whither he has returned,--as he told me one acute day in the fall, when
all the winter hinted itself, and the painted leaves shuddered earthward
in the grove across the way,--to enjoy a little climate before he died
(_per goder un po' di dima prima di morire_). Our climate was the only
thing he had against us; in every other respect he was a New-Englander,
even to the early stages of consumption. He told me the story of his
whole life, and of how in his adventurous youth he had left Milan
and sojourned some years in Naples, vainly seeking his fortune there.
Afterwards he went to Greece, and set up his ancestral business of
greengrocer in Athens, faring there no better, but rather worse than in
Naples, because of the deeper wickedness of the Athenians, who cheated
him right and left, and whose laws gave him no redress. The Neapolitans
were bad enough, he said, making a wry face, but the Greeks!--and he
spat the Greeks out in the grass. At last, after much misfortune
in Europe, he bethought him of coming to America, and he had never
regretted it, but for the climate. You spent a good deal here,--nearly
all you earned,--but then a poor man was a man, and the people were
honest. It was wonderful to him that they all knew how to read and
write, and he viewed with inexpressible scorn those Irish who came to
this country, and were so little sensible of the benefits it conferred
upon them. Boston he believed the best city in America, and “Tell me,”
said he, “is there such a thing anywhere else in the world as that
Public Library?” He, a poor man, and almost unknown, had taken books
from it to his own room, and was master to do so whenever he liked. He
had thus been enabled to read Botta's history of the United States, an
enormous compliment both to the country and the work which I doubt ever
to have been paid before; and he knew more about Washington than I did,
and desired to know more than I could tell him of the financial question
among us. So we came to national politics, and then to European affairs.
“It appears that Garibaldi will not go to Rome this year,” remarks
my scissors-grinder, who is very red in his sympathies. “The Emperor
forbids! Well, patience! And that blessed Pope, what does he want, that
Pope? He will be king find priest both, he will wear two pairs of shoes
at once!” I must confess that no other of my door-step acquaintance had
so clear an idea as this one of the difference between things here and
at home. To the minds of most we seemed divided here as there into rich
and poor,--_signori, persone eivili_, and _povera gente_,--and their
thoughts about us did not go beyond a speculation as to our individual
willingness or ability to pay for organ-grinding. But this Lombard was
worthy of his adopted country, and I forgive him the frank expression
of a doubt that one day occurred to him, when offered a glass of Italian
wine. He held it daintily between him and the sun for a smiling
moment, and then said, as if our wine must needs be as ungenuine as
our Italian,--was perhaps some expression from the surrounding
currant-bushes, harsh as that from the Northern tongues which could
never give his language the true life and tonic charm,--“But I suppose
this wine is not made of grapes, signor?” Yet he was a very courteous
old man, elaborate in greeting and leave-taking, and with a quicker
sense than usual. It was accounted delicacy in him, that, when he had
bidden us a final adieu, he should never come near us again, though
the date of his departure was postponed some weeks, and we heard him
tinkling down the street, and stopping at the neighbors' houses. He
was a keen-faced, thoughtful-looking man; and he wore a blouse of blue
cotton, from the pocket of which always dangled the leaves of some wild
salad culled from our wasteful vacant lots or prodigal waysides.
[Illustration: “But I suppose this wine is not made of grapes, signor?”]
Altogether different in character was that Triestine, who came one
evening to be helped home at the close of a very disastrous career
in Mexico. He Was a person of innumerable bows, and fluttered his
bright-colored compliments about, till it appeared that never before
had such amiable people been asked charity by such a worthy and generous
sufferer. In Trieste he had been a journalist, and it was evident enough
from his speech that he was of a good education. He was vain of his
Italian accent, which was peculiarly good for his heterogeneously
peopled native city; and he made a show of that marvelous facility of
the Triestines in languages, by taking me down French books, Spanish
books, German books, and reading from them all with the properest
accent. Yet with this boyish pride and self-satisfaction there was mixed
a tone of bitter and worldly cynicism, a belief in fortune as the sole
providence. As nearly as I could make out, he was a Johnson man in
American politics; upon the Mexican question he was independent,
disdaining French and Mexicans alike. He was with the former from
the first, and had continued in the service of Maximilian after their
withdrawal, till the execution of that prince made Mexico no place
for adventurous merit. He was now going back to his native country, an
ungrateful land enough, which had ill treated him long ago, but to
which he nevertheless returned in a perfect gayety of temper. What a
light-hearted rogue he was,--with such merry eyes, and such a pleasant
smile shaping his neatly trimmed beard and mustache! After he had
supped, and he Stood with us at the door taking leave, something
happened to be said of Italian songs, whereupon this blithe exile, whom
the compassion of strangers was enabling to go home after many years of
unprofitable toil and danger to a country that had loved him not, fell
to caroling a Venetian barcarole, and went sweetly away in its cadence.
I bore him company as far as the gate of another Italian-speaking
signor, and was there bidden adieu with great effusion, so that I forgot
till he had left me to charge him not to be in fear of the house-dog,
which barked but did not bite. In calling this after him, I had the
misfortune to blunder in my verb. A man of another nation--perhaps
another man of his own nation--would have cared rather for what I said
than how I said it; but he, as if too zealous for the honor of his
beautiful language to endure a hurt to it even in that moment of grief,
lifting his hat, and bowing for the last time, responded with a “Morde,
non morsica, signore!” and passed in under the pines, and next day to
Italy.
There is a little old Genoese lady comes to sell us pins, needles,
thread, tape, and the like _roba_, whom I regard as leading quite an
ideal life in some respects. Her traffic is limited to a certain number
of families who speak more or less Italian; and her days, so far as
they are concerned, must be passed in an atmosphere of sympathy and
kindliness. The truth is, we Northern and New World folk cannot help but
cast a little romance about whoever comes to us from Italy, whether we
have actually known the beauty and charm of that land or not. Then this
old lady is in herself a very gentle and lovable kind of person, with
a tender mother-face, which is also the face of a child. A smile plays
always upon her wrinkled visage, and her quick and restless eyes are
full of friendliness. There is never much stuff in her basket, however,
and it is something of a mystery how she manages to live from it. None
but an Italian could, I am sure; and her experience must test the full
virtue of the national genius for cheap salads and much-extenuated
soup-meat. I do not know whether it is native in her, or whether it is a
grace acquired from long dealing with those kindly-hearted customers
of hers in Charlesbridge, but she is of a most munificent spirit, and
returns every smallest benefit with some present from her basket. She
makes me ashamed of things I have written about the sordidness of her
race, but I shall vainly seek to atone for them by open-handedness to
her. She will give favor for favor; she will not even count the money
she receives; our bargaining is a contest of the courtliest civilities,
ending in many an “Adieu!” “To meet again!” “Remain well!” and
“Finally!” not surpassed if rivaled in any Italian street. In her
ineffectual way, she brings us news of her different customers, breaking
up their stout Saxon names into tinkling polysyllables which suggest
them only to the practiced sense, and is perfectly patient and contented
if we mistake one for another. She loves them all, but she pities them
as living in a terrible climate; and doubtless in her heart she purposes
one day to go back to Italy, there to die. In the mean time she is
very cheerful; she, too, has had her troubles,--what troubles I do not
remember, but those that come by sickness and by death, and that really
seem no sorrows until they come to us,--yet she never complains. It is
hard to make a living, and the house-rent alone is six dollars a month;
but still one lives, and does not fare so ill either. As it does not
seem to be in her to dislike any one, it must be out of a harmless
guile, felt to be comforting to servant-ridden householders, that she
always speaks of “those Irish,” her neighbors, with a bated breath, a
shaken head, a hand lifted to the cheek, and an averted countenance.
Swarthiest of the organ-grinding tribe is he who peers up at my window
out of infinitesimal black eyes, perceives me, louts low, and for
form's sake grinds me out a tune before he begins to talk. As we
parley together, say it is eleven o'clock in the forenoon, and a sober
tranquillity reigns upon the dust and nodding weeds of Benicia Street.
At that hour the organ-grinder and I are the only persons of our sex
in the whole suburban population; all other husbands and fathers having
eaten their breakfasts at seven o'clock, and stood up in the early
horse-cars to Boston, whence they will return, with aching backs and
quivering calves, half-pendant by leathern straps from the roofs of the
same luxurious conveyances, in the evening. The Italian might go and
grind his organ upon the front stoop of any one of a hundred French-roof
houses around, and there would be no arm within strong enough to thrust
him thence; but he is a gentleman in his way, and, as he prettily
explains, he never stops to play except where the window smiles on
him: a frowning lattice he will pass in silence. I behold in him a
disappointed man,--a man broken in health, and of a liver baked by long
sojourn in a tropical clime. In large and dim outline, made all the
dimmer by his dialect, he sketches me the story of his life; how in his
youth he ran away from the Milanese for love of a girl in France, who,
dying, left him with so little purpose in the world that, after working
at his trade of plasterer for some years in Lyons, he listened to a
certain gentleman going out upon government service to a French colony
in South America. This gentleman wanted a man-servant, and he said to
my organ-grinder, “Go with me and I make your fortune.” So he, who cared
not whither he went, went, and found himself in the tropics. It was a
hard life he led there; and of the wages that had seemed so great in
France, he paid nearly half to his laundress alone, being forced to be
neat in his master's house. The service was not so irksome in-doors, but
it was the hunting beasts in the forest all day that broke his patience
at last.
“Beasts in the forest?” I ask, forgetful of the familiar sense of
_bestie_, and figuring cougars at least by the word.
“Yes, those little beasts for the naturalists,--flies, bugs,
beetles,--Heaven knows what.”
“But this brought you money?”
“It brought my master money, but me aches and pains as many as you will,
and at last the fever. When that was burnt out, I made up my mind to
ask for more pay, and, not getting it, to quit that service. I think
the signor would have given it,--but the signora! So I left, empty as I
came, and was cook on a vessel to New York.”
This was the black and white of the man's story. I lose the color and
atmosphere which his manner as well as his words bestowed upon it. He
told it in a cheerful, impersonal kind of way as the romance of a poor
devil which had interested him, and might possibly amuse me, leaving
out no touch of character in his portrait of the fat, selfish
master,--yielding enough, however, but for his grasping wife, who, with
all her avarice and greed, he yet confessed to be very handsome. By the
wave of a hand he housed them in a tropic residence, dim, cool, close
shut, kept by servants in white linen moving with mute slippered feet
over stone floors; and by another gesture he indicated the fierce thorny
growths of the forest in which he hunted those vivid insects,--the
luxuriant savannas, the gigantic ferns and palms, the hush and shining
desolation, the presence of the invisible fever and death. There was a
touch, too, of inexpressible sadness in his half-ignorant mention of
the exiles at Cayenne, who were forbidden the wide ocean of escape about
them by those swift gunboats keeping their coasts and swooping down upon
every craft that left the shore. He himself had seen one such capture,
and he made me see it, and the mortal despair of the fugitives, standing
upright in their boat with the idle oars in their unconscious hands,
while the corvette swept toward them.
For all his misfortunes, he was not cast down. He had that lightness of
temper which seems proper to most northern Italians, whereas those from
the south are usually dark-mooded, sad-faced men. Nothing surpasses for
unstudied misanthropy of expression the visages of different Neapolitan
harpers who have visited us; but they have some right to their dejected
countenances as being of a yet half-civilized stock, and as real artists
and men of genius. Nearly all wandering violinists, as well as harpers,
are of their race, and they are of every age, from that of mere
children to men in their prime. They are very rarely old, as many of
the organ-grinders are; they are not so handsome as the Italians of the
north, though they have invariably fine eyes. They arrive in twos and
threes; the violinist briefly tunes his fiddle, and the harper unslings
his instrument, and, with faces of profound gloom, they go through their
repertory,--pieces from the great composers, airs from the opera, not
unmingled with such efforts of Anglo-Saxon genius as Champagne Charley
and Captain Jenks of the Horse Marines, which, like the language of
Shakespeare and Milton, hold us and our English cousins in tender bonds
of mutual affection. Beyond the fact that they come “dal Basilicat',” or
“dal Principat',” one gets very little out of these Neapolitans, though
I dare say they are not so surly at heart as they look. Money does not
brighten them to the eye, but yet it touches them, and they are good
in playing or leaving off to him that pays. Long time two of them stood
between the gateway firs on a pleasant summer's afternoon and twanged
and scraped their harmonious strings, till all the idle boys of the
neighborhood gathered about them, listening with a grave and still
delight. It was a most serious company: the Neapolitans, with their
cloudy brows, rapt in their music; and the Yankee children, with their
impassive faces, warily guarding against the faintest expression of
enjoyment; and when at last the minstrels played a brisk measure,
and the music began to work in the blood of the boys, and one of them
shuffling his reluctant feet upon the gravel, broke into a sudden and
resistless dance, the spectacle became too sad for contemplation. The
boy danced only from the hips down; no expression of his face gave the
levity sanction, nor did any of his comrades: they beheld him with a
silent fascination, but none was infected by the solemn indecorum; and
when the legs and music ceased their play together, no comment was made,
and the dancer turned unheated away. A chance passer asked for what he
called the Gearybaldeye Hymn, but the Neapolitans apparently did not
know what this was.
My doorstep acquaintance were not all of one race; now and then an alien
to the common Italian tribe appeared,--an Irish soldier, on his way to
Salem, and willing to show me more of his mutilation than I cared to
buy the sight of for twenty-five cents; and more rarely yet an American,
also formerly of the army, but with something besides his wretchedness
to sell. On the hottest day of last summer such a one rang the bell, and
was discovered on the threshold wiping with his poor sole hand the sweat
that stood upon his forehead. There was still enough of the independent
citizen in his maimed and emaciated person to inspire him with
deliberation and a show of that indifference with which we Americans
like to encounter each other; but his voice was rather faint when he
asked if I supposed we wanted any starch to-day.
“Yes, certainly,” answered what heart there was within, taking note
willfully, but I hope not wantonly, what an absurdly limp figure he was
for a peddler of starch,--“certainly from you, brave fellow;” and the
package being taken from his basket, the man turned to go away, so very
wearily, that a cheap philanthropy protested: “For shame! ask him to sit
down in-doors and drink a glass of water.”
“No,” answered the poor fellow, when this indignant voice had been
obeyed, and he had been taken at a disadvantage, and as it were
surprised into the confession, “my family hadn't any breakfast this
morning, and I've got to hurry back to them.”
“Haven't _you_ had any breakfast?”
“Well, I wa'n't rightly hungry when I left the house.”
“Here, now,” popped in the virtue before named, “is an opportunity to
discharge the debt we all owe to the brave fellows who gave us back our
country. Make it beer.”
So it was made beer and bread and cold meat, and, after a little
pressing, the honest soul consented to the refreshment. He sat down in a
cool doorway and began to eat and to tell of the fight before Vicksburg.
And if you have never seen a one-armed soldier making a meal, I can
assure you the sight is a pathetic one, and is rendered none the
cheerfuller by his memories of the fights that mutilated him. This man
had no very susceptible audience, but before he was carried off the
field, shot through the body, and in the arm and foot, he had sold every
package of starch in his basket. I am ashamed to say this now, for I
suspect that a man with one arm, who indulged himself in going about
under that broiling sun of July, peddling starch, was very probably an
impostor. He computed a good day's profits of seventy-five cents, and
when asked if that was not very little for the support of a sick wife
and three children, he answered with a quaint effort at impressiveness,
and with a trick, as I imagined, from the manner of the regimental
chaplain, “You've done your duty, my friend, and more'n your duty. If
every one did their duty like that, we should get along.” So he took
leave, and shambled out into the furnace-heat, the sun beating upon his
pale face, and his linen coat hugging him close, but with his basket
lighter, and I hope his heart also. At any rate, this was the sentiment
which cheap philanthropy offered in self-gratulation, as he passed out
of sight: “There! you are quits with those maimed soldiers at last, and
you have a country which you have paid for with cold victuals as they
with blood.”
We have been a good deal visited by one disbanded volunteer, not to the
naked eye maimed, nor apparently suffering from any lingering illness,
yet who bears, as he tells me, a secret disabling wound in his side from
a spent shell, and who is certainly a prey to the most acute form
of shiftlessness. I do not recall with exactness the date of our
acquaintance, but it was one of those pleasant August afternoons when
a dinner eaten in peace fills the digester with a millennial tenderness
for the race too rarely felt in the nineteenth century. At such a moment
it is a more natural action to loosen than to tighten the purse-strings,
and when a very neatly dressed young man presented himself at the gate,
and, in a note of indescribable plaintiveness, asked if I had any little
job for him to do that he might pay for a night's lodging, I looked
about the small domain with a vague longing to find some part of it in
disrepair, and experienced a moment's absurd relief when he hinted that
he would be willing to accept fifty cents in pledge of future service.
Yet this was not the right principle: some work, real or apparent, must
be done for the money, and the veteran was told that he might weed the
strawberry bed, though, as matters then stood, it was clean enough for a
strawberry bed that never bore anything. The veteran was neatly dressed,
as I have said: his coat, which was good, was buttoned to the throat
for reasons that shall be sacred against curiosity, and he had on a
perfectly clean paper collar; he was a handsome young fellow, with
regular features, and a solicitously kept imperial and mustache; his
hair, when he lifted his hat, appeared elegantly oiled and brushed.
I did not hope from this figure that the work done would be worth the
money paid, and, as nearly as I can compute, the weeds he took from that
bed cost me a cent apiece, to say nothing of a cup of tea given him in
grace at the end of his labors.
My acquaintance was, as the reader will be glad to learn, a native
American, though it is to be regretted, for the sake of facts which his
case went far to establish, that he was not a New-Englander by birth.
The most that could be claimed was, that he came to Boston from Delaware
when very young, and that there on that brine-washed granite he had
grown as perfect a flower of helplessness and indolence, as fine a fruit
of maturing civilization, as ever expanded or ripened in Latin lands.
He lived, not only a protest in flesh and blood against the tendency of
democracy to exclude mere beauty from our system, but a refutation
of those Old World observers, who deny to our vulgar and bustling
communities the refining and elevating grace of Repose. There was
something very curious and original in his character, from which the
sentiment of shame was absent, but which was not lacking in the fine
instincts of personal cleanliness, of dress, of style. There was nothing
of the rowdy in him; he was gentle as an Italian noble in his manners:
what other traits they may have had in common, I do not know; perhaps an
amiable habit of illusion. He was always going to bring me his discharge
papers, but he never did, though he came often and had many a pleasant
night's sleep at my cost. If sometimes he did a little work, he spent
great part of the time contracted to me in the kitchen, where it was
understood, quite upon his own agency, that his wages included board. At
other times, he called for money too late in the evening to work it out
that day, and it has happened that a new second girl, deceived by
his genteel appearance in the uncertain light, has shown him into the
parlor, where I have found him to his and my own great amusement, as
the gentleman who wanted to see me. Nothing else seemed to raise his
ordinarily dejected spirits so much. We all know how pleasant it is to
laugh at people behind their backs; but this veteran afforded me at a
very low rate the luxury of a fellow-being whom one might laugh at to
his face as much as one liked.
Yet with all his shamelessness, his pensiveness, his elegance, I felt
that somehow our national triumph was not complete in him,--that there
were yet more finished forms of self-abasement in the Old World, till
one day I looked out of the window and saw at a little distance my
veteran digging a cellar for an Irishman. I own that the spectacle gave
me a shock of pleasure, and that I ran down to have a nearer view of
what human eyes have seldom, if ever, beheld,--an American, pure blood,
handling the pick, the shovel, and the wheelbarrow, while an Irishman
directed his labors. Upon inspection, it appeared that none of the trees
grew with their roots in the air, in recognition of this great reversal
of the natural law; all the French-roof houses stood right side up. The
phenomenon may become more common in future, unless the American
race accomplishes its destiny of dying out before the more populatory
foreigner, but as yet it graced the veteran with an exquisite and signal
distinction. He, however, seemed to feel unpleasantly the anomaly of his
case, and opened the conversation by saying that he should not work at
that job to-morrow, it hurt his side; and went on to complain of the
inhumanity of Americans to Americans. “Why,” said he, “they'd rather
give out their jobs to a nigger than to one of their own kind. I was
beatin' carpets for a gentleman on the Avenue, and the first thing I
know he give most of 'em to a nigger. I beat seven of 'em in one day,
and got two dollars; and the nigger beat 'em by the piece, and he got a
dollar an' a half apiece. My luck!”
Here the Irishman glanced at his hireling, and the rueful veteran
hastened to pile up another wheelbarrow with earth. If ever we come to
reverse positions generally with our Irish brethren, there is no doubt
but they will get more work out of us than we do from them at present.
It was shortly after this that the veteran offered to do second girl's
work in my house if I would take him. The place was not vacant; and as
the summer was now drawing to a close, and I feared to be left with
him on my hands for the winter, it seemed well to speak to him upon
the subject of economy. The next time he called, I had not about me the
exact sum for a night's lodging,--fifty cents, namely--and asked him
if he thought a dollar would do He smiled sadly, as if he did not like
jesting upon such a very serious subject, but said he allowed to work it
out, and took it.
“Now, I hope you won't think I am interfering with your affairs,” said
his benefactor, “but I really think you are a very poor financier.
According to your own account, you have been going on from year to year
for a long time, trusting to luck for a night's lodging. Sometimes I
suppose you have to sleep out-of-doors.”
“No, never!” answered the veteran, with something like scorn. “I never
sleep out-doors. I wouldn't do it.”
“Well, at any rate, some one has to pay for your lodging. Don't you
think you'd come cheaper to your friends, if, instead of going to a
hotel every night, you'd take a room somewhere, and pay for it by the
month?”
“I've thought of that. If I could get a good bed, I'd try it awhile
anyhow. You see the hotels have raised. I used to get a lodgin' and a
nice breakfast for a half a dollar, but now it is as much as you can do
to get a lodgin' for the money, and it's just as dear in the Port as
it is in the city. I've tried hotels pretty much everywhere, and one's
about as bad as another.”
If he had been a travelled Englishman writing a book, he could not have
spoken of hotels with greater disdain.
“You see, the trouble with me is, I ain't got any relations around here.
Now,” he added, with the life and eagerness of an inspiration, “if I had
a mother and sister livin' down at the Port, say, I wouldn't go hunting
about for these mean little jobs everywheres. I'd just lay round home,
and wait till something come up big. What I want is a home.”
At the instigation of a malignant spirit I asked the homeless orphan,
“Why don't you get married, then?”