As the wondering Bertino passed, bearded men in the rôle of newsboys bellowed their wares in his ears: “Il Progresso! L’Araldo! L’Italiano in America! Due soldi!” Literature got scant nourishment, but tobacco-selling throve, and the man without a lengthy rat-tail cigar in his mouth was marked among his fellows. They were all in their smartest clothes. Starched shirts were too numerous to give their wearers distinction, and not a few of the clean-shaved necks fretted within stiff collars. Here and there dark-skinned young sparks with red neckties puffed cigarettes and showed fine in apparel that smacked of Bowery show-windows. Scarcely a woman was there from whose ears did not hang long pendants of gold, nor a feminine head that did not gleam in oily smoothness. Shawls woven in the gaudy hues and fantastic patterns of Italian looms splashed the throng with colour, and a few of those large-rayed combs that Apennine maidens love to wear glinted in the sunshine of Paradise Park. Much courting went forward on the park benches, the fond ones caring not an atom for the stare of colder eyes, but retaining their entwined pose in sweet oblivion to the rest of Mulberry.
The company in charge of the five-cent guide followed their leader into a broad alley, and Bertino was left alone in the concourse, at loss whither to turn. Not a soul gave the least heed to him. Those whom he asked to point him to 342 Mulberry Street, his uncle’s abode, passed on shaking their heads and mumbling something in broad Sicilian or Neapolitan which the young Genovese did not understand. Some sighed as they made the sign of not knowing, as though that number were the darkest of mysteries. At length a gleam of light came over one face.
“I know,” said the man, a young fellow decked in Sunday corduroy. “It is Casa Di Bello.”
“Yes; Giorgio Di Bello is the name of my uncle.”
“Your uncle? Santa Maria, signore! Let me carry your trunk.”
But Bertino only hugged the goatskin closer, the tales of Mulberry sharks current in every mountain hamlet of Italy being vivid in his mind.
“I’ll show you the house, anyway,” said the man of knowledge, and Bertino followed.
The sidewalk was too narrow for the buzzing stream. The asphalted roadway had become the grand promenade, and there the panorama of Italia’s types unrolled: black men of Messina, with the hair and skin of Persia, exiled from Etna’s slopes mayhap by the glowing lavas that burn up olive grove and vineyard; red, flat-nosed men and fair-haired women of Lombardy, driven perchance from their fertile plains by the ruin that rides grimly on the freshets of the Po, but brought oftener by the tax collector; cowherds and clodbreakers of the Roman Campagna, whose clear-toned dialect found an antiphonal note in the patter of the gaunt but often brawny sons of fever-plagued Maremma. Here and there in the moving throng strutted a labour padrone, out to salute and be saluted with lifted hat by all who prized his favour. One and all they uncovered as he passed—sturdy dwarfs from Calabria and the Basilicata, mere pegs from the heel and the toe of the Boot; limpid-eyed mountaineers from the Abruzzi, bronzed fags of half-African Sicily, riffraff of the Neapolitan slums; America-mad fishermen of the Adriatic and Tyrrhene, deserters of a coinless Arcadia to become hod-slaves with a bank account.
Slowly but volubly the clans of toil moved by, unheeded by a little mother whose life was given for the moment to shining the heavy gold rings in her baby’s ears.
“Eccola, signore,” said the man in corduroy, pausing before a house that faced St. Patrick’s graveyard. “This is Casa Di Bello, the finest domicile in the colony.”