“So,” thought Gian-Luca; “so this is love!” And because of his heartache he felt a little frightened.
IV
By the time that his seventeenth birthday arrived, Gian-Luca had decided that no one in the world was so utterly unhappy as he was. If all had not been well with the Padrona before, it was certainly less well now; if he had felt that she was slipping away, she was now so far off as to be quite inaccessible, for now she no longer singled him out to attend to her needs at the bar. She selected Schmidt—the plump Schmidt of all people—to polish and tidy and fetch and carry; Schmidt who would have a sly look in his eye whenever he passed Gian-Luca.
“Nun was!” grinned Schmidt; “I do not wish it, you know—I have my own girl I like much better, and this gives me nur more work.”
Gian-Luca eyed him with open contempt; did he think, the fool, that the Padrona admired him? “No, no, it cannot be that—” thought Gian-Luca; “it is only that she now hates me.”
Yet why did she hate him? He had told her of his love, but surely she had known it long before he had spoken that day at Maidenhead? Then what was his transgression? A transgression of words? Yes, that must be it, he might love her it seemed, and she on her part might know that he loved her—only, he must not say so. This made him laugh a little it seemed so very foolish; then it made him frown a little, it seemed so very mean.
“While I spoke as a child, she could smile,” thought Gian-Luca; “that day in her sitting-room I spoke as a child, I amused her perhaps; now I do not amuse her because she knows I am a man.”
For the quality of his love was gradually changing, the dew was no longer on the meadow. The knight-errant of youth was still in the saddle, but his armor was already slightly tarnished. Something deep down in Gian-Luca was conscious of this change and began to grow infinitely sad. It cried out because of the splendor that was passing—that particular splendor that could never come again, for no two dawns are alike in this world. Gian-Luca began to feel very angry because of the sadness that was in him; he would glare at the Padrona from the end of the room, and all that she did would seem mean and unlovely, yet this in itself would fill him with loving, and then he would almost hate her.
The poor Padrona would have many little tasks to perform in connection with the bar. She might be mopping up the counter, for instance, removing the stale-smelling, beery foam, or rubbing the blurs left by whisky and brandy; or perhaps she might be wiping the sides of a bottle that had grown sticky sweet with liqueur. Her face would almost certainly be flushed by the exertion of providing other people with drinks; from time to time she would pause to draw a cork, bending ungracefully to the bottle which she held between her round feminine knees. “Two mixed grill and mashed!” she might shout down the lift shaft, electing to speak in English; and when she did this her voice sounded Cockney, not soft and pleasing as when she spoke Italian.
The restaurant would smell stuffy, Schmidt’s forehead would be beaded, and Mario’s collar damp and creased; while downstairs in the kitchen, the sweating Moscatone might pause from time to time to pick his front teeth with a fork. And the beautiful Padrona with her fine Venetian hair, and her eyes the color of gentians, would seem strangely out of place amid her surroundings, yet very much a part of them too.
V
“You grow sulky,” said Mario to his foster-son; “what is the matter? You no longer work gladly.”
“I am tired of the Capo,” Gian-Luca told him; “I think I must find a better job.”
“You are young and a fool,” snapped Mario crossly. “I too have been foolish enough in my day, but never, no, never such a big fool as you are.”
“I am tired of the Capo,” Gian-Luca repeated, pretending not to understand.
It was all very lonely, more lonely by far than anything he had yet known. In the past he had been lonely but without the Padrona, whereas now he was utterly lonely with her; and to find oneself lonely with the creature one loves is to plumb the full depths of desolation. There was no one he could talk to, Mario did not sympathize and Schmidt was a low-minded fellow; as for Fabio and Teresa—at the mere thought of them Gian-Luca could not help laughing.
He still had his books, and long into the night he would read the “Gioia della Luce.” All poetry hurt him a little it was true, but that poem could comfort while it hurt. There were many other poems which he reread in that book, some of them spiritual and placid—they might have been written by a saint or a seer; but then would come others, crude outpourings of passion that he had not understood as a child. Like the “Gioia della Luce,” they partook of the greatness that, carnal or spiritual, belonged to the genius of their writer, Ugo Doria.
“A very curious book,” thought Gian-Luca; “I must read some more of this poet’s work.” So one day he made his way to Hatchard’s, where he heard that they sold
