makes her talk to him. He leans forward, resting his arms on the seat
before him, stretching his slender, cat-like, flexible loins. The
padrona of the hotel hates him--'_ein frecher Kerl_,' she says with
contempt, and she looks away. Her eyes hate to see him.
In the village there is the clerical party, which is the majority;
there is the anti-clerical party, and there are the ne'er-do-wells. The
clerical people are dark and pious and cold; there is a curious
stone-cold, ponderous darkness over them, moral and gloomy. Then the
anti-clerical party, with the Syndaco at the head, is bourgeois and
respectable as far as the middle-aged people are concerned, banal,
respectable, shut off as by a wall from the clerical people. The young
anti-clericals are the young bloods of the place, the men who gather
every night in the more expensive and less-respectable cafe. These young
men are all free-thinkers, great dancers, singers, players of the
guitar. They are immoral and slightly cynical. Their leader is the young
shopkeeper, who has lived in Vienna, who is a bit of a bounder, with a
veneer of sneering irony on an original good nature. He is well-to-do,
and gives dances to which only the looser women go, with these reckless
young men. He also gets up parties of pleasure, and is chiefly
responsible for the coming of the players to the theatre this carnival.
These young men are disliked, but they belong to the important class,
they are well-to-do, and they have the life of the village in their
hands. The clerical peasants are priest-ridden and good, because they
are poor and afraid and superstitious. There is, lastly, a sprinkling of
loose women, one who keeps the inn where the soldiers drink. These women
are a definite set. They know what they are, they pretend nothing else.
They are not prostitutes, but just loose women. They keep to their own
clique, among men and women, never wanting to compromise anybody else.
And beyond all these there are the Franciscan friars in their brown
robes, so shy, so silent, so obliterated, as they stand back in the
shop, waiting to buy the bread for the monastery, waiting obscure and
neutral, till no one shall be in the shop wanting to be served. The
village women speak to them in a curious neutral, official, slightly
contemptuous voice. They answer neutral and humble, though distinctly.
At the theatre, now the play is over, the peasants in their black hats
and cloaks crowd the hall. Only Pietro, the wharf-lounger, has no cloak,
and a bit of a cap on the side of his head instead of a black felt hat.
His clothes are thin and loose on his thin, vigorous, cat-like body, and
he is cold, but he takes no notice. His hands are always in his pockets,
his shoulders slightly raised.
The few women slip away home. In the little theatre bar the well-to-do
young atheists are having another drink. Not that they spend much. A
tumbler of wine or a glass of vermouth costs a penny. And the wine is
horrible new stuff. Yet the little baker, Agostino, sits on a bench with
his pale baby on his knee, putting the wine to its lips. And the baby
drinks, like a blind fledgeling.
Upstairs, the quality has paid its visits and shaken hands: the Syndaco
and the well-to-do half-Austrian owners of the woodyard, the Bertolini,
have ostentatiously shown their mutual friendship; our padrone, the
Signer Pietro Di Paoli, has visited his relatives the Graziani in the
box next the stage and has spent two intervals with us in our box;
meanwhile, his two peasants standing down below, pathetic, thin
contadini of the old school, like worn stones, have looked up at us as
if we are the angels in heaven, with a reverential, devotional eye, they
themselves far away below, standing in the bay at the back, below all.
The chemist and the grocer and the schoolmistress pay calls. They have
all sat self-consciously posed in the front of their boxes, like framed
photographs of themselves. The second grocer and the baker visit each
other. The barber looks in on the carpenter, then drops downstairs among
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