Part 87 (1/2)

”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.”