Then, one by one, familiar scents began to be wafted to him, as he sat in the stifling compartment in a daze of discomfort, wedged between ten other Italian repatriates on their way home. Once, near the frontier of France where trees crowded down to the line’s edge, there came a breath, between the odours of stale khaki and garlic, from pinewoods warmed by the sun. When he got out of the train at a Swiss station and wandered past the open door of the stationmaster’s office, he smelt fresh beeswax from the polished floor. Then, after they had actually entered Italy (but he was asleep, jerking miserably to the movement of the train with his head against his neighbour’s shoulder, when that sacred moment passed) he touched and smelled and tasted grapes for the first time in five years.
A signora gave them to him, and to every other man in the carriage, together with a drink of fresh water mingled with wine; a real signora, with white hair under a decent black hat and wearing many sparkling rings and golden brooches; and as she and her elderly maidservant offered the fruit and water, they made the Sign of the Cross and blessed the returning prisoners. Some of the men blessed them gratefully in return; but others, as soon as she and her maid had left the station to return to the large car and chauffeur which awaited them outside it, hastened to sell the large bunches of fresh yellow grapes to the rich English and Americans on the train.
Fabrio ate his bunch down to the last seed and skin; then he smelled the big fading leaf, mottled with amber, which was still attached to the brown crutch-shaped stem, and bruised it between his fingers to bring out its scent, and lastly he put it away into the worn notebook where he carried the papers that proved he was a human being.
In this wallet he also carried the money that he had saved while working for Mr. Hoadley and the farmer with whom he had passed the final six months of his captivity (for his request to be transferred to another farm had been granted, supported as it was by Father Francis and Mr. Hoadley himself). This sum amounted to nearly nine pounds in English money. It seemed a fortune to Fabrio, and had done much towards sending him home in a confident, forward-looking frame of mind. He was not like the dirty, penniless, feckless creatures with whom he shared the carriage and with whom he had handled the same greasy pack of cards throughout two stifling days and a night. Some, despite their long sojourn in England, could hardly speak a word of English, and others quickly lost in gambling the few lire that they had, while one continually related a disgusting story of cowardice and disease. Some were bad, others were merely fools, but not one of them could read the copy of Post that Fabrio (who had always had a weakness for that journal) had brought with him; he was the only one with well-blacked boots and a rag in his pocket with which to dust them, a comb, and in his wallet a fortune in lire! Truly, he was returning home with a higher heart than the one he had set out with as an unhappy boy, nearly eight years ago.
Best of all and thanks to the Blessed Mother of God, I am alive, thought Fabrio, looking out of the window at the Lombard plains going by, covered in the blue leaves of ripe vines and shimmering in the heat. How many, how very many of us, are dead.
Someone paused at the open door of the carriage and glanced in at the sweating, yawning group with black heads bent over the cards. There was the soft thr-p, thr-p as someone shuffled the pack, and exclamations in liquid Italian. Some were asleep, with head flung back against the wooden wall, while others gazed dejectedly out of the window at the dancing haze as if only waiting for the journey to end.
The stranger was a tall portly priest in American army uniform, with grey eyes that looked small and keen behind the lenses of strong glasses. His glance lingered over the men; then smiled and made some pleasant conventional observation on the heat and their destination (which for most of them was Genoa) and passed on.
As the afternoon advanced, the air in the carriage grew so stiflingly hot that it was impossible to do anything but try to sleep. Most of these repatriates had spent four or five years in Northern countries where such summers are unknown, and had lost their native capacity for enduring them; they swore and moved restlessly, crowded out into the corridors to get what air blew in from the burning fields, or made useless visits to the lavatory in search of the drinking water which had not been there for years.
At last, in the hottest hour of the afternoon, the men shouted with excitement and crowded to the windows to stare thirstily at the sea, blue as a sheet of cornflowers, and placidly extending beneath the dazzling sun. Immediately before them lay a large town of which only the slum tenements were at first visible; tall buildings of pale gold plaster with lines of coloured washing looped from house to house, and many a window having an indifferent, dark old face staring out above a pot of growing flowers. The train was entering Genoa.
The men struggled to reach down their suitcases or bundles from the racks, loaded themselves up, and crowded to the door, talking and laughing and staring over each other’s shoulders at the station, which was crowded with people struggling to reach the train and welcome their men home. Fabrio sat down in a vacated corner seat and stretched out his legs with a sigh. He lit a cigarette and wondered if Emilio were in that crowd out there.
Emilio had been sent home nearly a year ago. A terrible fate had overtaken his eldest son, the little robber of American lorries. It will not be told here, for we agree with that philosopher of the Ancient World who said that the death of a young child is the only grief which is insupportable, and Ruskin wrote the epitaph of Emilio’s son once and for all time when he described the heavy-eyed desperate child gamblers “clashing their bruised centesimi” in the porches of Saint Mark’s. He was a victim of the cities, and of war. Let us try to forget him.
So Fabrio thought a little of his friend, but not much, for already he was beginning to hear the voice of his own home, calling him onwards. With every turn of the wheels bearing him deeper into Italy, the memory of England became fainter. The grey sky, those large dark trees that had dripped cold rain down his neck, the endless mud, those potatoes and that bitter stinging beer, they all faded into the past. Now the sun burned his face and the sky above the sea was turquoise. A girl came past the window selling little fritters fried in fat, and he bought some and put them into his mouth. She was thin, and she looked sad, but she wore a bright pink dress and her dark eyes smiled up at him as she gave him his change. The crisp fritters were not so good as they had been eight years ago, but as he crunched them up all Italy seemed to be in their taste.
As for La Scimmia, he scarcely thought of her at all. No man with self-respect would think about a woman who had so shamelessly insulted him. La Scimmia was probably still at Naylor’s Farm, awaiting the time when the British Government would release her and she could get away to Londra to display her shameless person upon the stage, passing the time meanwhile by dressing and washing the padrona’s baby. Yes, amidst the potatoes and the mud, under those great trees, La Scimmia was shouting and banging still. Let her shout, let her bang. Fabrio cared for her no longer and he was going home.
The train halted for some hours at Genoa, and when it moved on again towards Santa Margherita and the smaller towns of the Ligurian coast, evening was falling. But the air still quivered with heat, and in the carriage where the lights now glared and Fabrio dozed with the three remaining repatriates on their way to the South, it was still stiflingly close. The vine rows in the dry fields were dark in the violet dusk, and he had seen his first firefly. In an hour they would reach Santa Margherita, and there he would leave the train and set out on the twenty-mile walk to San Angelo; or perhaps he would be lucky enough to get a lift part of the way. There would be time enough to think about all that when he got there. He stretched himself out more comfortably and soon fell into his deepest sleep yet, for the carriage was now quieter and he had slept hardly at all on the previous night. The three other men were already snoring.
Distant shouting aroused him some time later; he sat up suddenly, startled and confused, and saw through the window the brilliant lamps and white roof of a sta
tion against the night sky. The train had stopped at Santa Margherita. He sprang up, in panic lest he should not have time to get out, and dragged down his bundle of possessions. The carriage was empty save for himself, but he was in such a hurry that he did not think about this, and he dashed down the corridor and out through the door, down the steps, and on to the platform.
Once there, he found that he need not have hurried. The train made no signs of moving on, but stayed where it was, panting steam into the hot blue night while a few porters and some passengers were occupied with luggage and greeting their friends. He set down his bundle and wiped his forehead and recovered his breath while gazing about him. A white flower with a sweet scent bloomed all down the side of a bank, and his eyes rested absently upon it while he felt, as he did every half-hour or so, in his breast pocket for his wallet.
A sickening sensation gripped his stomach and he gasped. It was not there.
He stared wildly about him. The train still panted steam into the night, showing no sign of departing. He rushed forward towards the carriage which he had just left—the men, of course! the men who shared it with him had robbed him while he slept—but they had gone—they were hiding somewhere on the train and at any minute now it would start—it was hopeless—he had lost his money and he would never get it back. Mother of God, what a fool he had been to sleep!
His hand was on the rail and he had one foot on the step when the train began to move. He sprang down; then set his teeth in rage and sprang on to the step again. The warm air began to move faster and faster past his face, he felt the train’s increasing speed beneath his feet. He knew that it was hopeless, even as he rode there: they might have slipped out at the other side of the train and be half a kilometre away by now, and his bundle with all his remaining possessions! he had left his bundle! He looked back and saw it, looking very small in the middle of the empty platform under the brilliant lamps. A man was walking towards it.
The train was rapidly increasing its speed. He swore, and jumped down.
The shock jarred him but he was too wild with fury and despair to notice. He shook his fists at the train, he shrieked curses aloud, he beat his breast in his anguish. Nine English pounds! His fortune—his hope for all the future, which was to show his family and Maria and her family that he had not come home from the war a ruined man! Tears burst from his eyes and, all his hard-won self-control in ruins, he sobbed aloud.
The end of the train was now approaching. Someone tall and portly was standing on the steps of the last carriage, and as he came level with Fabrio, he leant forward and launched something at him. It landed full in his chest with a most comforting thump. It was his wallet.
“There you are, my son, and be a bit more careful with it next time,” roared the American priest in a voice that soared easily above the increasing noise of the train’s wheels, “I caught those boys counting it over and made ’em stand and disgorge. Don’t forget to give the Church a thank-offering! Good-bye, my son. God—ble-e-ess you!” (in a vibrating shout) and as the tail of the train passed on into the twilight, Fabrio saw a great hand go up and two fingers held in blessing. He sank upon his knees then and there and vowed a candle, the biggest that Father Mario could supply, to Saint Antony and Our Blessed Lady at San Angelo.
He was just in time to secure his bundle from the porter, who had been about to appropriate it, and this incident turned out fortunately, for he got into a friendly conversation with the man which ended in his spending that night at his home. It was a poor place near the port, but there was food and a bed and the sound of the sea awash on the rocks coming in through the open door and, most comforting of all, there were the voices of Italian women and children in his ears again, and dark eyes smiling at him while he ate and talked and heard all the news.
In the morning he said good-bye to his hosts and left them a little money out of his recovered hoard because they were very poor, and set out on the last stage of his journey.
He left the town of pink and white and yellow houses behind him, and set out along the steep coast road.
The dazzling blue sea lay below, and above there were groves of silver olive that covered the hillside in broad cloudlike shapes, but so hot was the still air that their shade scarcely afforded any coolness. More than once he paused to listen to the cicala, and to wipe his face and neck, and twice he saw the yellow tail of a lizard flick into a creviced stone wall, so quickly that it was barely distinguishable from the shimmer of the heat. He moved slowly on with the dogged rocking pace of a man accustomed to walking in the mountains, and as the road climbed higher the silence deepened, but presently he heard a sound that he had known from boyhood, coming down from the groves of olive and chestnut above him. High up on the little farms half-concealed under blue and golden vines, the coopers were hammering on the casks for the new wine. For the grape harvest had begun.
Wherever there was room, and wherever the sun could get at them, the vines were trained: over trellises, over pergolas, over the walls and roofs of cottages washed with pink or blue or apricot against the fire of the sun; they grew along wires in twisted shapes like rustic godlings of the olive groves and chestnut woods; they drooped from stunted nut or fruit bushes, while the glittering harmless flies and the wasps, wild with the life which heat and grape juice were pouring into their bodies, darted and clung amidst the lavish clusters. He did not pause to look, but kept steadily on. Only his head turned from side to side every few seconds as he took it all in. Home with its sights and sounds and smells was rising about him and closing him in, and he began to feel very happy. During the last months he had almost ceased to sing, but now, warmed by this familiar sunlight and moving through sweet wafts of grape-must while the distant hammering rang in his ears, he sang a line or two, almost under his breath, then more loudly. A bicycle came unsteadily down the road ridden by a young man and a girl. She was seated in front of him, and they only stopped their singing in order to press their lips and their thin young bodies together in ardent kisses. They looked curiously at Fabrio and his song died away as he looked back at them; then all three smiled together and called “Good morning” in chorus as the bicycle went on down the road. He walked on, and now he was thinking of Maria.
Months ago, while he was still at Naylor’s Farm, he had begun again to write regularly to her, and her letters had resumed their cheerfulness. Not a word was said about the future, but each felt the other understood that one day they would marry.
He had written to her (by the Air Mail, for now he was a man of means who could afford such conveniences of the modern world) as soon as he knew the date on which he was to leave England, telling her that if all went well he would arrive at San Angelo upon a certain day, but at what hour he did not know. There had been no time for her reply to reach him before he left, but he knew that she would come out to meet him, if she could leave the harvesting, and accordingly he began to look out for her, gazing along the road that faded off into a distant prospect of hills from which the sun had burned out all colour but the brown of earth and the blue-green of vines.
Soon he began to recognise landmarks that he had known from boyhood. Once he had ridden out in his uncle’s cart to search that wood for chestnuts, and had drunk from the fountain at its edge where a statue of Our Lady smiled above the gushing water, now in its summer slenderness. There was the tower of the church at Palazzo, rising between a gap in the hills, and there the fields of white barley and yellow maize that he had countless times seen as he glanced inland and upwards from his hoeing in the field at San Angelo.
He passed familiar farmsteads, where laughter and voices sounded from figures moving with baskets slung on their backs behind the screen of violet grapes and bronze leaves, and more than once some thin young mother or weeping old woman ran down to stop and question him, bringing a faded and tattered letter written—how many months ago!—from Derna or Tripoli, showing it to him that he might see the writer’s number and regiment, and perhaps give news of him. Oh yes, a let
ter had come from an office at Roma or Venezia or Milano saying that he was missing and must be dead, but the war had been in so many places and there had been such miraculous escapes, the dead had returned alive after years, and Our Lady was merciful, She knew what it was to lose a son. Fabrio did his best for them, but their sad anxious eyes and pleading voices wrung his heart and spoiled his own happiness, and as soon as he could he escaped and went on his way.
Women were scrubbing the wine-presses on some of the farms, singing as they worked, and girls stood up above the vine rows in faded ragged cotton dresses to laugh at him and wave thin arms to him as he went by. There were few young men at work, because most of them were still in the army or in prison camps, and the old men at harvest were almost in rags. Fabrio, who had grown accustomed to the decent shabbiness of the English, was shocked by these tatters and naked feet, these dresses clumsily fashioned from parachute cotton, and was glad of his own neat suit and stout boots, though certainly the latter were beginning to feel unusually heavy. He was tempted to remove them and bathe his feet in another trickling summer stream but refrained, because he was anxious to get on.
He was very thirsty, and when a wagon drawn by two large, emaciated white oxen lurched down the road towards him, and the children riding with purple-stained mouths amidst sliding mounds of red fruit tossed him a bunch, he crushed the cluster into his mouth and gratefully swallowed the rough delicious juice. Now and again he put up his hand to feel the wallet hidden in his breast. It was safe; and so, now, was he.