Jerry Junior

“I see no one else with whom you can   talk Italian. Perhaps for ten minutes you will deign to speak English with me?”

“I am too tired to talk,” she threw over her shoulder as she followed her father through the gate.

They plunged into a tangle of tortuous paved streets, the houses pressing each other as closely as if there were not all the outside world to spread in. Grotta del Monte is built on a slope and its streets are in reality long narrow flights of stairs all converging in the little piazza. The moon was not yet up, and aside from an occasional flickering light before a madonna’s shrine, the way was black.

“Signorina, take my arm. I’m afraid maybe you fall.”

Tony’s voice was humbly persuasive. Constance laughed and laid her hand lightly on his arm. Tony dropped his own hand over hers and held her firmly. Neither spoke until they came to the piazza.

“Signorina,” he whispered, “you make me ver’ happy tonight.”

She drew her hand away.

“I’m tired, Tony. I’m not quite myself.”

“No, signorina, yesterday I sink maybe you not yourself, but to-day you ver’ good ver’ kind—jus’ your own self ze way you ought to be.”

The piazza, after the dark, narrow streets that led to it, seemed bubbling with life. The day’s work was finished and the evening’s play had begun. In the center, where a fountain splashed into a broad bowl, groups of women and girls with copper water-jars were laughing and gossiping as they waited their turns. One side of the square was flanked by the imposing façade of a church with the village saint on a pedestal in front; the other side, by a cheerfully inviting osteria with tables and chairs set into the street and a glimpse inside of a blazing hearth and copper kettles.

Mr. Wilder headed in a straight line for the nearest chair and dropped into it with an expression of permanence. Constance followed and they held a colloquy with a   bowing host. He was vague as to the finding of carriage or donkeys, but if they would accommodate themselves until after supper there would be a diligence along which would take them back to Valedolmo.

“How soon will the diligence arrive?” asked Constance.

The man spread out his hands.

“It is due in three quarters of an hour, but it may be early and it may be late. It arrives when God and the driver wills.”

“In that case,” she laughed, “we will accommodate ourselves until after supper—and we have appetites! Please bring everything you have.”

They supped on minestra and fritto misto washed down with the red wine of Grotta del Monte, which, their host assured them, was famous through all the country. He could not believe that they had never heard of it in Valedolmo. People sent for it from far off; even from Verona.

They finished their supper and the famous wine, but there was still no diligence.   The village also had finished its supper and was drifting in family groups into the piazza. The moon was just showing above the house-tops, and its light, combined with the blazing braziers before the cook-shops made the square a patch work of brilliant high-lights and black shadows from deep cut doorways. Constance sat up alertly and watched the people crowding past. Across from the inn an itinerant show had established itself on a rudely improvised stage, with two flaring torches which threw their light half across the piazza, and turned the spray of the fountain into an iridescent shower. The gaiety of the scene was contagious. Constance rose insistently.

“Come, Dad; let’s go over and see what they’re doing.”

“No, thank you, my dear. I prefer my chair.”

“Oh, Dad, you’re so phlegmatic!”

“But I thought you were tired.”

“I’m not any more; I want to see the play.—You come then, Tony.”

Tony rose with an elaborate sigh.

“As you please, signorina,” he murmured obediently. An onlooker would have thought Constance cruel in dragging him away from his well-earned rest.

They made their way across the piazza and mounted the church steps behind the crowd where they could look across obliquely to the little stage. A clown was dancing to the music of a hurdy-gurdy while a woman in a tawdry pink satin evening gown beat an accompaniment on a drum. It was a very poor play with very poor players, and yet it represented to these people of Grotta del Monte something of life, of the big outside world which they in their little village would never see. Their upturned faces touched by the moonlight and the flare of the torches contained a look of wondering eagerness—the same look that had been in the eyes of the young peasant when he had begged to be taken to America.

The two stood back in the shadow of the doorway watching the people with the   same interest that the people were expending on the stage. A child had been lifted to the base of the saint’s pedestal in order to see, and in the excitement of a duel between two clowns he suddenly lost his balance and toppled off. His mother snatched him up quickly and commenced covering the hurt arm with kisses to make it well.

Constance laughed.

“Isn’t it queer,” she asked, “to think how different these people are from us and yet how exactly the same. Their way of living is absolutely foreign but their feelings are just like yours and mine.”

He touched her arm and called her attention to a man and a girl on the step below them. It was the young peasant again who had guided them down the mountain, but who now had eyes for no one but Maria. She leaned toward him to see the stage and his arm was around her. Their interest in the play was purely a pretense and both of them knew it.

Tony laughed softly and echoed her words.

“Yes, their feelings are just like yours and mine.”

He slipped his arm around her.

Constance drew back quickly.

“I think,” she remarked, “that the diligence has come.”

“Oh, hang the diligence!” Tony growled. “Why couldn’t it have been five minutes late?”

They returned to the inn to find Mr. Wilder already on the front seat, and obligingly holding the reins, while the driver occupied himself with a glass of the famous wine. The diligence was a roomy affair of four seats and three horses. Behind the driver were three Italians gesticulating violently over local politics; a new sindaco was imminent. Behind these were three black-hooded nuns covertly interested in the woman in the pink evening gown. And behind the three, occupying the exact center of the rear seat, was a fourth nun with the portly bearing of a Mother Superior. She was very comfortable as she was, and did not propose   to move. Constance climbed up on one side of her and Tony on the other.

“We are well chaperoned,” he grumbled, as they jolted out of the piazza. “I always did think that the Church interfered too much with the rights of individuals.”

Constance, in a spirit of friendly expansiveness, proceeded to pick up an acquaintance with the nuns, and the four black heads were presently bobbing in unison, while Tony, in gloomy isolation at his end of the seat, folded his arms and stared at the road. The driver had passed through many villages that day and had drunk many glasses of famous wine; he cracked his whip and sang as he drove. They rattled in and out of stone-paved villages, along open stretches of moonlit road, past villas and olive groves. Children screamed after them, dogs barked, Constance and her four nuns were very vivacious, and Tony’s gloom deepened with every mile.

They had covered three quarters of the   distance when the diligence was brought to a halt before a high stone wall and a solid barred gate. The nuns came back to the present with an excited cackling. Who would believe they had reached the convent so soon! They made their adieus and ponderously descended, their departure accelerated by Tony who had become of a sudden alertly helpful. As they started again he slid along into the Mother Superior’s empty seat.

“What were we saying when the diligence interrupted?” he inquired.

“I don’t remember, Tony, but I don’t want to talk any more; I’m tired.”

“You tired, signorina? Lay your head on my shoulder and go to sleep.”

“Tony, please behave yourself. I’m simply too tired to make you do it.”

He reached over and took her hand. She did not try to withdraw it for two—three minutes; then she shot him a sidewise glance.

“Tony,” she said, “don’t you think you are forgetting your place?”

“No, signorina, I am just learning it.”

“Let go my hand.”

He gazed pensively at the moon and hummed Santa Lucia under his breath.

“Tony! I shall be angry with you.”

“I shall be ver’ sorry for zat, signorina. I do not wish to make you angry, but I sink—perhaps you get over it.”