The Lost Girl Part 87

"It is for Christmas," said Ciccio. "They will come every day now."

Alvina rose and went round to the little balcony. Two men stood below, amid the crumbling of finely falling snow. One, the elder, had a bagpipe whose bag was patched with s.h.i.+rting: the younger was dressed in greenish clothes, he had his face lifted, and was yelling the verses of the unintelligible Christmas ballad: short, rapid verses, followed by a brilliant flourish on a short wooden pipe he held ready in his hand. Alvina felt he was going to be out of breath. But no, rapid and high came the next verse, verse after verse, with the wild scream on the little new pipe in between, over the roar of the bagpipe. And the crumbs of snow were like a speckled veil, faintly drifting the atmosphere and powdering the littered threshold where they stood--a threshold littered with f.a.ggots, leaves, straw, fowls and geese and a.s.s droppings, and rag thrown out from the house, and pieces of paper.

The carol suddenly ended, the young man s.n.a.t.c.hed off his hat to Alvina who stood above, and in the same breath he was gone, followed by the bagpipe. Alvina saw them dropping hurriedly down the incline between the twiggy wild oaks.

"They will come every day now, till Christmas," said Ciccio. "They go to every house."

And sure enough, when Alvina went down, in the cold, silent house, and out to the well in the still crumbling snow, she heard the sound far off, strange, yelling, wonderful: and the same ache for she knew not what overcame her, so that she felt one might go mad, there in the veiled silence of these mountains, in the great hilly valley cut off from the world.

Ciccio worked all day on the land or round about. He was building a little earth closet also: the obvious and unscreened place outside was impossible. It was curious how little he went to Pescocalascio, how little he mixed with the natives. He seemed always to withhold something from them. Only with his relatives, of whom he had many, he was more free, in a kind of family intimacy.

Yet even here he was guarded. His uncle at the mill, an unwashed, fat man with a wife who tinkled with gold and grime, and who shouted a few lost words of American, insisted on giving Alvina wine and a sort of cake made with cheese and rice. Ciccio too was feasted, in the dark hole of a room. And the two natives seemed to press their cheer on Alvina and Ciccio whole-heartedly.

"How nice they are!" said Alvina when she had left. "They give so freely."

But Ciccio smiled a wry smile, silent.

"Why do you make a face?" she said.

"It's because you are a foreigner, and they think you will go away again," he said.

"But I should have thought that would make them less generous," she said.

"No. They like to give to foreigners. They don't like to give to the people here. Giocomo puts water in the wine which he sells to the people who go by. And if I leave the donkey in her shed, I give Marta Maria something, or the next time she won't let me have it.

Ha, they are--they are sly ones, the people here."

"They are like that everywhere," said Alvina.

"Yes. But nowhere they say so many bad things about people as here--nowhere where I have ever been."

It was strange to Alvina to feel the deep-bed-rock distrust which all the hill-peasants seemed to have of one another. They were watchful, venomous, dangerous.

"Ah," said Pancrazio, "I am glad there is a woman in my house once more."

"But did _n.o.body_ come in and do for you before?" asked Alvina. "Why didn't you pay somebody?"

"n.o.body will come," said Pancrazio, in his slow, aristocratic English. "n.o.body will come, because I am a man, and if somebody should see her at my house, they will all talk."

"Talk!" Alvina looked at the deeply-lined man of sixty-six, "But what will they say?"

"Many bad things. Many bad things indeed. They are not good people here. All saying bad things, and all jealous. They don't like me because I have a house--they think I am too much a _signore_. They say to me 'Why do you think you are a signore?' Oh, they are bad people, envious, you cannot have anything to do with them."

"They are nice to me," said Alvina.

"They think you will go away. But if you stay, they will say bad things. You must wait. Oh, they are evil people, evil against one another, against everybody but strangers who don't know them--"

Alvina felt the curious pa.s.sion in Pancrazio's voice, the pa.s.sion of a man who has lived for many years in England and known the social confidence of England, and who, coming back, is deeply injured by the ancient malevolence of the remote, somewhat gloomy hill-peasantry. She understood also why he was so glad to have her in his house, so proud, why he loved serving her. She seemed to see a fairness, a luminousness in the northern soul, something free, touched with divinity such as "these people here" lacked entirely.

When she went to Ossona with him, she knew everybody questioned him about her and Ciccio. She began to get the drift of the questions--which Pancrazio answered with reserve.

"And how long are they staying?"

This was an invariable, envious question. And invariably Pancrazio answered with a reserved--

"Some months. As long as _they_ like."

And Alvina could feel waves of black envy go out against Pancrazio, because she was domiciled with him, and because she sat with him in the flat cart, driving to Ossona.

Yet Pancrazio himself was a study. He was thin, and very shabby, and rather out of shape. Only in his yellow eyes lurked a strange sardonic fire, and a leer which puzzled her. When Ciccio happened to be out in the evening he would sit with her and tell her stories of Lord Leighton and Millais and Alma Tadema and other academicians dead and living. There would sometimes be a strange pa.s.sivity on his worn face, an impa.s.sive, almost Red Indian look. And then again he would stir into a curious, arch, malevolent laugh, for all the world like a debauched old tom-cat. His narration was like this: either simple, bare, stoical, with a touch of n.o.bility; or else satiric, malicious, with a strange, rather repellent jeering.

"Leighton--he wasn't Lord Leighton then--he wouldn't have me to sit for him, because my figure was too poor, he didn't like it. He liked fair young men, with plenty of flesh. But once, when he was doing a picture--I don't know if you know it? It is a crucifixion, with a man on a cross, and--" He described the picture. "No! Well, the model had to be tied hanging on to a wooden cross. And it made you suffer! Ah!" Here the odd, arch, diabolic yellow flare lit up through the stoicism of Pancrazio's eyes. "Because Leighton, he was cruel to his model. He wouldn't let you rest. 'd.a.m.n you, you've got to keep still till I've finished with you, you devil,' so he said.

Well, for this man on the cross, he couldn't get a model who would do it for him. They all tried it once, but they would not go again.

So they said to him, he must try Califano, because Califano was the only man who would stand it. At last then he sent for me. 'I don't like your d.a.m.ned figure, Califano,' he said to me, 'but n.o.body will do this if you won't. Now will you do it? 'Yes!' I said, 'I will.'

So he tied me up on the cross. And he paid me well, so I stood it.

Well, he kept me tied up, hanging you know forwards naked on this cross, for four hours. And then it was luncheon. And after luncheon he would tie me again. Well, I suffered. I suffered so much, that I must lean against the wall to support me to walk home. And in the night I could not sleep, I could cry with the pains in my arms and my ribs, I had no sleep. 'You've said you'd do it, so now you must,'

he said to me. 'And I will do it,' I said. And so he tied me up.

This cross, you know, was on a little raised place--I don't know what you call it--"

"A platform," suggested Alvina.

"A platform. Now one day when he came to do something to me, when I was tied up, he slipped back over this platform, and he pulled me, who was tied on the cross, with him. So we all fell down, he with the naked man on top of him, and the heavy cross on top of us both.

I could not move, because I was tied. And it was so, with me on top of him, and the heavy cross, that he could not get out. So he had to lie shouting underneath me until some one came to the studio to untie me. No, we were not hurt, because the top of the cross fell so that it did not crush us. 'Now you have had a taste of the cross,' I said to him. 'Yes, you devil, but I shan't let you off,' he said to me.

"To make the time go he would ask me questions. Once he said, 'Now, Califano, what time is it? I give you three guesses, and if you guess right once I give you sixpence.' So I guessed three o'clock.

'That's one. Now then, what time is it? 'Again, three o'clock.

'That's two guesses gone, you silly devil. Now then, what time is it? 'So now I was obstinate, and I said _Three o'clock_. He took out his watch. 'Why d.a.m.n you, how did you know? I give you a s.h.i.+lling--'

It was three o'clock, as I said, so he gave me a s.h.i.+lling instead of sixpence as he had said--"

It was strange, in the silent winter afternoon, downstairs in the black kitchen, to sit drinking a cup of tea with Pancrazio and hearing these stories of English painters. It was strange to look at the battered figure of Pancrazio, and think how much he had been crucified through the long years in London, for the sake of late Victorian art. It was strangest of all to see through his yellow, often dull, red-rimmed eyes these blithe and well-conditioned painters. Pancrazio looked on them admiringly and contemptuously, as an old, rakish tom-cat might look on such frivolous well-groomed young gentlemen.

As a matter of fact Pancrazio had never been rakish or debauched, but mountain-moral, timid. So that the queer, half-sinister drop of his eyelids was curious, and the strange, wicked yellow flare that came into his eyes was almost frightening. There was in the man a sort of sulphur-yellow flame of pa.s.sion which would light up in his battered body and give him an almost diabolic look. Alvina felt that if she were left much alone with him she would need all her English ascendancy not to be afraid of him.

It was a Sunday morning just before Christmas when Alvina and Ciccio and Pancrazio set off for Pescocalascio for the first time. Snow had fallen--not much round the house, but deep between the banks as they climbed. And the sun was very bright. So that the mountains were dazzling. The snow was wet on the roads. They wound between oak-trees and under the broom-scrub, climbing over the jumbled hills that lay between the mountains, until the village came near. They got on to a broader track, where the path from a distant village joined theirs. They were all talking, in the bright clear air of the morning.

A little man came down an upper path. As he joined them near the village he hailed them in English:

"Good morning. Nice morning."

"Does everybody speak English here?" asked Alvina.

"I have been eighteen years in Glasgow. I am only here for a trip."

He was a little Italian shop-keeper from Glasgow. He was most friendly, insisted on paying for drinks, and coffee and almond biscuits for Alvina. Evidently he also was grateful to Britain.

The village was wonderful. It occupied the crown of an eminence in the midst of the wide valley. From the terrace of the high-road the valley spread below, with all its jumble of hills, and two rivers, set in the walls of the mountains, a wide s.p.a.ce, but imprisoned. It glistened with snow under the blue sky. But the lowest hollows were brown. In the distance, Ossona hung at the edge of a platform. Many villages clung like pale swarms of birds to the far slopes, or perched on the hills beneath. It was a world within a world, a valley of many hills and townlets and streams shut in beyond access.

Pescocalascio itself was crowded. The roads were sloppy with snow.

But none the less, peasants in full dress, their feet soaked in the skin sandals, were trooping in the sun, purchasing, selling, bargaining for cloth, talking all the time. In the shop, which was also a sort of inn, an ancient woman was making coffee over a charcoal brazier, while a crowd of peasants sat at the tables at the back, eating the food they had brought.