But he had suffered very much in America. With his curious,
over-sensitive, wincing laugh, he told us how the boys had followed him
and jeered at him, calling after him, 'You damn Dago, you damn Dago.'
They had stopped him and his friend in the street and taken away their
hats, and spat into them. So that at last he had gone mad. They were
youths and men who always tortured him, using bad language which
startled us very much as he repeated it, there on the little lawn under
the olive trees, above the perfect lake: English obscenities and abuse
so coarse and startling that we bit our lips, shocked almost into
laughter, whilst John, simple and natural, and somehow, for all his long
hair and dirty appearance, flower-like in soul, repeated to us these
things which may never be repeated in decent company.
'Oh,' he said, 'at last, I get mad. When they come one day, shouting,
"You damn Dago, dirty dog," and will take my hat again, oh, I get mad,
and I would kill them, I would kill them, I am so mad. I run to them,
and throw one to the floor, and I tread on him while I go upon another,
the biggest. Though they hit me and kick me all over, I feel nothing, I
am mad. I throw the biggest to the floor, a man; he is older than I am,
and I hit him so hard I would kill him. When the others see it they are
afraid, they throw stones and hit me on the face. But I don't feel it--I
don't know nothing. I hit the man on the floor, I almost kill him. I
forget everything except I will kill him--'
'But you didn't?'
'No--I don't know--' and he laughed his queer, shaken laugh. 'The other
man that was with me, my friend, he came to me and we went away. Oh, I
was mad. I was completely mad. I would have killed them.'
He was trembling slightly, and his eyes were dilated with a strange
greyish-blue fire that was very painful and elemental. He looked beside
himself. But he was by no means mad.
We were shaken by the vivid, lambent excitement of the youth, we wished
him to forget. We were shocked, too, in our souls to see the pure
elemental flame shaken out of his gentle, sensitive nature. By his
slight, crinkled laugh we could see how much he had suffered. He had
gone out and faced the world, and he had kept his place, stranger and
Dago though he was.
'They never came after me no more, not all the while I was there.'
Then he said he became the foreman in the store--at first he was only
assistant. It was the best store in the town, and many English ladies
came, and some Germans. He liked the English ladies very much: they
always wanted him to be in the store. He wore white clothes there, and
they would say:
'You look very nice in the white coat, John'; or else:
'Let John come, he can find it'; or else they said:
'John speaks like a born American.'
This pleased him very much.
In the end, he said, he earned a hundred dollars a month. He lived with
the extraordinary frugality of the Italians, and had quite a lot
of money.
He was not like Il Duro. Faustino had lived in a state of miserliness
almost in America, but then he had had his debauches of shows and wine
and carousals. John went chiefly to the schools, in one of which he was
even asked to teach Italian. His knowledge of his own language was
remarkable and most unusual!
'But what,' I asked, 'brought you back?'
'It was my father. You see, if I did not come to have my military
service, I must stay till I am forty. So I think perhaps my father will
be dead, I shall never see him. So I came.'
He had come home when he was twenty to fulfil his military duties. At
home he had married. He was very fond of his wife, but he had no
conception of love in the old sense. His wife was like the past, to
which he was wedded. Out of her he begot his child, as out of the past.
But the future was all beyond her, apart from her. He was going away
again, now, to America. He had been some nine months at home after his
military service was over. He had no more to do. Now he was leaving his
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