Part 29

The landlord glaringly watched me go out. I went down the stone passage and found a great, half-lighted room that might be used to hold meetings, with forms piled at the side. At one end was raised platform or stage. And on this stage was a table and a lamp, and the Italians grouped round the light, gesticulating and laughing. Their beer mugs were on the table and on the floor of the stage; the little sharp youth was intently looking over some papers, the others were bending over the table with him.

They looked up as I entered from the distance, looked at me in the distant twilight of the dusky room, as if I were an intruder, as if I should go away when I had seen them. But I said in German:

'May I look?'

They were still unwilling to see or to hear me.

'What do you say?' the small one asked in reply.

The others stood and watched, slightly at bay, like suspicious animals.

'If I might come and look,' I said in German; then, feeling very uncomfortable, in Italian: 'You are doing a drama, the landlady told me.'

The big empty room was behind me, dark, the little company of Italians stood above me in the light of the lamp which was on the table. They all watched with unseeing, unwilling looks: I was merely an intrusion.

'We are only learning it,' said the small youth.

They wanted me to go away. But I wanted to stay.

'May I listen?' I said. 'I don't want to stay in there.' And I indicated, with a movement of the head, the inn-room beyond.

'Yes,' said the young intelligent man. 'But we are only reading our parts.'

They had all become more friendly to me, they accepted me.

'You are a German?' asked one youth.

'No--English.'

'English? But do you live in Switzerland?'

'No--I am walking to Italy.'

'On foot?'

They looked with wakened eyes.

'Yes.'

So I told them about my journey. They were puzzled. They did not quite understand why I wanted to walk. But they were delighted with the idea of going to Lugano and Como and then to Milan.

'Where do you come from?' I asked them.

They were all from the villages between Verona and Venice. They had seen the Garda. I told them of my living there.

'Those peasants of the mountains,' they said at once, 'they are people of little education. Rather wild folk.'

And they spoke with good-humoured contempt.

I thought of Paolo, and Il Duro, and the Signor Pietro, our padrone, and I resented these factory-hands for criticizing them.

So I sat on the edge of the stage whilst they rehearsed their parts. The little thin intelligent fellow, Giuseppino, was the leader. The others read their parts in the laborious, disjointed fashion of the peasant, who can only see one word at a time, and has then to put the words together, afterwards, to make sense. The play was an amateur melodrama, printed in little penny booklets, for carnival production. This was only the second reading they had given it, and the handsome, dark fellow, who was roused and displaying himself before the girl, a hard, erect piece of callousness, laughed and flushed and stumbled, and understood nothing till it was transferred into him direct through Giuseppino. The fat, fair, slow man was more conscientious. He laboured through his part. The other two men were in the background more or less.

The most confidential was the fat, fair, slow man, who was called Alberto. His part was not very important, so he could sit by me and talk to me.