was coming by the time they reached the river. At the high-road,
Pancrazio harnessed the ass, and after endless delay they jogged off
to Ossona. The dawning mountains were wonderful, dim-green and mauve
and rose, the ground rang with frost. Along the roads many peasants
were trooping to market, women in their best dresses, some of thick
heavy silk with the white, full-sleeved bodices, dresses green,
lavender, dark-red, with gay kerchiefs on the head: men muffled in
cloaks, treading silently in their pointed skin sandals: asses with
loads, carts full of peasants, a belated cow.
The market was lovely, there in the crown of the pass, in the old
town, on the frosty sunny morning. Bulls, cows, sheep, pigs, goats
stood and lay about under the bare little trees on the platform high
over the valley: some one had kindled a great fire of brush-wood,
and men crowded round, out of the blue frost. From laden asses
vegetables were unloaded, from little carts all kinds of things,
boots, pots, tin-ware, hats, sweet-things, and heaps of corn and
beans and seeds. By eight o'clock in the December morning the market
was in full swing: a great crowd of handsome mountain people, all
peasants, nearly all in costume, with different head-dresses.
Ciccio and Pancrazio and Alvina went quietly about. They bought pots
and pans and vegetables and sweet-things and thick rush matting and
two wooden arm-chairs and one old soft arm-chair, going quietly and
bargaining modestly among the crowd, as Anglicized Italians do.
The sun came on to the market at about nine o'clock, and then, from
the terrace of the town gate, Alvina looked down on the wonderful
sight of all the coloured dresses of the peasant women, the black
hats of the men, the heaps of goods, the squealing pigs, the pale
lovely cattle, the many tethered asses--and she wondered if she
would die before she became one with it altogether. It was
impossible for her to become one with it altogether. Ciccio would
have to take her to England again, or to America. He was always
hinting at America.
But then, Italy might enter the war. Even here it was the great
theme of conversation. She looked down on the seethe of the market.
The sun was warm on her. Ciccio and Pancrazio were bargaining for
two cowskin rugs: she saw Ciccio standing with his head rather
forward. Her husband! She felt her heart die away within her.
All those other peasant women, did they feel as she did?--the same
sort of acquiescent passion, the same lapse of life? She believed
they did. The same helpless passion for the man, the same remoteness
from the world's actuality? Probably, under all their tension of
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