III
Death, that was striking at heart after heart, now struck at the hearts of Mario and Rosa; for that December Geppe was killed in the twelfth great battle of the Isonzo. Geppe had gone through those weeks of hell without so much as a scratch, and then, zipp! a large splinter of shrapnel in the stomach, and presently no more Geppe!
Mario was unexpectedly quiet, saying little, not weeping at all. He just gathered Rosa into his arms: “Povera, povera donna,” he murmured, rhythmically patting her shoulder.
Rosa’s tears came gushing up from her heart in a great, irresistible flood; she was all dissolving with love and pity, weeping less for the death of her only son than for what she knew must have been his fear in those last few agonizing hours.
Nerone sat silently staring at his birds and rubbing his wooden leg. When at last he did speak his voice was solemn. “A hero has died,” said Nerone slowly; “my daughter Rosa is the mother of a hero. Let it be always remembered among us how nobly our Geppe died.”
There had been nothing noble in poor Geppe’s death, unless death itself be noble—he had died as hundreds of others had done, because there was no escape. Scourged and tormented by vile engines of war, by terrible, nerve-breaking, soul-sickening noise, by the smell and the sight and the slime of blood—crowding, thrusting, yelling, retreating, in a welter of maimed, half-demented men—that was how Geppe had died. But now he must needs be a hero to Nerone, and Rosa must mourn him as a hero, and Mario must speak of “My brave son Geppe,” as though Geppe had been willing and glad to die in that awful retreat of Caporetto.
Nerone went out with his snapshot the next day, and two weeks later there arrived an enlargement—an enormous affair in a wide gilt frame—showing Geppe’s weak face beneath a steel helmet, and a little blurred at that. Nerone hung the picture in the shop, above a low shelf just opposite the door, where all who came in must see it; he draped an Italian flag round the frame, a silk one, befitting a hero. Mario wrote out a little inscription which he stuck at the bottom of the picture: “Of your charity pray for the soul of Giuseppe Varese, who died that Italy might live.” Then he made the sign of the Cross on himself and muttered: “God grant that he rest in peace.” After which he hurried away to the Capo, for the living would be wanting their dinners. But Rosa came later and cleared from that shelf all the tins of tobacco and cigarettes, and in their place she set flowers before Geppe, so that now he looked more like a warrior-saint than the poor, frightened soldier he had been—Geppe, who had always liked cigarettes infinitely better than flowers!
Whenever a customer glanced at the picture, Nerone would tell him about it. “Ecco! My grandson, Geppe!” he would say; “as gallant a lad as ever went to war. Ma che! The boy was a veritable tiger, but what will you, he was young, and the young are too reckless—” And then he would spin out those long romances that his mind had woven around Geppe.
Rosa would hear him and shake her head sadly, thinking that her father had aged a great deal, thinking that the customer looked a little bored, a little anxious for his change. But not for the world would she have told old Nerone that he grew too voluble these days, that his yarns about Geppe were quite without foundation.
“After all, I believe he was fond of the boy,” she would think, and the thought would bring comfort with it; for nothing is so sweet a consolation in grief as the affection of others for our dead.