When I was a young man I thought a great deal of local color. At that
time it was still a pigment of recent discovery, and supposed to have
a peculiarly stimulating effect on the mental eye. As an aid to the
imagination its value was perhaps overrated; but as an object of pursuit
to that vagrant faculty, it had all the merits claimed for it. I certainly
never hunted any game better worth my powder; and to a young man with rare
holidays and long working hours, its value was enhanced by the fact that
one might bring it down at any turn, if only one kept one’s eye alert and
one’s hand on the trigger.
Even the large manufacturing city where, for some years, my young
enthusiasms were chained to an accountant’s desk, was not without its
romantic opportunities. Many of the mill-hands at Dunstable were Italians,
and a foreign settlement had formed itself in that unsavory and unsanitary
portion of the town known as the Point. The Point, like more aristocratic
communities, had its residential and commercial districts, its church, its
theatre and its restaurant. When the craving for local color was on me it
was my habit to resort to the restaurant, a low-browed wooden building with
the appetizing announcement:
“_Aristiù di montone_”
pasted in one of its fly-blown window-panes. Here the consumption of tough
macaroni or of an ambiguous _frittura_ sufficed to transport me to the
Cappello d’Oro in Venice, while my cup of coffee and a wasp-waisted cigar
with a straw in it turned my greasy table-cloth into the marble top of
one of the little round tables under the arcade of the Caffè Pedrotti at
Padua. This feat of the imagination was materially aided by Agostino, the
hollow-eyed and low-collared waiter, whose slimy napkin never lost its
Latin flourish and whose zeal for my comfort was not infrequently displayed
by his testing the warmth of my soup with his finger. Through Agostino I
became acquainted with the inner history of the colony, heard the details
of its feuds and vendettas, and learned to know by sight the leading
characters in these domestic dramas.
The restaurant was frequented by the chief personages of the community:
the overseer of the Italian hands at the Meriton Mills, the doctor, his
wife the _levatrice_ (a plump Neapolitan with greasy ringlets, a plush
picture-hat, and a charm against the evil-eye hanging in a crease of her
neck) and lastly by Don Egidio, the _parocco_ of the little church
across the street. The doctor and his wife came only on feast days, but
the overseer and Don Egidio were regular patrons. The former was a quiet
saturnine-looking man, of accomplished manners but reluctant speech, and I
depended for my diversion chiefly on Don Egidio, whose large loosely-hung
lips were always ajar for conversation. The remarks issuing from them
were richly tinged by the gutturals of the Bergamasque dialect, and it
needed but a slight acquaintance with Italian types to detect the Lombard
peasant under the priest’s rusty cassock. This inference was confirmed
by Don Egidio’s telling me that he came from a village of Val Camonica,
the radiant valley which extends northward from the lake of Iseo to
the Adamello glaciers. His step-father had been a laborer on one of
the fruit-farms of a Milanese count who owned large estates in the Val
Camonica; and that gentleman, taking a fancy to the lad, whom he had seen
at work in his orchards, had removed him to his villa on the lake of Iseo
and had subsequently educated him for the Church.
It was doubtless to this picturesque accident that Don Egidio owed the
mingling of ease and simplicity that gave an inimitable charm to his
stout shabby presence. It was as though some wild mountain-fruit had been
transplanted to the Count’s orchards and had mellowed under cultivation
without losing its sylvan flavor. I have never seen the social art carried
farther without suggestion of artifice. The fact that Don Egidio’s
amenities were mainly exercised on the mill-hands composing his parish
proved the genuineness of his gift. It is easier to simulate gentility
among gentlemen than among navvies; and the plain man is a touchstone who
draws out all the alloy in the gold.
Among his parishioners Don Egidio ruled with the cheerful despotism of the
good priest. On cardinal points he was inflexible, but in minor matters he
had that elasticity of judgment which enables the Catholic discipline to
fit itself to every inequality of the human conscience. There was no appeal
from his verdict; but his judgment-seat was a revolving chair from which he
could view the same act at various angles. His influence was acknowledged
not only by his flock, but by the policeman at the corner, the “bar-keep’”
in the dive, the ward politician in the corner grocery. The general verdict
of Dunstable was that the Point would have been hell without the priest.
It was perhaps not precisely heaven with him; but such light of the upper
sky as pierced its murky atmosphere was reflected from Don Egidio’s
countenance. It is hardly possible for any one to exercise such influence
without taking pleasure in it; and on the whole the priest was probably
a contented man; though it does not follow that he was a happy one. On
this point the first stages of our acquaintance yielded much food for
conjecture. At first sight Don Egidio was the image of cheerfulness. He had
all the physical indications of a mind at ease: the leisurely rolling gait,
the ready laugh, the hospitable eye of the man whose sympathies are always
on the latch. It took me some time to discover under his surface garrulity
the impenetrable reticence of his profession, and under his enjoyment of
trifles a levelling melancholy which made all enjoyment trifling. Don
Egidio’s aspect and conversation were so unsuggestive of psychological
complexities that I set down this trait to poverty or home-sickness. There
are few classes of men more frugal in tastes and habit than the village
priest in Italy; but Don Egidio, by his own account, had been introduced,
at an impressionable age, to a way of living that must have surpassed his
wildest dreams of self-indulgence. To whatever privations his parochial
work had since accustomed him, the influences of that earlier life were
too perceptible in his talk not to have made a profound impression on his
tastes; and he remained, for all his apostolic simplicity, the image of the
family priest who has his seat at the rich man’s table.
It chanced that I had used one of my short European holidays to explore
afoot the romantic passes connecting the Valtelline with the lake of Iseo;
and my remembrance of that enchanting region made it seem impossible
that Don Egidio should ever look without a reminiscent pang on the grimy
perspective of his parochial streets. The transition was too complete, too
ironical, from those rich glades and Titianesque acclivities to the brick
hovels and fissured sidewalks of the Point.
This impression was confirmed when Don Egidio, in response to my urgent
invitation, paid his first visit to my modest lodgings. He called one
winter evening, when a wood-fire in its happiest humor was giving a
factitious lustre to my book-shelves and bringing out the values of the one
or two old prints and Chinese porcelains that accounted for the perennial
shabbiness of my wardrobe.
“Ah,” said he with a murmur of satisfaction, as he laid aside his shiny hat
and bulging umbrella, “it is a long time since I have been in a _casa
signorile_.”
My remembrance of his own room (he lodged with the doctor and the
_levatrice_) saved this epithet from the suggestion of irony and kept
me silent while he sank into my arm-chair with the deliberation of a tired
traveller lowering himself gently into a warm bath.
“Good! good!” he repeated, looking about him. “Books, porcelains, objects
of _virtù_--I am glad to see that there are still such things in the
world!” And he turned a genial eye on the glass of Marsala that I had
poured out for him.
Don Egidio was the most temperate of men and never exceeded his one glass;
but he liked to sit by the hour puffing at my Cabañas, which I suspected
him of preferring to the black weed of his native country. Under the
influence of my tobacco he became even more blandly garrulous, and I
sometimes fancied that of all the obligations of his calling none could
have placed such a strain on him as that of preserving the secrets of the
confessional. He often talked of his early life at the Count’s villa, where
he had been educated with his patron’s two sons till he was of age to be
sent to the seminary; and I could see that the years spent in simple and
familiar intercourse with his benefactors had been the most vivid chapter
in his experience. The Italian peasant’s inarticulate tenderness for the
beauty of his birthplace had been specialized in him by contact with
cultivated tastes, and he could tell me not only that the Count had a
“stupendous” collection of pictures, but that the chapel of the villa
contained a sepulchral monument by Bambaja, and that the art-critics were
divided as to the authenticity of the Leonardo in the family palace at
Milan.
On all these subjects he was inexhaustibly voluble; but there was one point
which he always avoided, and that was his reason for coming to America. I
remember the round turn with which he brought me up when I questioned him.
“A priest,” said he, “is a soldier and must obey orders like a soldier.”
He set down his glass of Marsala and strolled across the room. “I had not
observed,” he went on, “that you have here a photograph of the Sposalizio
of the Brera. What a picture! _È stupendo_!” and he turned back to his
seat and smilingly lit a fresh cigar.
I saw at once that I had hit on a point where his native garrulity was
protected by the chain-mail of religious discipline that every Catholic
priest wears beneath his cassock. I had too much respect for my friend
to wish to penetrate his armor, and now and then I almost fancied he was
grateful to me for not putting his reticence to the test.
Don Egidio must have been past sixty when I made his acquaintance; but it
was not till the close of an exceptionally harsh winter, some five or six
years after our first meeting, that I began to think of him as an old man.
It was as though the long-continued cold had cracked and shrivelled him. He
had grown bent and hollow-chested and his lower lip shook like an unhinged
door. The summer heat did little to revive him, and in September, when I
came home from my vacation, I found him just recovering from an attack of
pneumonia. That autumn he did not care to venture often into the night air,
and now and then I used to go and sit with him in his little room, to which
I had contributed the unheard-of luxuries of an easy-chair and a gas-stove.
My engagements, however, made these visits infrequent, and several weeks
had elapsed without my seeing the _parocco_ when, one snowy November
morning, I ran across him in the railway-station. I was on my way to New
York for the day and had just time to wave a greeting to him as I jumped
into the railway-carriage; but a moment later, to my surprise, I saw him
stiffly clambering into the same train. I found him seated in the common
car, with his umbrella between his knees and a bundle done up in a red
cotton handkerchief on the seat at his side. The caution with which, at my
approach, he transferred this bundle to his arms caused me to glance at it
in surprise; and he answered my look by saying with a smile:
“They are flowers for the dead--the most exquisite flowers--from the
greenhouses of Mr. Meriton--_si figuri_!” And he waved a descriptive
hand. “One of my lads, Gianpietro, is employed by the gardener there, and
every year on this day he brings me a beautiful bunch of flowers--for such
a purpose it is no sin,” he added, with the charming Italian pliancy of
judgment.
“And why are you travelling in this snowy weather, _signor parocco_?”
I asked, as he ended with a cough.
He fixed me gravely with his simple shallow eye. “Because it is the day of
the dead, my son,” he said, “and I go to place these on the grave of the
noblest man that ever lived.”
“You are going to New York?”
“To Brooklyn--“
I hesitated a moment, wishing to question him, yet uncertain whether his
replies were curtailed by the persistency of his cough or by the desire to
avoid interrogation.
“This is no weather to be travelling with such a cough,” I said at length.
He made a deprecating gesture.
“I have never missed the day--not once in eighteen years. But for me he
would have no one!” He folded his hands on his umbrella and looked away
from me to hide the trembling of his lip.
I resolved on a last attempt to storm his confidence. “Your friend is
buried in Calvary cemetery?”
He signed an assent.
“That is a long way for you to go alone, _signor parocco_. The streets
are sure to be slippery and there is an icy wind blowing. Give me your
flowers and let me send them to the cemetery by a messenger. I give you my
word they shall reach their destination safely.”
He turned a quiet look on me. “My son, you are young,” he said, “and you
don’t know how the dead need us.” He drew his breviary from his pocket and
opened it with a smile. “_Mi scusi?_” he murmured.
The business which had called me to town obliged me to part from him as
soon as the train entered the station, and in my dash for the street I
left his unwieldy figure laboring far behind me through the crowd on the
platform. Before we separated, however, I had learned that he was returning
to Dunstable by the four o’clock train, and had resolved to despatch my
business in time to travel home with him. When I reached Wall Street I was
received with the news that the man I had appointed to meet was ill and
detained in the country. My business was “off” and I found myself with
the rest of the day at my disposal. I had no difficulty in deciding how
to employ my time. I was at an age when, in such contingencies, there is
always a feminine alternative; and even now I don’t know how it was that,
on my way to a certain hospitable luncheon-table, I suddenly found myself
in a cab which was carrying me at full-speed to the Twenty-third Street
ferry. It was not till I had bought my ticket and seated myself in the
varnished tunnel of the ferry-boat that I was aware of having been diverted
from my purpose by an overmastering anxiety for Don Egidio. I rapidly
calculated that he had not more than an hour’s advance on me, and that,
allowing for my greater agility and for the fact that I had a cab at my
call, I was likely to reach the cemetery in time to see him under shelter
before the gusts of sleet that were already sweeping across the river had
thickened to a snow-storm.
At the gates of the cemetery I began to take a less sanguine view of my
attempt. The commemorative anniversary had filled the silent avenues
with visitors, and I felt the futility of my quest as I tried to fix the
gatekeeper’s attention on my delineation of a stout Italian priest with a
bad cough and a bunch of flowers tied up in a red cotton handkerchief. The
gate-keeper showed that delusive desire to oblige that is certain to send
its victims in the wrong direction; but I had the presence of mind to go
exactly contrary to his indication, and thanks to this precaution I came,
after half an hour’s search, on the figure of my poor _parocco_,
kneeling on the wet ground in one of the humblest by-ways of the great
necropolis. The mound before which he knelt was strewn with the spoils of
Mr. Meriton’s conservatories, and on the weather-worn tablet at its head I
read the inscription:
IL CONTE SIVIANO
DA MILANO.
_Super flumina Babylonis, illic sedimus et flevimus._
So engrossed was Don Egidio that for some moments I stood behind him
unobserved; and when he rose and faced me, grief had left so little room
for any minor emotion that he looked at me almost without surprise.
“Don Egidio,” I said, “I have a carriage waiting for you at the gate. You
must come home with me.”
He nodded quietly and I drew his hand through my arm.
He turned back to the grave. “One moment, my son,” he said. “It may be for
the last time.” He stood motionless, his eyes on the heaped-up flowers
which were already bruised and blackened by the cold. “To leave him
alone--after sixty years! But God is everywhere--“ he murmured as I led him
away.
On the journey home he did not care to talk, and my chief concern was to
keep him wrapped in my greatcoat and to see that his bed was made ready as
soon as I had restored him to his lodgings. The _levatrice_ brought a
quilted coverlet from her own room and hovered over him as gently as though
he had been of the sex to require her services; while Agostino, at my
summons, appeared with a bowl of hot soup that was heralded down the
street by a reviving waft of garlic. To these ministrations I left the
_parocco_, intending to call for news of him the next evening; but an
unexpected pressure of work kept me late at my desk, and the following day
some fresh obstacle delayed me.
On the third afternoon, as I was leaving the office, an agate-eyed infant
from the Point hailed me with a message from the doctor. The _parocco_
was worse and had asked for me. I jumped into the nearest car and ten
minutes later was running up the doctor’s greasy stairs.
To my dismay I found Don Egidio’s room cold and untenanted; but I was
reassured a moment later by the appearance of the _levatrice_, who
announced that she had transferred the blessed man to her own apartment,
where he could have the sunlight and a good bed to lie in. There in fact
he lay, weak but smiling, in a setting which contrasted oddly enough with
his own monastic surroundings: a cheerful grimy room, hung with anecdotic
chromos, photographs of lady-patients proudly presenting their offspring
to the camera, and innumerable Neapolitan _santolini_ decked out with
shrivelled palm-leaves.
The _levatrice_ whispered that the good man had the pleurisy, and
that, as she phrased it, he was nearing his last mile-stone. I saw that he
was in fact in a bad way, but his condition did not indicate any pressing
danger, and I had the presentiment that he would still, as the saying is,
put up a good fight. It was clear, however, that he knew what turn the
conflict must take, and the solemnity with which he welcomed me showed that
my summons was a part of that spiritual strategy with which the Catholic
opposes the surprise of death.
“My son,” he said, when the _levatrice_ had left us, “I have a favor
to ask you. You found me yesterday bidding good-bye to my best friend.”
His cough interrupted him. “I have never told you,” he went on, “the name
of the family in which I was brought up. It was Siviano, and that was
the grave of the Count’s eldest son, with whom I grew up as a brother.
For eighteen years he has lain in that strange ground--_in terra
aliena_--and when I die, there will be no one to care for his grave.”