by Grant Allen
Mariana was not so fond of reading as I was. Her aims were more social. I cared most for the things of the mind. It was Mariana’s idea to get on in life; she wanted to know the Cicolari who lived lower down the hill, and were distinguished people in the retail oil trade, with seventeen acres of good olive-terrace. Ermite Cicolari waited about when she passed the oil-press, and opened his saucer eyes at her. Mariana used to flit by as though she never noticed him.
We both loved the Madonna del Monte. It taught us much. We loved the sunlight that lurked in the hollows of the soaring dome; the great guttering candles that flared before the altar; the ministrants in their lace-edged garb of scarlet and white; the odorous air, heavy with the fumes that rose in blue curls from the swinging censers; the monks in brown robes with cowl and sandals; the organ that pealed to the echoing roof: all was rife with mystery. I pity English children who have never known those solemn joys of the sanctuary. They colour life for one.
Mother and father were also an element of education to us. I am not ashamed to say I learnt from mother the first rudiments of the literary habit She had the ordinary rich vocabulary of the Irish peasant — a trifle florid, it is true, and not always quite correct in the employment of words, but still graphic, profuse, and varied. She knew, I think, every noun and adjective in the English language, and she strung them together with fatal and fluent familiarity. In verbs, to be sure, she was weak; but her choice of epithets left nothing to desire save applicability. Mariana laughed at her; for myself, I secretly admired and still admire the ease and smoothness with which she could pour forth her torrent floods of largiloquent Celtic rhetoric. Her style lacked reserve; it erred, if at all, in the direction of exuberance. It would have been better for stern and judicious pruning. But what it wanted in terseness it almost made up in picturesque confusion. And ‘t is beyond a doubt that vocabulary, when all is said and done, lies at the root of literature. We who write are by trade phrasemongers.
Of father we saw less. He was an idealist, was father. I suppose those of you who have only met the waiter at Gatti’s in his professional capacity as waiter at Gatti’s would hardly associate idealism with the restaurant in the Strand. But there you would show a grievous class-narrowness. Idealism is a product of temperament, not a result of vocation, or even of association. In Italy’s need, my father had returned from his comfortable berth in London to join Garibaldi’s volunteers on the great revolutionist’s last wild expedition, and had been wounded in the leg with a severe wound, which lamed him for life and afforded him thenceforward the ceaseless joy of knowing that he had shed his blood (to the extent of at least two tablespoonfuls) on behalf of the Fatherland. Now that he had retired to his three acres, he busied himself mostly with the culture of the vine; but he was also an important personage in the Party, for whose sake he paid frequent visits to Padua. We children knew little about the Party; but we understood in some vague way that it was profoundly necessary for the salvation of the Fatherland, and that without it Italy would be given over, bound hand and foot, to some wicked people known as the borghesia or bourgeoisie. I have since inferred that father was a socialist; but as we lived in daily fear of the vengeance of the borghesi, we never used that word ourselves on the Monti Berici; the sole phrase we knew was that of “the Party.”
Personally, a gentler revolutionist than my father I never saw. He stabbed with difficulty, and guillotined his opponents in dumb show only. He would stop short in his fiercest denunciation of kings, priests, and the black hearts of capitalists, to lay one hand tenderly on my curly head, and say with his expansive smile, “There, run away, Rosalba mia! Run away, my little one! These serious matters are not for such as thee. Dreamer of dreams, what dost thou know of politics? Non sono per te! Go, pluck thyself a bunch of the ripe black grapes, the biggest thou canst find, on the sunny side of the pergola, and set thyself down in the mulberry shade to eat them, where the mother cannot see thee.” For mother objected to our eating grapes (except at vintage time) on the two absurd grounds that grapes “were not for the likes of us,” and that we always got ill from swallowing the grape-stones.
That was how our life wagged on the Monti Berici. The days were all alike, save for the intrusive tourist. Part of every day, Mariana and I tramped off to the communal school and were genuine Italians. Part of the day we played around the house, or watched for forestieri on the Al Cristo platform. It was a constant joy to us to play our little game of surprise with the forestieri. We played it quite intentionally, talking Italian together before them for some minutes, till they had committed themselves to a number of frank remarks, and then covering them with confusion by suddenly bursting into an English exclamation. We could never understand why our change of tongue took them so by surprise; but we played upon the peculiarity. To us, it seemed quite natural to be English children in Italy. But the tourists always expressed the same unmitigated astonishment when we revealed our Englishry: and as they generally ended by giving Mariana six sous at least, as some slight solatium for her wounded feelings, she was fond of exciting me to take part in this amusing game with her.
The only-serious drawback to our happiness was mother.
I can hardly remember when I first began to find out about mother.
I think it must have been one day in vintage time, about a year after the visit of the artist who sketched me.
We had great fun at vintage, — greater fun even than feeding the silkworms. All the boys and girls at the communal school had holidays for a week, to help pick grapes and assist in the pressing. Not, of course, all together; each family gathered its own grapes separately, and watched the rows with jealous care lest the children of the next plot should encroach and steal; for there is no identifying stolen grapes once they reach the baskets. As we went to and fro, for some weeks before, indeed, on our way to school, we had to hold our hands clasped above our heads while we passed through the vineyards, that our neighbours might see we were duly keeping them from picking and stealing. To us little ones, however, the vintage, when at last it arrived, was a real festival. We loved passing down through the pergolas, where the purple bunches hung multitudinous overhead, and snipping them off with our scissors, and tossing them with careless glee into the creels. Authorised destructiveness rejoices everyone. Besides, we might then eat as many as we liked by the way, even mother yielding on that point, having satisfied herself early that “childer will be childer; an’ shure the on’y way to reshtrain their appetites is to give free play to them.”
This particular day was a hot one, I admit, even for Italy. Mother from the first had been cross and irritable. She hated heat. “What would be afther making yer fader come and pitch his tint in this outlandish counthry, among a barbarious pack of haythen Italians, barrin’ their bein’ good Cahtholics on Sundays and fistivals, bates ivverything,” she used to say. “An’ thin, the cloimate! Why, in the splindid romantic scaynery of the Kerry mountains, wid their bays and their headlands all contagious to the cool refreshing breeze of the moighty ocean, isn’t the cloimate so moild and ayquable that the evergreen arbyootus trees will flourish, the winter t’rough, on the hoights of the precipitous rocky promontories; an’ yet in the summer’t is so cool an’ agrayable that ye can sit in the sunshine on the longest day, an’ sorra a freckle will the blessed sun of ould Oireland print on the most delicate complexion. Whoile, here, for all they’ll talk about their cloudless Italian skies, isn’t it frozen in winter ye are, wid nothing to warrum ye barrin’ a fayble little scaldeeno, an’ burnt up intoirely in summer, wid divvil wan breeze to cool yer brow from the hate of the sayson? Och!’t is the miserable cloimate I’d be afther calling it at all, at all.” And she mopped her face with her apron in pantomimic disapprobation of universal Italy.
All through the day Mariana and I went on picking our grapes and tossing them into the baskets — except, of course, at siesta time; and all through the day I noticed that as time went on mother seemed to grow crosser and crosser. As for father, the crosser
she got, and the oftener she called me “Ye idle little divvil!” the more he seemed to lay his hand on my head and fondle me. “There, there, my dreamer, my little one,” he whispered to me in Italian, drawing me off towards his basket, away from mother’s; “come and pick with me. Let the madre have that row; you and I will take this one.” There was something in his touch even more caressing than usual. He seemed to be protecting me from some unknown evil.
I picked with him for a while, laughing and talking and cutting my antic little capers as usual—” That child’s soul is in her feet!” my father used to say of me often — then something perverse drew me back once more towards mother. I noticed that Mariana stood away from her with caution, and that even when mother called she took care to keep well out of cuffing distance. I also noticed that from time to time mother dropped off, for a short time, towards the house and the village, and that after each relaxation her temper became first temporarily better, and then worse again than ever. Now, I have always been a person of a philosophically inquiring temperament; and this unexplained phenomenon roused my curiosity. Investigation is the mainspring of science. I sidled off from father, who happened to be looking the other way, and went over with my grapes to mother’s basket. As I put them in, working with childish eagerness, I chanced to give mother a slight accidental push. She pushed back in return to preserve her balance. Between us, somehow, we upset the pannier.
“What for did ye do that, ye clumsy little baste?” my mother cried, seizing me. Next instant I was aware of a perfect rain of cuffs on my head and ears.
I tried to slip from her grasp with one of my quick, sidelong, snake-like movements. For a second I succeeded. “It was more your fault than mine,” I cried, facing her, with a fierce sense of burning indignation. “It was you that upset it. If you hadn’t been so awkward—”
She caught at me again, and ran her strong hand through my hair. “Is it answering me back ye’d be, ye black-hearted little Italian divvil?” she cried, bringing her hand down on my ears. Every nerve in my body tingled with pain as she struck at me savagely.
My father rushed up in his excitable southern way.
“Drop her!” he shouted aloud in English. “Drop her, I say! How dare you treat my child so? You shall not lay a hand upon her head, ze poor darling!” And he caught me up in his arms and kissed me.
Mother stood off a little and glared at him. Her face was distorted. From that day forth I was dimly aware that there was something or other uncanny which I didn’t quite understand about mother.
“Why did you go near her when she was like that?” Mariana asked me later. Mariana was older and worldly-wiser than I was.
“Like what?” I answered in my innocence.
Mariana paused and pondered, perusing her shoes, She sucked her thumb reflectively.
“Well, didn’t you see her eyes were very small?” she suggested at last, in that silvery-liquid voice of hers.
I remembered then that they did look small, as indeed I had often observed them before; and I said so, wondering.
Mariana nodded. “Whenever you see her eyes growing small like that,” she remarked in a tone of candid advice, “just keep out of her way. You’ll find it’s better.”
CHAPTER IV
A REVOLTING DAUGHTER
AFTER that, I often noticed that mother had “small eyes,” as Mariana called it; also that the symptom recurred at shorter and shorter intervals. Mariana and father talked about it alone at times, as I judged; but they talked so low, and in such enigmatical words, that I could never quite make out what it was they were debating. Childhood is surrounded by these tantalising mysteries. I only knew that Mariana, who was a masterful body, said (stamping her little foot) it ought to be put a stop to; and that father, who was an easy-going man (twirling the ends of his black moustache with irresolute thumb and finger), entirely agreed with her, but shrugged his shoulders and did nothing.
I did something. It was my nature to act. Even as a child, I had a strange congenital habit of decision. And I acted now. “A strong will,” the man in brown had said; “but capricious.” It came about at last, I think, through something I read in what I used to call the Talk-Book — the book which told its stories not by means of a direct narrative, but by speeches which it put into people’s mouths, allowing the characters to develop the situations.
I had read a story in this Talk-Book called As You Like It. It was a lovely story, all about the adventures of two young ladies, real signorine of the highest rank, who fled forth from their castle into a pathless forest all alone by themselves, and there went in search of the most romantic episodes. I admired those signorine. They had such pluck, such initiative! And they hated injustice! So did I. The sense of wrong rankled ever in my bosom. I did not much mind when father punished me; for he punished justly; or if, in his hot Italian way, he sometimes struck us in sudden temper, he made up for it later on by acknowledging his fault and asking our forgiveness. That touched my heart. But when mother struck me for no fault committed, I was always angry; and I often thought I should love to set out, like Rosalind and Celia, on a voyage of exploration into the World beyond Vicenza.
That World beyond Vicenza beckoned me from afar with phantom fingers. I looked out on it often at noon or twilight from the Madonna del Monte. The lay of the land spoke to me. The wide grey plain that smouldered in the sunshine; the gleaming white towns that lay sprinkled like bright specks over its misty surface, as daisies lie sprinkled on a close-cropped lawn; the jagged peaks of the Alps, glowing rosy in the sunset from the steps of the great church, all called to me—” Come, come! We are full of romance! We are full of mystery!” From that coign of vantage my eye beheld the kingdoms of the earth and all their glory.
The lowland plain stretches like a sea. Northward, the Alps form its shore; southward, the Apennines. The Euganean hills — Shelley’s Euganeans, though as yet I knew not that there was a Shelley — stand up like islands in the middle distance. All is mystic and dim. The eye ranges so far that land melts into cloud, and one sees no horizon.
In the Thousand and One Nights, everybody set forth on every page in search of adventures, quite as a matter of course, and embraced the first chance that Allah sent them. I longed to imitate those Sindbads and Aladdins. I was tired of the Monti Berici, and the vines, and the tourists; tired of old Giuseppe and his three-days-old beard, that seemed never older, yet never clean-shaven; tired of the droning sermons preached every Sunday afternoon, by the fat-faced priest with the droop in his cheeks, to us children at the catechising; tired above all of that rankling sense of injustice suffered at the hands of my mother. Like Cassim in the cave, I fumed after freedom.
It was written that I should fare forth. But what put the last touch to my romantic longing for romance was an event that occurred when father went one day to Padua, on the service of the Party.
Before he left the house he and Mariana held a confidential consultation together. As well as I can guess, I must have been then about twelve years old, and Mariana fourteen; which last, for an Italian girl, may count as about equal to eighteen in England. I can hear them to this day conspiring in secret under the trellis of vines by the front doorway.
The importance of the outcome has fixed the very words they used in my memory.
Mariana said: “Don’t leave her a soldo. Give the money for food to me instead. I can buy bread and meat Then she will not be able to get it.”
My father shrugged his shoulders and stroked his black moustache ineffectually. After a moment’s hesitation, he twitched his sheepskin cloak on one side, as he always did when in doubt or perplexity. He would not for worlds have gone to Padua without that sheepskin cloak. Not only was it the badge of his Party, a protest against the excessive luxury of the black-coated borghesia, but it was also his social uniform as a landed proprietor. You could hardly have imagined, if you saw him trudging along a powdery-white Italian road with his high-collared mule and his shaggy sheepskin, that he was the same person
as that very grand gentleman who wore an immaculate evening suit, relieved by a false shirt-front and white tie, at Gatti’s in London.
“She will get it all the same,” he murmured dubiously. “The type! the type. ‘T is my experience, Mariana, that when they want it, they manage to get it,”
“That is true,” Mariana answered — and I can hear the very ring of her silvery voice as she uttered with conviction those words, “È vero!”—” but, at least, you and I will have cleared our consciences. Is it not always somewhat to have cleared one’s conscience?”
My father pulled the leather purse from his pocket slowly, and counted out some torn and dirty lira notes, one by one, into Mariana’s hands. Mariana’s little fist closed over them lovingly. She had never held so much money in her grasp before, and I am sure she felt the importance of the position. A gasp of her soft throat and a sparkle in her bright eyes showed her sense of the dignity of the moment. She looked so handsome as she stood there, holding her breath, that I wondered in my heart how the man in brown could ever have said of her: “Nothing distinctive! Might be Seven Dials!” I had yet to learn that there is beauty and beauty; for Mariana’s beauty, though perfect in its kind, was one that you may find by the dozen any day in Italy.
I listened to their talk, and felt like a conspirator. I thought that must be just how father felt when he sat in conclaves of the Party at Padua, denouncing the borghesi.
He turned and laid his gentle bronzed hand on my head. “You will say nothing of this to her, piccola mia?” he asked with an inquiring accent The question insulted me! I, a conspirator, and a conspirator’s daughter! To betray the secret of the brotherhood to the very authority against whom it was aimed!— “I would die first!” I answered, looking back at him steadfastly. “Not racks would wring it from me!”
