The Demi-Gods

The Demi-Gods by John Galsworthy

The Demi-Gods is a short tale of stolen love and its violent, willed conclusion, told in three movements: a Prologue, an interior monologue titled "The Meditations of Pietro," and an Epilogue. In the Prologue, an unnamed man and woman sit together in a garden overlooking a great Italian lake, on what they know is the last day of a secret idyll. She is married to another, and tomorrow will mean the end of their monthlong affair and her return to a "caged existence" and a "loathed companionship." He faces a return to the torment of longing without her. Galsworthy frames their love in reverent, near-religious terms — a tree grown from comradeship into passion and trust — and sets it against the beauty of the Italian landscape and the sound of distant church bells. Rather than despair openly, the woman sings to her lover, and the two resolve to seize their last hours: they will hire a carriage, chase the sound of the bells, and lose themselves in a day of sun and forgetting before the "angel of Publicity" — social convention and exposure — closes off any future together. The central section shifts entirely in tone and voice, narrated by Pietro, the vain, garrulous, wine-loving driver of the carriage the lovers hire for their excursion to San Felice. Told in a comic dialect-inflected monologue, Pietro's account provides ironic counterpoint to the tragic romance framing the story. He sizes up his passengers as mad but generous English tourists, mistaking their rapt tenderness for eccentricity. He narrates the day's drive through the mountain valley beside the lake — which he personifies as a great blue Mother, a snow-capped Father, and a rushing brown Son — pointing out sights, telling half-understood local legends, and drinking steadily at every stop. He admires the woman's beauty without understanding the depth of the couple's feeling, watching them embrace, laugh, and gather flowers in San Felice while he eats and drinks for three hours. On the return journey, as evening falls and the light turns golden, Pietro grows increasingly, comfortably drunk, rambling on until, in the story's darkly comic final note, he falls asleep at the reins entirely. The Epilogue returns to the lyrical, tragic register of the opening. As dusk deepens over the lake, the carriage rolls on with its horse picking its own way and its driver senseless with drink. At an iron railway bridge crossing the lake, the road and the railway track run parallel, separated by a partition, both gates standing open. The drowsing, unguided horse strays through the wrong gate onto the railway line itself, and there is no room to turn back. Pietro wakes with a cry, wrenches the reins, and only succeeds in driving the terrified horse further onto the track before falling off himself and scrambling to safety at the trackside, leaving the lovers alone in the runaway carriage. Trapped and helpless, the man tries at first to reassure the woman that they cannot really come to harm. But the woman, gripped by the same dread of tomorrow's separation that has haunted the whole day, suddenly breaks down: she confesses that she cannot face the coming parting and would rather die now, in his arms, with nothing but the sky and lake as witnesses. He answers that his wish is the same as hers. At that moment they hear, from the darkness ahead, the rising roar of an approaching train. Recognizing their fate, the man declares that the gods are merciful — there will be no ending, no tomorrow of separation and heartbreak after all, only this. As the train bears down on them, the lovers embrace and kiss, calling themselves "demi-gods" for having lived a day of perfect, transcendent joy, and affirming their faith that if there is any life beyond this one, it will be theirs together, body and soul. The train obliterates the carriage in an instant. The narrative closes on the stilled, darkening lake and mountains, over which floats the sound of a chime — a natural requiem for the dead lovers, whose brief day of stolen happiness has ended, as they wished, together, rather than in the "caged" unhappiness that awaited them apart. Thematically, the story counterpoises the transcendent, almost mythic self-conception of the doomed lovers — who see their affair, and their death, as a passage into demi-godhood — against Pietro's earthy, comic obliviousness, suggesting the gulf between grand romantic tragedy as the lovers experience it and the mundane, even absurd human carelessness (a drunken driver, a wandering horse) that actually delivers their fate. Galsworthy leaves ambiguous whether their end is glorious transcendence or merely a needless accident dressed in the lovers' own self-mythologizing language.

By John Galsworthy · First published 1897 · Genre: Tragedy, Romance, Literary Fiction · 4,318 words

First lines

PROLOGUE

Into the garden of rest had come trouble and pain, for the end was at hand.

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literary fiction · social commentary · early 20th century · English countryside · journey narrative · character study · philosophical · coming of age · adventure · episodic structure · introspective · class consciousness

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