frowsily-dressed Giovanni.
He laughed in his sensitive, quick fashion.
'The women in America, when they came into the store, they said, "Where
is John, where is John?" Yes, they liked me.'
And he laughed again, glancing with vague, warm blue eyes, very shy,
very coiled upon himself with sensitiveness.
He had managed a store in America, in a smallish town. I glanced at his
reddish, smooth, rather knuckly hands, and thin wrists in the frayed
cuff. They were real shopman's hands.
The landlord brought some special feast-day cake, so overjoyed he was to
have his Giovanni speaking English with the Signoria.
When we went away, we asked 'John' to come down to our villa to see us.
We scarcely expected him to turn up.
Yet one morning he appeared, at about half past nine, just as we were
finishing breakfast. It was sunny and warm and beautiful, so we asked
him please to come with us picnicking.
He was a queer shoot, again, in his unkempt longish hair and slovenly
clothes, a sort of very vulgar down-at-heel American in appearance. And
he was transported with shyness. Yet ours was the world he had chosen as
his own, so he took his place bravely and simply, a hanger-on.
We climbed up the water-course in the mountain-side, up to a smooth
little lawn under the olive trees, where daisies were flowering and
gladioli were in bud. It was a tiny little lawn of grass in a level
crevice, and sitting there we had the world below us--the lake, the
distant island, the far-off low Verona shore.
Then 'John' began to talk, and he talked continuously, like a foreigner,
not saying the things he would have said in Italian, but following the
suggestion and scope of his limited English.
In the first place, he loved his father--it was 'my father, my father'
always. His father had a little shop as well as the inn in the village
above. So John had had some education. He had been sent to Brescia and
then to Verona to school, and there had taken his examinations to become
a civil engineer. He was clever, and could pass his examinations. But he
never finished his course. His mother died, and his father,
disconsolate, had wanted him at home. Then he had gone back, when he was
sixteen or seventeen, to the village beyond the lake, to be with his
father and to look after the shop.
'But didn't you mind giving up all your work?' I said.
He did not quite understand.
'My father wanted me to come back,' he said.
It was evident that Giovanni had had no definite conception of what he
was doing or what he wanted to do. His father, wishing to make a
gentleman of him, had sent him to school in Verona. By accident he had
been moved on into the engineering course. When it all fizzled to an
end, and he returned half-baked to the remote, desolate village of the
mountain-side, he was not disappointed or chagrined. He had never
conceived of a coherent purposive life. Either one stayed in the
village, like a lodged stone, or one made random excursions into the
world, across the world. It was all aimless and purposeless.
So he had stayed a while with his father, then he had gone, just as
aimlessly, with a party of men who were emigrating to America. He had
taken some money, had drifted about, living in the most comfortless,
wretched fashion, then he had found a place somewhere in Pennsylvania,
in a dry goods store. This was when he was seventeen or eighteen
years old.
All this seemed to have happened to him without his being very much
affected, at least consciously. His nature was simple and self-complete.
Yet not so self-complete as that of Il Duro or Paolo. They had passed
through the foreign world and been quite untouched. Their souls were
static, it was the world that had flowed unstable by.
But John was more sensitive, he had come more into contact with his new
surroundings. He had attended night classes almost every evening, and
had been taught English like a child. He had loved the American free
school, the teachers, the work.
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