II
To please her he drank up the good beef tea, and the milk and wine that she brought him; and when she took him his simple meals, he made her stand by him and watch while he ate, hoping to reassure her.
“Give me a little more fish,” he would say, then look up quickly at her face; and because of her smile he would praise the fish: “It is good, I must be getting much better, Maddalena, already I feel much better.”
By the fourth day of nursing he was certainly stronger; he was able to get up and dress. He was able to smoke too, an excellent sign, as he pointed out to his wife. And by the next morning he had grown rather restless, he wished to go out, he told her, he wanted to find that woman again, and the child who had lost his eyes.
“But why, amore?” Maddalena protested. “But why, when they made you so sad?”
“I must find out much more about them,” he answered. “Do not worry, I shall not be long.”
And something told her that he had better go, so she sighed and nodded her head.
In Theobald’s Road he got into a taxi and drove to New Oxford Street, stopping the cab when it came to the corner where the woman had sold him matches. He paid off the driver and stood looking about him, but the woman and her child were not there; and this gave him a little shock for some reason, so that he felt afraid. He went up and spoke to the policeman on point duty, describing the pair to him minutely.
But the policeman shook his head: “I’ve not seen them, sir, I don’t ever remember having seen them.”
Then Gian-Luca began to urge him to remember. “The child had no eyes,” he repeated. “Of course you have seen them—a child with no eyes—there cannot be many such children?”
“Well,” said the policeman, “maybe I have seen them, we’ve a good many beggars round here—they don’t always stop in the same place for long—but I can’t recall them at the moment.”
Then Gian-Luca inquired at a shop on the corner, but there also they could not remember. The street was so crowded, there were so many people—a woman selling matches with a little blind boy? Yes, they thought they had seen her; or was it a man? They were sorry, they could not remember. Still intent on his search, Gian-Luca walked on until he came to High Holborn. There were several other beggars, one or two who sold matches, but not the beggars he wanted.
“If I could only find them,” he muttered, “if I could only find them!” Not that he knew what he would say if he found them—what could anyone say?
And strangely now he had turned in the direction of home, still feeling afraid; for his eyes were full of that awful new seeing, so that he must pity the straining horses, and the men who crouched by their dingy loads, urging those straining horses. The stench of the traffic seemed more horrible than ever, and the throb and the roar of engines. In and out of the turmoil dashed tired, anxious people—across the road limped a foolhardy cripple, swinging a perilous crutch. There were babies with incredibly old, suffering faces, bearing the sins of their fathers; there were women with blemished, disease-stricken bodies, bearing the sins of their men; there were men with blotched skins and small, hating eyes, eyes that were looking for vengeance; there were children who were full of a crude, horrid wisdom, learnt in the school of degradation. And then there were all the more prosperous citizens, wearing their liveries of business. Grey clothes, grey faces, grey minds, grey spirits; that blank, grey stare of preoccupation with the unrelieved greyness of the office. Such excellent, hardworking people these latter, such neat little wheels in the machine; so proud of the order to which they belonged, so contented—yes, that was the worst of it, so contented to be neat little wheels in the machine. And then there were the idle who passed in their motors, which were constantly checked by the traffic. Inquiring faces would look through the windows; what a bore it all was, they wanted to get on! They wanted to go quickly, to go more and more quickly; they had nothing to do so they wanted to go quickly, in order the better to do it. And then there was Gian-Luca, seeing sadness in these things, disintegrating with pity, so that the years swept backwards to childhood, so that he muttered the words of a child: “Oh poor, oh poor, oh poor!”
What did it matter if the things that he saw were the work and the will of these people; all the hideous folly the work of their hands, all the hideous injustice the will of their brains; it was there, they had done it, they had built up the monster, and had called him Civilization. And now they were sweating great gouts of blood, or so it seemed to Gian-Luca—rich and poor, idlers, workers, they were all sweating blood. Ay, and the patient beasts that must serve them, all sweating great gouts of blood.
He quickened his steps because of Maddalena, who would surely be watching and waiting; a quiet, patient woman, herself so much a victim; and his pity overflowed when he thought of Maddalena to whom he could never give love. If he could have realized anything to pray to he would surely have prayed at that moment; he would surely have prayed that he might love Maddalena, but his mind and his lips were both strangers to prayer. He could not find God in this anguish of pity, he could not find himself, he was utterly lost; he could not find high-sounding, resonant phrases, for only the words of his childhood came to him: “Oh poor, oh poor, oh poor!”