Marrina quickly swings herself down the broken steps of her abode, and hastens towards the advancing couple.
‘Fetch a chair for her under the pergola; why it’s no education you young men have nowadays,’ she whispered angrily to Giannino.
The rain has come up the valley in a great mist; it has broken over the fields and the woods in a torrent that quickly saturates the ground; it drops again from the broad-leaved chestnuts. It is scarcely a wholesome rain, though the land was parched, for the hail descends and a violent storm might heavily damage the growing things of the country.
The Prevosto seeks Marrina’s sympathy in this evil chance, but all her complaints have quickly given place to pleasure in the very presence of the townwoman with the real woollen dress on of a working-day. She is only a tradesman’s wife, but she has bits of news from the city and a figured silk jacket to display, and Marrina warms so that she is really mortified at the refusal of beans and polenta, which refreshment was offered at once with the gracious hospitality that comes as naturally to these courteous peasants as the passing benediction or chance greeting by the roadside.
But at last the storm is over, the air is fresh, the soil is fragrant after the rain. The Prevosto goes on his way towards the sick person, whom he has to visit. The tradesman’s wife, after an exciting gossip, returns to the pink house in the meadows. Marrina lays aside her needle, for the night has darkened, and work cannot be done by firelight. ‘She’s a good soul, and it was a beautiful stuff,’ she murmurs sitting by the hearth. ‘But I say let everyone keep to what he’s been brought up in. And as for the strange folk and the going to America, I say, God forbid!’
The Village Damsel.
For a time holidays are over. Until the festival of the Madonna is due, after the dog days, there is no rigorous necessity for laziness. San Giovanni is past, and the most particular feasts of the early summer. Work is again the order of the day, with only the less important interval of Sunday to make a little breathing space—breathing space that will scarcely seem necessary from such pleasurable labour, perhaps, for all the peasants of the Northern Apennines think it indispensable even though they cannot be so fitly accused as the Southern Italians of that love of the dolce far niente which has come to be considered, sometimes most unjustly, such a good description of their existence.
To-day is a giorno feriale, a working-day proper: let us judge for ourselves of the aptness of the proverbial reproof.
Standing on the church steps, as we stood on the day of the Corpus Domini, with the peasants—men and women—gathered in knots on the piazza, and the priest in their midst, you might see straight before you a road running right away amongst the meadows to the river’s bank, while to left of you another way winds itself above the water; and behind, a third, more rugged than ever, climbs the mountain’s side to a hamlet on the mountain’s brow. Take either of those three paths, and you cannot miss coming shortly into the midst of some steady labour.
Down towards the river’s shingle girls are driving cows to their evening drink, women are spreading yellow linen to bleach in the sunshine and moistening it with water that they dash up from the stream with their wooden scoops, or perhaps rolling it into bales before carrying it home. Below them the torrent’s bed widens out in the broader expanse of the valley, with plantations of willow trees guarding its way on the stones, and coronella shrubs bending over from the rocks; above them the water’s line dwindles away to a mere thread as it nears the mountains where it has had its birth. With the heavy homespun in coils on their heads and shoulders, or neatly folded away in baskets which they swing between them, the contadine climb up to the meadow’s level, and so home to thatched cottages where walnuts grow in the fields, to lonelier cottages that stand in strong breezes on the ridge of the hill-side: home to fractious children, famished husbands, sons and brothers—the linen, the dinner, and the supper, have been their day’s work.