“This is the first attack,” I protested, “you can’t tell when they will be at it again, perhaps in a few hours.... It is very dangerous, signora!”
“I have no fear,” she said simply, conclusively.
So Giuseppe took her over to Mestre in the gondola. I judged that it would be safer for her to start on her quest alone, depending solely on her mother appeal to make her way through the confusion at the front. She waved me a smiling farewell on the steps of the old palace, her little bag in one hand, looking like a comfortable middle-aged matron on a shopping expedition, not in the least like a timid mother starting for the battle line in search of her child.
And that was the last I saw of Signora Maironi for four days. Ordinarily, it would not take that many hours to make the journey to X——. But these first days of war there was no telling how long it might take, nor whether one could get there by any route. Had her resolution failed her and had she already returned to Rome? But in that case she would surely have telegraphed. Or was she detained in some frontier village as a spy?...
The morning of the fifth day after the signora’s departure I was dawdling over my coffee in the deserted salone, enjoying the scented June breeze that came from the canal, when I heard a light step and a knock at the door. Signora Maironi entered and dropped on a lounge, very white and breathless, as if she had run a long way from somewhere.
“Give me coffee, please! I have had nothing to eat since yesterday morning.” And after she had swallowed some of the coffee I poured for her she began to speak, to tell her story, not pausing to eat her roll.
“When I left you that morning—when was it, a week or a year ago?—I seemed very courageous, didn’t I? The firing, the danger, somehow woke my spirit, made me brave. But before I started I really wanted to run back to Rome. Yes, if it hadn’t been for the idea of poor ’Rico up there in that same danger, only worse, I should never have had the courage to do what I did.... Well, we got to Mestre, as Giuseppe no doubt told you. While I was waiting in the station for the train to that place the commandant told me, I saw a young lieutenant in the grenadier uniform. He was not of ’Rico’s company or I should have known him, but he had the uniform. Of course I asked him where he was going. He said he didn’t know, he was trying to find out where the regiment was. He had been given leave to go to his home in Sardinia to bury his father, poor boy, and was hurrying back to join the grenadiers. ‘If you will stay with me, signora,’ he said, ‘you will find where your boy is, for you see I must join my regiment at once.’ Wasn’t that lucky for me? So I got into the same compartment with the lieutenant when the train came along. It was full of officers. But no one seemed to know where the grenadiers had been sent. The officers were very polite and kind to me. They gave me something to eat or I should have starved, for there was nothing to be bought at the stations, everything had been eaten clean up as if the locusts had passed that way!... There was one old gentleman—here, I have his card somewhere—well, no matter—we talked a long time. He told me how many difficulties the army had to meet, especially with spies. It seems that the spies are terrible. The Austrians have them everywhere, and many are Italians, alas! the ones who live up there in the mountains! They are arresting them all the time. They took a woman and a man in a woman’s dress off the train. Well, that didn’t make me any easier in my mind, but I stayed close to my little lieutenant, who looked after me as he would his own mother, and no one bothered me with questions....
“Such heat and such slowness! You cannot imagine how weary I became before the day was done. Trains and trains of troops passed. Poor fellows! And cannon and horses and food, just one long train after another. We could scarcely crawl.... So we reached X—— as it was getting dark, but the granatieri were not there. They had been the day before, but had gone on forward during the night. To think, if I had started the night before I should have found ’Rico and had him a whole day perhaps.”