I
I
Teresa Boselli stood at the window staring down at Old Compton Street; at the greasy pavements, the greasy roadway, the carts, the intolerable slow-moving vans, those vans, that to Teresa’s agonized ears, seemed to rumble more loudly because of that window. There were men in the street, and women too, mothers—yet they let those vans go on rumbling; they did not know, and even if they knew they would probably continue on their way uncaring.
Teresa’s whole being, soul, heart and brain, seemed to fuse itself together into something hard, resisting—a shield, a wall, a barricade of steel wherewith to shut away those sounds. In the street below the traffic blocked itself; protesting horses shuffled and stamped, their drivers shouted to each other, laughing; a boy went by whistling a music-hall song; a dog, perched jauntily on a grocer’s cart, sprang up to bark at nothing in particular; and Teresa shook her clenched fists in the air, then let them drop stiffly to her sides. Her eyes, small, black and aggressively defiant, burnt with a kind of fury.
Turning from the window, she looked about the room with its horsehair armchair and couch. She herself had crocheted the antimacassars that, slightly out of shape and no longer very white, adorned the slippery horsehair. She herself had chosen the red serge curtains and the bottle-green window blind, the brown linoleum so very unlike parquet and the rug so alien to Persia. She herself had made the spotted muslin hangings over pink sateen that clothed the dressing-table, and she herself had pinned on the large pink bow wherewith they were looped together. She herself had fixed the little wooden bracket that held the patient plaster Virgin, and hers were the hands that had nailed the Sacred Heart directly over the bedstead. A battered wooden bedstead, a battered Sacred Heart; the one from long enduring the travail of men’s bodies, the other from long enduring the travail of their souls. In the oleograph the Heart was always bleeding—no one ever staunched it, no one ever worried. To Teresa it had stood for a symbol of salvation; she had sometimes condoned with its sufferings in her prayers, but never—no, not once—in her life. She had seen this particular picture of the Heart in a window near the church in Hatton Garden. She had gone in and bought it, three and sixpence it had cost. That had been six months ago this November, while Olga, the beloved, the only child, the beautiful, had been away in Florence serving as maid to the children of rich Americans, teaching them Italian—Maledetti!
On the wooden bedstead lay an old patchwork quilt, the labor of Teresa’s fingers, and under the quilt lay Olga, the beloved, the labor of Teresa’s body, and of Fabio, downstairs in the shop below cutting up mottled salame. But when Teresa thought of Olga, the beloved, she tried not to think of Fabio.
Teresa was forty. For forty years she had stared at life out of fierce, black eyes that had only once softened to human passion, for the rest they had softened when she looked at Olga; but when she had prayed to the Blessed Virgin, to whose gentle service she had once been dedicated, her eyes had been frightened and sometimes defiant, but not soft as when she looked at Olga. “Mea culpa, Mea culpa!” she had told the Blessed Virgin—remembering the one hot sin of her youth—“Ora pro nobis, Sancta Maria Virgio Mater Dei, Ora pro nobis.” And then: “Take care of Olga, dear Mother of Jesus, preserve her from temptation and the lusts of men—”
Tall and spare as a birch tree was Teresa, as a birch tree that has waited in vain for the spring. Her wavy black hair was defying time; it shone, and where the light touched it, it bloomed, faintly blue in the light. Her forehead had much that was noble about it, but the brows—thick and coarse as those of a man—all but met above the arch of her nose, a few isolated hairs alone dividing them. A slight shade, more marked towards the corners of her mouth, added to the strong virile look of her. Her dress was somber and rather austere, it was fastened at the throat by a large mosaic brooch, and in her ears she wore filigree gold earrings. A purposeful woman, an efficient woman, a woman who knew well that four farthings make a penny; a woman who liked the feel of those four farthings, who invested them with romance. Farthings, pennies, shillings, sovereigns—always the ultimate sovereigns. Golden things! Some people might like buttercups; Fabio did, for Fabio was simple, but Teresa preferred the cold beauty of sovereigns; sovereigns could buy flowers, but flowers could not buy sovereigns, her practical Tuscan mind told her that. And yet she was no miser, there was method in her saving, she saved for a definite reason, for Olga. Perhaps, too, she saved a little for Fabio, Fabio who was stupid where money was concerned. He could cut up salame into fine transparent slices, but only after Teresa had taught him how to do it; scolding, ridiculing, making him feel humble—Fabio who always replied: “Si, si, cara.” Long ago now, more than twenty years ago, she had said: “If you love me, you’ll marry me, Fabio, in spite of what you know has happened.”
And Fabio had said: “I will kill him first, Cane!”
But Teresa had said: “No, marry me first.”
And Fabio had replied: “Allora—”
After that he had brought her back with him to England. Fabio had already been a naturalized Englishman at the time of his meeting with Teresa in Florence—he had found it convenient in his business—yet never was man more Latin in spirit. Short flares of temper and infinite patience; the patience that sat for hours waiting for trains in the heat of a Tuscan summer; the patience that suffered the hardships of conscription, and later the heartbreaking sunlessness of England, and later still, Teresa’s cold marital endurance—Teresa who was always repenting the sin that Fabio had helped her to efface. Once back again in London among his salami, his spaghetti and his Parmesan cheeses, damped down by rain and fog and mud, and a little, perhaps, by Teresa’s endurance, Fabio had forgotten to kill his “Cane,” which doubtless was just as well. Only when Olga was born two years later did he remember how often he had prayed to Saint Joseph, the wise old patron of wedlock, that she might not be born too soon.
Sounds! The room was full of them, the house was full of them! The whole world was full of them—a hell composed of sounds! Footsteps in the shop below, the clanging of the shop bell—voices—Fabio’s voice, then others, unknown voices. A door banging, the shop door, people going in and out. And always that ceaseless din of traffic in the street, now fainter, and now louder, more vindictive. Teresa’s body tightened to do battle once again, as though by standing rigid and scarcely drawing breath she might hope to subdue the universe.
The figure on the bed moved a little and then sighed, and together with that sigh came a more imperious summons, the sharp, protesting, angry wailing of an infant not yet fully reconciled to life.
Teresa hurried to the bed. “Olga!” she whispered, “Olga!” The girl’s eyes opened and closed, then they opened again and remained fixed on Teresa; there was recognition in their gaze.
Teresa bent lower; the nurse had gone out, she would not be back for an hour. “Who was he?”—the same monotonous question. “Tell me, my darling—tell Mamma that loves you. Who was it hurt my little lamb?”
Olga’s head moved from side to side; feebly, like some sore stricken creature, she beat with her hands on the patchwork quilt.
Teresa’s strong arm slid under her shoulders. “Tell Mamma,” she whispered close to her ear, “tell Mamma, like a good child, Olga, my darling, and then the Blessed Virgin will make you well again.”
She spoke as she might have done fourteen years ago, when the five-year-old Olga had been coaxed and coerced into making some childish confession.
“Tell Mamma, Olga—tell Mamma.”
But the pale lips remained very gently closed. Olga, slipping back again into oblivion, kept her secret safe in her heart. Then Teresa’s will to know rose up stern and terrible, the will of those countless peasant forbears, creatures of hot suns and icy winds, of mountains and valleys and strong, brown soil; creatures who, finding no man to respect them, had made a god of their self-respect, offering the virtue of their women on his shrine, not for that virtue’s sake but for their own. And against this god in the days of her youth, at the time of the gathering in of the grapes, Teresa Boselli had passionately sinned, and had forever after hated her sin; but never more hotly than at this moment when she saw it lifting its head in her child, in Olga, who, having betrayed her mother would not betray her lover. Teresa’s thin form towered gaunt above the bed.
“Tell me!” she commanded. “Tell me!”
The girl’s lids had fallen, she was very far away; no sounds from the external world could reach her. Teresa stared down at the drawn young face, and her breast ached as though it would kill her with its pain. Groping for her rosary she tried to tell her beads, the Dolorous Mysteries, beginning in Gethsemane, and as each tragic decade came to a close she demanded the life of her child.
“Give me the fruit of my womb, Blessed Mary.”
Her prayers gathered force as her terror increased; the face on the pillow was changing, changing—it was growing very solemn, very aloof. In a passion of entreaty she dropped to her knees, pressing the rosary against her forehead until the beads scarred her flesh. In her anguish she struck at the gates of heaven, she tore at the garments of the Mother of God.
“Not like this—not like this—you spared me, spare her. I demand it of you—I demand Olga’s life! Why should her sin be greater than mine? You who were a Mother, you who knew grief—you who saw death at the foot of the Cross—you whom I have served in penitence and love—I demand it of you—give me Olga’s life!”
And Olga, drifting always farther away, lay with quiet, closed eyelids and motionless lips, giving her life’s blood, but not the secret of her loyal and impenitent heart.
Then Teresa fell to weeping; she wept without restraint, noisily, heavily—her sobs shook the bed. From time to time she drank in her own tears.
The nurse came back. “What’s the matter, what’s happened?” She laid her fingers on the girl’s thin wrist. “I must send your husband for the doctor,” she said, and she hurried downstairs to the shop.
Fabio lifted his head from his hands; he was sitting on a narrow, high-legged stool behind his sausages and cheeses. A small man, himself as rotund as a cheese, with a mild, pale face, and a ring of grey hair that gave him a somewhat monkish appearance, in spite of his white coat and apron.
“Well?” he said, blinking at her a little.
The nurse shook her head: “You must go for the doctor—any doctor if he’s out.”
Fabio got heavily off his stool, his lips were trembling: “You go,” he suggested. “I would wish to be with our Olga.”
“No, I must go back—I’m needed upstairs—but be as quick as you can.”
II
Olga was dying—the doctor came and went; he would call again later, he told them.
“Fetch me a priest!” demanded Teresa, calm as a general now before battle. “There is yet time enough for a miracle to happen, the Holy Oil has been known to save life.”
She stared across the bed at the kneeling Fabio.
“Don’t drive me from Olga—” he pleaded pitifully.
Teresa was relentless: “Do as I tell you!”
And getting to his feet he obeyed her.
III
That night, in spite of the Holy Oil, Olga went on her journey. After the great love that lay hidden in her heart, after the great anguish that lay whimpering in the basket, the spirit that was Olga slipped silently away to the Maker who would have no need to question, knowing all things and the reason thereof.
IV
Teresa demanded to be left alone with her child and the child of her child, and because of her voice and the look in her eyes, Fabio left them alone. The room was shrouded in comparative darkness. Four thin, brown candles guarded the bed. From the little red lamp in front of the Virgin came a fitful, flickering glimmer. Teresa stood over the slender body, gazing down with her hard, black eyes; then she turned and lifted the baby from his basket, a tiny lump of protesting flesh muffled in folds of flannel. From her fumed-oak bracket the Virgin watched with a gentle, deprecating smile. She could not help that deprecating smile—it was molded into plaster. Majestically, Teresa turned and faced her, and they looked at each other eye to eye. Then Teresa thrust the baby towards her, and the gesture was one of repudiation.
“Take him!” said Teresa. “I give him to you, I have no use for him. He has stolen my joy, he has killed my child, and you, you have let him do it—therefore, you can have him, body and soul, but you cannot any longer have Teresa Boselli. Teresa Boselli has done with prayer, for you cannot answer and God cannot answer—possibly neither of you exists—but if you do exist, then I give this thing to you—do as you like with it, play with it, crush it, as you crushed its mother over there!”
Fabio came up quietly behind her; he had stolen back to her unperceived. He took the baby from her very gently.
“Little Gian-Luca come to Nonno,” he murmured, pressing his cheek against the child.