The father spoke with love and pride, and the father was a gentleman, like Falstaff, a pure gentleman. The daughter-in-law also peered out to look at Il Giovann', who was evidently a figure of repute, in his sordid, degenerate American respectability. Meanwhile, this figure of repute blew himself red in the face, producing staccato strains on his cornet. And the crowd stood desolate and forsaken in the cold, upper afternoon.
Then there was a sudden rugged 'Evviva, Evviva!' from the people, the band stopped playing, somebody valiantly broke into a line of the song:
Tripoli, sarà italiana,
Sarà italiana al rombo del cannon'.
The colonel had appeared on the balcony, a smallish man, very yellow in the face, with grizzled black hair and very shabby legs. They all seemed so sordidly, hopelessly shabby.
He suddenly began to speak, leaning forward, hot and feverish and yellow, upon the iron rail of the balcony. There was something hot and marshy and sick about him, slightly repulsive, less than human. He told his fellow-villagers how he loved them, how, when he lay uncovered on the sands of Tripoli, week after week, he had known they were watching him from the Alpine height of the village, he could feel that where he was they were all looking. When the Arabs came rushing like things gone mad, and he had received his wound, he had known that in his own village, among his own dear ones, there was recovery. Love would heal the wounds, the home country was a lover who would heal all her sons' wounds with love.
Among the grey desolate crowd were sharp, rending 'Bravos!'—the people were in tears—the landlord at my side was repeating softly, abstractedly: 'Caro—caro—Ettore, caro colonello—' and when it was finished, and the little colonel with shabby, humiliated legs was gone in, he turned to me and said, with challenge that almost frightened me:
'Un brav' uomo.'
'Bravissimo,' I said.
Then we, too, went indoors.
It was all, somehow, grey and hopeless and acrid, unendurable.