parts.'
They had all become more friendly to me, they accepted me.
'You are a German?' asked one youth.
'No--English.'
'English? But do you live in Switzerland?'
'No--I am walking to Italy.'
'On foot?'
They looked with wakened eyes.
'Yes.'
So I told them about my journey. They were puzzled. They did not quite
understand why I wanted to walk. But they were delighted with the idea
of going to Lugano and Como and then to Milan.
'Where do you come from?' I asked them.
They were all from the villages between Verona and Venice. They had seen
the Garda. I told them of my living there.
'Those peasants of the mountains,' they said at once, 'they are people
of little education. Rather wild folk.'
And they spoke with good-humoured contempt.
I thought of Paolo, and Il Duro, and the Signor Pietro, our padrone, and
I resented these factory-hands for criticizing them.
So I sat on the edge of the stage whilst they rehearsed their parts. The
little thin intelligent fellow, Giuseppino, was the leader. The others
read their parts in the laborious, disjointed fashion of the peasant,
who can only see one word at a time, and has then to put the words
together, afterwards, to make sense. The play was an amateur melodrama,
printed in little penny booklets, for carnival production. This was only
the second reading they had given it, and the handsome, dark fellow, who
was roused and displaying himself before the girl, a hard, erect piece
of callousness, laughed and flushed and stumbled, and understood nothing
till it was transferred into him direct through Giuseppino. The fat,
fair, slow man was more conscientious. He laboured through his part. The
other two men were in the background more or less.
The most confidential was the fat, fair, slow man, who was called
Alberto. His part was not very important, so he could sit by me and
talk to me.
He said they were all workers in the factory--silk, I think it was--in
the village. They were a whole colony of Italians, thirty or more
families. They had all come at different times.
Giuseppino had been longest in the village. He had come when he was
eleven, with his parents, and had attended the Swiss school. So he spoke
perfect German. He was a clever man, was married, and had two children.
He himself, Alberto, had been seven years in the valley; the girl, la
Maddelena, had been here ten years; the dark man, Alfredo, who was
flushed with excitement of her, had been in the village about nine
years--he alone of all men was not married.
The others had all married Italian wives, and they lived in the great
dwelling whose windows shone yellow by the rattling factory. They lived
entirely among themselves; none of them could speak German, more than a
few words, except the Giuseppino, who was like a native here.
It was very strange being among these Italians exiled in Switzerland.
Alfredo, the dark one, the unmarried, was in the old tradition. Yet even
he was curiously subject to a new purpose, as if there were some greater
new will that included him, sensuous, mindless as he was. He seemed to
give his consent to something beyond himself. In this he was different
from Il Duro, in that he had put himself under the control of the
outside conception.
It was strange to watch them on the stage, the Italians all lambent,
soft, warm, sensuous, yet moving subject round Giuseppino, who was
always quiet, always ready, always impersonal. There was a look of
purpose, almost of devotion on his face, that singled him out and made
him seem the one stable, eternal being among them. They quarrelled, and
he let them quarrel up to a certain point; then he called them back. He
let them do as they liked so long as they adhered more or less to the
central purpose, so long as they got on in some measure with the play.
All the while they were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The
Alberto was barman: he went out continually with the glasses. The
Maddelena had a small glass. In the lamplight of the stage the little
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