Crucial Instances

When I was a young man I thought a great deal of local color.  At that time it was still a pigment of recent discovery, and supposed to have a peculiarly stimulating effect on the mental eye.  As an aid to the imagination its value was perhaps overrated; but as an object of pursuit to that vagrant faculty, it had all the merits claimed for it.  I certainly never hunted any game better worth my powder; and to a young man with rare holidays and long working hours, its value was enhanced by the fact that one might bring it down at any turn, if only one kept one’s eye alert and one’s hand on the trigger.

Even the large manufacturing city where, for some years, my young enthusiasms were chained to an accountant’s desk, was not without its romantic opportunities.  Many of the mill-hands at Dunstable were Italians, and a foreign settlement had formed itself in that unsavory and unsanitary portion of the town known as the Point.  The Point, like more aristocratic communities, had its residential and commercial districts, its church, its theatre and its restaurant.  When the craving for local color was on me it was my habit to resort to the restaurant, a low-browed wooden building with the appetizing announcement: 

“Aristiù di montone”

pasted in one of its fly-blown window-panes.  Here the consumption of tough macaroni or of an ambiguous frittura sufficed to transport me to the Cappello d’Oro in Venice, while my cup of coffee and a wasp-waisted cigar with a straw in it turned my greasy table-cloth into the marble top of one of the little round tables under the arcade of the Caffè Pedrotti at Padua.  This feat of the imagination was materially aided by Agostino, the hollow-eyed and low-collared waiter, whose slimy napkin never lost its Latin flourish and whose zeal for my comfort was not infrequently displayed by his testing the warmth of my soup with his finger.  Through Agostino I became acquainted with the inner history of the colony, heard the details of its feuds and vendettas, and learned to know by sight the leading characters in these domestic dramas.

The restaurant was frequented by the chief personages of the community:  the overseer of the Italian hands at the Meriton Mills, the doctor, his wife the levatrice (a plump Neapolitan with greasy ringlets, a plush picture-hat, and a charm against the evil-eye hanging in a crease of her neck) and lastly by Don Egidio, the parocco of the little church across the street.  The doctor and his wife came only on feast days, but the overseer and Don Egidio were regular patrons.  The former was a quiet saturnine-looking man, of accomplished manners but reluctant speech, and I depended for my diversion chiefly on Don Egidio, whose large loosely-hung lips were always ajar for conversation.  The remarks issuing from them were richly tinged by the gutturals of the Bergamasque dialect, and it needed but a slight acquaintance with Italian types to detect the Lombard peasant under the priest’s rusty cassock.  This inference was confirmed by Don Egidio’s telling me that he came from a village of Val Camonica, the radiant valley which extends northward from the lake of Iseo to the Adamello glaciers.  His step-father had been a laborer on one of the fruit-farms of a Milanese count who owned large estates in the Val Camonica; and that gentleman, taking a fancy to the lad, whom he had seen at work in his orchards, had removed him to his villa on the lake of Iseo and had subsequently educated him for the Church.

It was doubtless to this picturesque accident that Don Egidio owed the mingling of ease and simplicity that gave an inimitable charm to his stout shabby presence.  It was as though some wild mountain-fruit had been transplanted to the Count’s orchards and had mellowed under cultivation without losing its sylvan flavor.  I have never seen the social art carried farther without suggestion of artifice.  The fact that Don Egidio’s amenities were mainly exercised on the mill-hands composing his parish proved the genuineness of his gift.  It is easier to simulate gentility among gentlemen than among navvies; and the plain man is a touchstone who draws out all the alloy in the gold.

Among his parishioners Don Egidio ruled with the cheerful despotism of the good priest.  On cardinal points he was inflexible, but in minor matters he had that elasticity of judgment which enables the Catholic discipline to fit itself to every inequality of the human conscience.  There was no appeal from his verdict; but his judgment-seat was a revolving chair from which he could view the same act at various angles.  His influence was acknowledged not only by his flock, but by the policeman at the corner, the “bar-keep’” in the dive, the ward politician in the corner grocery.  The general verdict of Dunstable was that the Point would have been hell without the priest.  It was perhaps not precisely heaven with him; but such light of the upper sky as pierced its murky atmosphere was reflected from Don Egidio’s countenance.  It is hardly possible for any one to exercise such influence without taking pleasure in it; and on the whole the priest was probably a contented man; though it does not follow that he was a happy one.  On this point the first stages of our acquaintance yielded much food for conjecture.  At first sight Don Egidio was the image of cheerfulness.  He had all the physical indications of a mind at ease:  the leisurely rolling gait, the ready laugh, the hospitable eye of the man whose sympathies are always on the latch.  It took me some time to discover under his surface garrulity the impenetrable reticence of his profession, and under his enjoyment of trifles a levelling melancholy which made all enjoyment trifling.  Don Egidio’s aspect and conversation were so unsuggestive of psychological complexities that I set down this trait to poverty or home-sickness.  There are few classes of men more frugal in tastes and habit than the village priest in Italy; but Don Egidio, by his own account, had been introduced, at an impressionable age, to a way of living that must have surpassed his wildest dreams of self-indulgence.  To whatever privations his parochial work had since accustomed him, the influences of that earlier life were too perceptible in his talk not to have made a profound impression on his tastes; and he remained, for all his apostolic simplicity, the image of the family priest who has his seat at the rich man’s table.

It chanced that I had used one of my short European holidays to explore afoot the romantic passes connecting the Valtelline with the lake of Iseo; and my remembrance of that enchanting region made it seem impossible that Don Egidio should ever look without a reminiscent pang on the grimy perspective of his parochial streets.  The transition was too complete, too ironical, from those rich glades and Titianesque acclivities to the brick hovels and fissured sidewalks of the Point.

This impression was confirmed when Don Egidio, in response to my urgent invitation, paid his first visit to my modest lodgings.  He called one winter evening, when a wood-fire in its happiest humor was giving a factitious lustre to my book-shelves and bringing out the values of the one or two old prints and Chinese porcelains that accounted for the perennial shabbiness of my wardrobe.

“Ah,” said he with a murmur of satisfaction, as he laid aside his shiny hat and bulging umbrella, “it is a long time since I have been in a casa signorile.”

My remembrance of his own room (he lodged with the doctor and the levatrice) saved this epithet from the suggestion of irony and kept me silent while he sank into my arm-chair with the deliberation of a tired traveller lowering himself gently into a warm bath.

“Good! good!” he repeated, looking about him.  “Books, porcelains, objects of virtù—­I am glad to see that there are still such things in the world!” And he turned a genial eye on the glass of Marsala that I had poured out for him.

Don Egidio was the most temperate of men and never exceeded his one glass; but he liked to sit by the hour puffing at my Cabanas, which I suspected him of preferring to the black weed of his native country.  Under the influence of my tobacco he became even more blandly garrulous, and I sometimes fancied that of all the obligations of his calling none could have placed such a strain on him as that of preserving the secrets of the confessional.  He often talked of his early life at the Count’s villa, where he had been educated with his patron’s two sons till he was of age to be sent to the seminary; and I could see that the years spent in simple and familiar intercourse with his benefactors had been the most vivid chapter in his experience.  The Italian peasant’s inarticulate tenderness for the beauty of his birthplace had been specialized in him by contact with cultivated tastes, and he could tell me not only that the Count had a “stupendous” collection of pictures, but that the chapel of the villa contained a sepulchral monument by Bambaja, and that the art-critics were divided as to the authenticity of the Leonardo in the family palace at Milan.

On all these subjects he was inexhaustibly voluble; but there was one point which he always avoided, and that was his reason for coming to America.  I remember the round turn with which he brought me up when I questioned him.

“A priest,” said he, “is a soldier and must obey orders like a soldier.”  He set down his glass of Marsala and strolled across the room.  “I had not observed,” he went on, “that you have here a photograph of the Sposalizio of the Brera.  What a picture! È stupendo!” and he turned back to his seat and smilingly lit a fresh cigar.

I saw at once that I had hit on a point where his native garrulity was protected by the chain-mail of religious discipline that every Catholic priest wears beneath his cassock.  I had too much respect for my friend to wish to penetrate his armor, and now and then I almost fancied he was grateful to me for not putting his reticence to the test.

Don Egidio must have been past sixty when I made his acquaintance; but it was not till the close of an exceptionally harsh winter, some five or six years after our first meeting, that I began to think of him as an old man.  It was as though the long-continued cold had cracked and shrivelled him.  He had grown bent and hollow-chested and his lower lip shook like an unhinged door.  The summer heat did little to revive him, and in September, when I came home from my vacation, I found him just recovering from an attack of pneumonia.  That autumn he did not care to venture often into the night air, and now and then I used to go and sit with him in his little room, to which I had contributed the unheard-of luxuries of an easy-chair and a gas-stove.

My engagements, however, made these visits infrequent, and several weeks had elapsed without my seeing the parocco when, one snowy November morning, I ran across him in the railway-station.  I was on my way to New York for the day and had just time to wave a greeting to him as I jumped into the railway-carriage; but a moment later, to my surprise, I saw him stiffly clambering into the same train.  I found him seated in the common car, with his umbrella between his knees and a bundle done up in a red cotton handkerchief on the seat at his side.  The caution with which, at my approach, he transferred this bundle to his arms caused me to glance at it in surprise; and he answered my look by saying with a smile: 

“They are flowers for the dead—­the most exquisite flowers—­from the greenhouses of Mr. Meriton—­si figuri!” And he waved a descriptive hand.  “One of my lads, Gianpietro, is employed by the gardener there, and every year on this day he brings me a beautiful bunch of flowers—­for such a purpose it is no sin,” he added, with the charming Italian pliancy of judgment.

“And why are you travelling in this snowy weather, signor parocco?” I asked, as he ended with a cough.

He fixed me gravely with his simple shallow eye.  “Because it is the day of the dead, my son,” he said, “and I go to place these on the grave of the noblest man that ever lived.”

“You are going to New York?”

“To Brooklyn—­”

I hesitated a moment, wishing to question him, yet uncertain whether his replies were curtailed by the persistency of his cough or by the desire to avoid interrogation.

“This is no weather to be travelling with such a cough,” I said at length.

He made a deprecating gesture.

“I have never missed the day—­not once in eighteen years.  But for me he would have no one!” He folded his hands on his umbrella and looked away from me to hide the trembling of his lip.

I resolved on a last attempt to storm his confidence.  “Your friend is buried in Calvary cemetery?”

He signed an assent.

“That is a long way for you to go alone, signor parocco.  The streets are sure to be slippery and there is an icy wind blowing.  Give me your flowers and let me send them to the cemetery by a messenger.  I give you my word they shall reach their destination safely.”

He turned a quiet look on me.  “My son, you are young,” he said, “and you don’t know how the dead need us.”  He drew his breviary from his pocket and opened it with a smile. “Mi scusi?” he murmured.

The business which had called me to town obliged me to part from him as soon as the train entered the station, and in my dash for the street I left his unwieldy figure laboring far behind me through the crowd on the platform.  Before we separated, however, I had learned that he was returning to Dunstable by the four o’clock train, and had resolved to despatch my business in time to travel home with him.  When I reached Wall Street I was received with the news that the man I had appointed to meet was ill and detained in the country.  My business was “off” and I found myself with the rest of the day at my disposal.  I had no difficulty in deciding how to employ my time.  I was at an age when, in such contingencies, there is always a feminine alternative; and even now I don’t know how it was that, on my way to a certain hospitable luncheon-table, I suddenly found myself in a cab which was carrying me at full-speed to the Twenty-third Street ferry.  It was not till I had bought my ticket and seated myself in the varnished tunnel of the ferry-boat that I was aware of having been diverted from my purpose by an overmastering anxiety for Don Egidio.  I rapidly calculated that he had not more than an hour’s advance on me, and that, allowing for my greater agility and for the fact that I had a cab at my call, I was likely to reach the cemetery in time to see him under shelter before the gusts of sleet that were already sweeping across the river had thickened to a snow-storm.

At the gates of the cemetery I began to take a less sanguine view of my attempt.  The commemorative anniversary had filled the silent avenues with visitors, and I felt the futility of my quest as I tried to fix the gatekeeper’s attention on my delineation of a stout Italian priest with a bad cough and a bunch of flowers tied up in a red cotton handkerchief.  The gate-keeper showed that delusive desire to oblige that is certain to send its victims in the wrong direction; but I had the presence of mind to go exactly contrary to his indication, and thanks to this precaution I came, after half an hour’s search, on the figure of my poor parocco, kneeling on the wet ground in one of the humblest by-ways of the great necropolis.  The mound before which he knelt was strewn with the spoils of Mr. Meriton’s conservatories, and on the weather-worn tablet at its head I read the inscription: 

IL CONTE SIVIANO
DA MILANO.

Super flumina Babylonis, illic sedimus et flevimus.

So engrossed was Don Egidio that for some moments I stood behind him unobserved; and when he rose and faced me, grief had left so little room for any minor emotion that he looked at me almost without surprise.

“Don Egidio,” I said, “I have a carriage waiting for you at the gate.  You must come home with me.”

He nodded quietly and I drew his hand through my arm.

He turned back to the grave.  “One moment, my son,” he said.  “It may be for the last time.”  He stood motionless, his eyes on the heaped-up flowers which were already bruised and blackened by the cold.  “To leave him alone—­after sixty years!  But God is everywhere—­” he murmured as I led him away.

On the journey home he did not care to talk, and my chief concern was to keep him wrapped in my greatcoat and to see that his bed was made ready as soon as I had restored him to his lodgings.  The levatrice brought a quilted coverlet from her own room and hovered over him as gently as though he had been of the sex to require her services; while Agostino, at my summons, appeared with a bowl of hot soup that was heralded down the street by a reviving waft of garlic.  To these ministrations I left the parocco, intending to call for news of him the next evening; but an unexpected pressure of work kept me late at my desk, and the following day some fresh obstacle delayed me.

On the third afternoon, as I was leaving the office, an agate-eyed infant from the Point hailed me with a message from the doctor.  The parocco was worse and had asked for me.  I jumped into the nearest car and ten minutes later was running up the doctor’s greasy stairs.

To my dismay I found Don Egidio’s room cold and untenanted; but I was reassured a moment later by the appearance of the levatrice, who announced that she had transferred the blessed man to her own apartment, where he could have the sunlight and a good bed to lie in.  There in fact he lay, weak but smiling, in a setting which contrasted oddly enough with his own monastic surroundings:  a cheerful grimy room, hung with anecdotic chromos, photographs of lady-patients proudly presenting their offspring to the camera, and innumerable Neapolitan santolini decked out with shrivelled palm-leaves.

The levatrice whispered that the good man had the pleurisy, and that, as she phrased it, he was nearing his last mile-stone.  I saw that he was in fact in a bad way, but his condition did not indicate any pressing danger, and I had the presentiment that he would still, as the saying is, put up a good fight.  It was clear, however, that he knew what turn the conflict must take, and the solemnity with which he welcomed me showed that my summons was a part of that spiritual strategy with which the Catholic opposes the surprise of death.

“My son,” he said, when the levatrice had left us, “I have a favor to ask you.  You found me yesterday bidding good-bye to my best friend.”  His cough interrupted him.  “I have never told you,” he went on, “the name of the family in which I was brought up.  It was Siviano, and that was the grave of the Count’s eldest son, with whom I grew up as a brother.  For eighteen years he has lain in that strange ground—­in terra aliena—­and when I die, there will be no one to care for his grave.”

I saw what he waited for.  “I will care for it, signor parocco.”

“I knew I should have your promise, my child; and what you promise you keep.  But my friend is a stranger to you—­you are young and at your age life is a mistress who kisses away sad memories.  Why should you remember the grave of a stranger?  I cannot lay such a claim on you.  But I will tell you his story—­and then I think that neither joy nor grief will let you forget him; for when you rejoice you will remember how he sorrowed; and when you sorrow the thought of him will be like a friend’s hand in yours.”