find ourselves now at 6 minutes to 9 P.M. This of course is the rub of travelling - this is the price paid for the sweep and the freedom - the dusting of our shoes and careering off tomorrow - and eating our lunch on a green plot beside a deep cold stream. It will be all over this day week-comfort-discomfort; and the zest and rush that no engagements, hours, habits give. Then we shall take them up again with more than the zest of travelling.
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