I
The spring is perhaps the time of all others when the lonely most realize their loneliness; and this had always been the case with Gian-Luca—he felt terribly lonely in the spring. His desire for companionship had been growing of late, becoming a kind of craving; even Fabio and Teresa saw more of him now; he would hang about the shop in his time off from the Doric; or if they were too busy he would go to Nerone’s on the pretext of buying cigarettes. Schmidt had gone back to Switzerland, and Gian-Luca did not regret him. He hated Schmidt as one hates the creature who has helped one to gratify one’s lower instincts; unjust, perhaps, since but for those instincts there would be no occasion to hate. He might have made friends of his fellow headwaiters, Riccardo, the head of the large restaurant, or Giuliano, who had charge of the grillroom. But he felt that they were jealous, as indeed they were, of the favor he stood in with Millo; and this knowledge made him stiff and a little awkward with them, while they on their part always eyed him with suspicion, as one who was waiting to jump into their shoes. Geppe, Gian-Luca could not endure, and besides he was more than four years his junior; Geppe, who was always asking him for money in order to run after girls. He still feared Berta with her flashing brown eyes, her temperamental moods and her affectations. He felt that Berta would have liked him to propose, and he thought her extremely unattractive. “It is strange,” he would think, “that I have so few friends.” And then he would wonder if the fault lay in himself, and this thought would make him unhappy.
But the spring that was thrusting the sap along the branches and filling the parks with flowers and lovers, and making Teresa’s old heart feel young because of her new macaroni factory—the spring brought Maddalena to the Doric; and chance or the spring, both impulsive and freakish, took Gian-Luca down to the still-room one morning, and there he saw Maddalena.
Maddalena was standing by a mound of golden butter, with the large wooden pats just raised in her hands. She was looking towards the little square opening through which the waiters gave their orders. The still-room had the kindly innocent smell of butter and milk and fresh bread. On a table in a corner stood a huge bowl of salad, green and glistening with sunshine and water, and over by the fireplace a girl was grinding coffee; she was humming under her breath.
There were several other young girls in the room, they were dressed in white and wore large white caps. A sense of cleanliness and youth hung about them, as about the cool little room itself; a sense of peace, pleasant, homely peace after the noise of the restaurant, and the hellish heat of the kitchens.
Maddalena was tall, strong-limbed and full-breasted; her face was oval and pale. Either side of her face curved her dark brown hair, covering her little ears. Her eyes were large and indulgent and soft, like the eyes of a mothering doe; and as she stood there in a patch of sunlight, she turned them full on Gian-Luca. There was nothing inviting in that gaze of hers, only it seemed to question; and his eyes questioned back—yet neither of them knew at that moment what they were asking.
Then he smiled. “Buon giorno,” he said politely, “you are new to the Doric, is it not so?”
“I came yesterday,” she told him, but she did not smile; “I have taken Maria’s place.”
He considered her a moment: “Oh, yes, the Maria—was she a friend of yours?”
“No, a friend of my aunt’s; I have just come from Rome—I have not got friends in England.” And then because she was feeling homesick: “Are you an Italian too? You speak our language as though you were—all the girls in the still-room are French except me.”
“I do not know what I am—” he said gravely, “but I feel just like an Italian.” He was thinking: “She is terribly homesick, poor creature, they are always like that just at first.” Aloud, he went on kindly: “You will like your work here; we all like our work at the Doric.” Then he gave an order to one of the maids and hurried upstairs to the restaurant.
Once or twice that afternoon he remembered Maddalena, and the next day he went back to see her; it was easy enough to visit the still-room on some slight pretext or another. The week that followed found him constantly there, whenever he could get the chance, in fact.
“She is homesick, poor soul,” he would say to himself; “I am sure she is terribly homesick.”
They spoke seldom; she seemed to be always patting butter, turning it into little rolls. Her large, competent hands held the pats very deftly. He liked to see her there by the clean, golden butter; the sight of her filled a void that was in him, she gave him a feeling of home.
Then one afternoon between luncheon and dinner, he met her crossing the street. On a sudden impulse he turned and walked beside her.
“Will you not come into the park?” he suggested. “It is cool there under the trees.”
“Thank you,” she said simply; “are you going to the park?” He smiled and said: “I am, if you are.”
They walked on in silence for quite a long time, then he found an empty seat and they rested. He noticed that Maddalena wore black and supposed that she must be in mourning.
“You come from Rome?” he inquired with interest.
She nodded. “Yes, I come from Rome. I am very homesick in England, signore; are you not homesick too?”
And suddenly he knew that he was very homesick, that he had been for years and years. He was homesick for some place a long way away—much farther away than Rome. But he said:
“As for me, I was born here in London, so what right have I to be homesick?”
“You have a look in your eyes—” she told him, then flushed, for she felt that she was being overbold.
Gian-Luca turned, the better to see her; she filled him with a sense of peace; the curve of her bosom was kind and maternal. Her beauty was that of a vine-clad arbor, an arbor heavy with purple grapes, where a man might rest after toil.
“May I not know your name?” he said gently; “I would like to know what I may call you.”
“My name is Maddalena Trevi,” she told him.
“And I am Gian-Luca,” he replied very gravely; “Gian-Luca—just that, nothing else.”
He saw that she did not understand him, and his heart felt lonely and aggrieved. He wanted her to ask him about himself, to ask him why he was just Gian-Luca. For he knew that the telling would come as a balm, because he would be telling Maddalena. But her gentle brown eyes were on his face and he suddenly felt ashamed; ashamed of the impulse that possessed him so strongly to make this girl share his troubles.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said quickly, as though she might read his thoughts.
Then she told him all that there was to tell; speaking quietly, trying to remember back along the years of her innocent life—as though he had a right to know. She was twenty-six, and had lost both her parents within a year of each other. Her father had died only eight weeks ago; he had kept a small trattoria. She was quite alone now except for distant cousins, and her Aunt Ottavia who lived in London. Aunt Ottavia lived in Little Italy, and here Maddalena smiled at Gian-Luca. “But it is not little at all,” she said; “it is large and gloomy and very full of people—Italians who do not seem quite like Italians—nor is it the least like home.” Aunt Ottavia let out her house in lodgings, and Maddalena must pay for her room—but Aunt Ottavia was kind, and asked little, later on she would pay her more. Maddalena was missing the big Campagna, where the sheep all wore little bells; and the sunshine and the hills, and the trattoria, which had been on the road to Domine Quo Vadis, where Our Lord had left His Footprint in the marble. Did not Gian-Luca think it gracious of Our Lord to leave us His sacred Footprint? There had been a good priest there, Father Battista, whom she had known ever since she was a child. She missed him, he had been such a kind, merry father—sometimes she had taken him a flask of Chianti, or a basket of oranges from her garden, or a loaf of homemade focaccia.
He had come to see her off at the station, and had warned her that most English people were not Christians, they were Protestants he had told her sadly, and had begged her to go to Mass every day. When she had been a girl of seventeen she had kissed a boy called Rubino—he had courted her for the space of a summer, and then he had gone to his military service. When he had come back he was changed, he was impudent, and Maddalena had not loved him any more. The grapes in the vineyards along the Via Appia had been unusually fine last year; the peasants had earned a great deal of money, but her father’s mule had gone suddenly lame—a large white mule whose name was Umberto—a mule with a temper, and a passion for grapes—he would steal the grapes out of their baskets.
Gian-Luca listened with a little smile, while she told of these simple things. Of the faith that believed in that Footprint in stone, of the priest who ate oranges grown in her garden, of the tinkling sheep bells across the Campagna, of the mule who stole grapes and whose name was Umberto. And while she talked thus, she seemed very childish, and made Gian-Luca, nearly three years her junior, feel terribly cynical and old. But when he looked at her he felt very young, for her face was the face of a mother of men.
“I would like to know Aunt Ottavia,” he told her, “for I want you and me to be friends.”
She smiled. “I will give you her name and address.”
He wrote it down in his notebook. “My grandmother will be glad to know her, too,” he went on; “I will surely see that they meet, and then I can take you out sometimes—we might go into the country when we get our day off—I will try to arrange that we get it together.”
She said: “I should like to go into the country, I should like to see fields and trees.”
“I hope you will like to see them with me,” he smiled.
She answered: “Yes, I shall like that, too.”
He glanced at his watch. “We must go,” he said reluctantly; “tomorrow we will come here again. It is good in our life to get plenty of air—and you are so new to our life.” She appeared to consider this for a moment, looking thoughtfully into his face; then she nodded, as though what she saw there reassured her. “That is as you will, signore.”