chin, his strange horse-mouth grinning almost pompously at me. It was an
affair of gentlemen. His wife disappeared as if dismissed. Then the
padrone broke into cordial motion. We must drink.
He would show me the estate. I had already seen the house. We went out
by the glass doors on the left, into the domestic courtyard.
It was lower than the gardens round it, and the sunshine came through
the trellised arches on to the flagstones, where the grass grew fine and
green in the cracks, and all was deserted and spacious and still. There
were one or two orange-tubs in the light.
Then I heard a noise, and there in the corner, among all the pink
geraniums and the sunshine, the Signora Gemma sat laughing with a baby.
It was a fair, bonny thing of eighteen months. The Signora was
concentrated upon the child as he sat, stolid and handsome, in his
little white cap, perched on a bench picking at the pink geraniums.
She laughed, bent forward her dark face out of the shadow, swift into a
glitter of sunshine near the sunny baby, laughing again excitedly,
making mother-noises. The child took no notice of her. She caught him
swiftly into the shadow, and they were obscured; her dark head was
against the baby's wool jacket, she was kissing his neck, avidly, under
the creeper leaves. The pink geraniums still frilled joyously in
the sunshine.
I had forgotten the padrone. Suddenly I turned to him inquiringly.
'The Signora's nephew,' he explained, briefly, curtly, in a small voice.
It was as if he were ashamed, or too deeply chagrined.
The woman had seen us watching, so she came across the sunshine with the
child, laughing, talking to the baby, not coming out of her own world to
us, not acknowledging us, except formally.
The Signor Pietro, queer old horse, began to laugh and neigh at the
child, with strange, rancorous envy. The child twisted its face to cry.
The Signora caught it away, dancing back a few yards from her
old husband.
'I am a stranger,' I said to her across the distance. 'He is afraid of a
stranger.'
'No, no,' she cried back, her eyes flaring up. 'It is the man. He always
cries at the men.'
She advanced again, laughing and roused, with the child in her arms. Her
husband stood as if overcast, obliterated. She and I and the baby, in
the sunshine, laughed a moment. Then I heard the neighing, forced laugh
of the old man. He would not be left out. He seemed to force himself
forward. He was bitter, acrid with chagrin and obliteration, struggling
as if to assert his own existence. He was nullified.
The woman also was uncomfortable. I could see she wanted to go away with
the child, to enjoy him alone, with palpitating, pained enjoyment. It
was her brother's boy. And the old padrone was as if nullified by her
ecstasy over the baby. He held his chin, gloomy, fretful, unimportant.
He was annulled. I was startled when I realized it. It was as though his
reality were not attested till he had a child. It was as if his _raison
d'être_ had been to have a son. And he had no children. Therefore he had
no _raison d'être_. He was nothing, a shadow that vanishes into nothing.
And he was ashamed, consumed by his own nothingness.
I was startled. This, then, is the secret of Italy's attraction for us,
this phallic worship. To the Italian the phallus is the symbol of
individual creative immortality, to each man his own Godhead. The child
is but the evidence of the Godhead.
And this is why the Italian is attractive, supple, and beautiful,
because he worships the Godhead in the flesh. We envy him, we feel pale
and insignificant beside him. Yet at the same time we feel superior to
him, as if he were a child and we adult.
Wherein are we superior? Only because we went beyond the phallus in the
search of the Godhead, the creative origin. And we found the physical
forces and the secrets of science.
We have exalted Man far above the man who is in each one of us. Our aim
is a perfect humanity, a perfect and equable human consciousness,
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