Adam’s Breed quotes

She herself had fixed the little wooden bracket that held the patient plaster Virgin, and hers were the hands that had nailed the Sacred Heart directly over the bedstead.

A battered wooden bedstead, a battered Sacred Heart; the one from long enduring the travail of men’s bodies, the other from long enduring the travail of their souls.

In the oleograph the Heart was always bleeding—no one ever staunched it, no one ever worried. To Teresa it had stood for a symbol of salvation; she had sometimes condoned with its sufferings in her prayers, but never—no, not once—in her life.

she had told the Blessed Virgin—remembering the one hot sin of her youth—“Ora pro nobis, Sancta Maria Virgio Mater Dei, Ora pro nobis.” And then: “Take care of Olga, dear Mother of Jesus, preserve her from temptation and the lusts of men—”

Tall and spare as a birch tree was Teresa, as a birch tree that has waited in vain for the spring.

Her wavy black hair was defying time; it shone, and where the light touched it, it bloomed, faintly blue in the light.

Footsteps in the shop below, the clanging of the shop bell—voices—Fabio’s voice, then others, unknown voices. A door banging, the shop door, people going in and out. And always that ceaseless din of traffic in the street, now fainter, and now louder, more vindictive.

Teresa’s body tightened to do battle once again, as though by standing rigid and scarcely drawing breath she might hope to subdue the universe.

The figure on the bed moved a little and then sighed, and together with that sigh came a more imperious summons, the sharp, protesting, angry wailing of an infant not yet fully reconciled to life.

And always that ceaseless din of traffic in the street, now fainter, and now louder, more vindictive. Teresa’s body tightened to do battle once again, as though by standing rigid and scarcely drawing breath she might hope to subdue the universe.

The figure on the bed moved a little and then sighed, and together with that sigh came a more imperious summons, the sharp, protesting, angry wailing of an infant not yet fully reconciled to life.

Teresa hurried to the bed. “Olga!” she whispered, “Olga!” The girl’s eyes opened and closed, then they opened again and remained fixed on Teresa; there was recognition in their gaze.

Her prayers gathered force as her terror increased; the face on the pillow was changing, changing—it was growing very solemn, very aloof. In a passion of entreaty she dropped to her knees, pressing the rosary against her forehead until the beads scarred her flesh.

In her anguish she struck at the gates of heaven, she tore at the garments of the Mother of God.

“Not like this—not like this—you spared me, spare her. I demand it of you—I demand Olga’s life! Why should her sin be greater than mine?

Your emotions were entirely concerned with yourself, not through any wish of yours, but by order of that something that commanded you, Gian-Luca, to live.

Side by side with the curious mystery of food was the mystery of safety-pins; the first inanimate objects these to emerge from the nebulous chaos.

They could press, they could prick, they could feel hard and cold, in fact they could fill you with fury;

but—and this was what was so strange about them—they could fall into your lap and look very alluring—beautiful even when they lay in your lap, so beautiful that you wished to pay homage and in consequence put them in your mouth.

Safety-pins, no doubt rather humble in themselves, were nevertheless important; through discovering them you discovered other things such as coal and soap and thimbles; in a word you developed your sense of beauty, and your instinct told you to worship beauty by trying to swallow it.

But although you were fast becoming familiar with the joys and sorrows of life, there were still big gaps in your comprehension;

One way and another you were full of curiosity, full of a desire to do things.

When you had done them they occasionally hurt you, as when you bit the buckle of your pram-strap and made your gum bleed, but taken on the whole you considered it worth while, and the next day you ducked your head and bit the thing again⁠—that was the way to face life, you felt.

Rosa spoke seldom but cried very often, so that poor Gian-Luca had not the advantage of hearing those consoling expressions of endearment that presumably help the infant subconscious to resign itself to life.

“You would think so if you had my bunion,” grumbled Mario; then he kissed her, for of course a dead baby hurt far more than even the most virile bunion.

But though Rosa wept with pity, Gian-Luca did not weep; what the ear has never heard and the eye has never seen, the heart of one year’s beating cannot mourn for.

In his vast self-satisfaction he walked towards the coal box, fell down, got up, fell down, and finally decided that Nature was not mocked, and that progress on all fours was the only mode of locomotion.

He could stare in fascination at the deep wounds in the wall; one just above the bed and four just opposite.

He longed to put his finger into these deep wounds, but found that they were too high up.

In the region of the wounds the paper hung torn and jagged—it looked like mutilated skin; and Gian-Luca, all agog with primitive instinct, would ache and ache to tear it away.

He lay and pondered these things, bewildered, and his heart felt afraid because of its love.

It was dreadful to love a goddess like Nonna⁠—a goddess who hated your hair⁠—

He began crying softly to himself in the darkness, a sniffling, lonely kind of crying. The pictures would not come and Nonna would not come; why should she come when she hated his hair?

At about this time Gian-Luca developed his first real signs of temper. This may have been due to heredity, of course, but Teresa certainly contributed.

It struck him one day that even a goddess could not be quite indifferent to devotion; the thing to do, therefore, was to worry her with love, and Gian-Luca acted accordingly.

He evolved the idea of climbing into her bed, and when ordered to desist, cried loudly.

Of course he knew that it was nice cherry jam, that was why he wanted her to eat it.

She never allowed herself butter and jam, and this pained him as unworthy of a goddess.

When she told him, as she often did, to run away upstairs, he now invited her to follow: “You come, Nonna.”

And that was all—she found him a very naughty child—he was conscious of wanting her to hit him.

If Nonna would not kiss him, then he wanted her to hit him; he wanted to try and make her hit him.

Words, heard, but half-forgotten until that moment leapt from him, he screamed them at her: “Vipera! vipera! Vecchia strega!” And screaming still, he waited for the blow.

religious forms were made, he felt, for women. Teresa’s secession from the Church had grieved and shocked him, he had grown to depend on her prayers.

He suspected that Teresa’s prayers had been both loud and fierce, the kind that would be heard for the sake of peace alone, if for no other reason.

Fabio could not pray like that; perhaps he lacked conviction, he had always been a shy and doubtful man; it had solaced him, however, to know that his Teresa stood up to God and asked for what they wanted.

The pains had been lumbago, or so the doctor said, and when they caught him, Fabio had some ado to move, had just to stand quite still and call Teresa.

For some reason the lumbago would make him think of God.

God—lumbago, lumbago—God; that was how it came to Fabio.

“Everything is always rising,” frowned Teresa, “but Fabio and I will rise with it.

For those who have got the will to succeed there is nearly always a way.

Our business grows, we have not enough room; soon we must hire a new shop.”

Mario was so indispensable, it seemed, that holidays were few and far between; when he got one, however, the occasion was momentous—it called for a gathering of the clan.

A holiday was not a real holiday to Mario unless it was accompanied by toil; that was the way the good Mario took his pleasures; he planned, he worked, he wore himself out⁠—but after it was over and he lay abed with Rosa, he could count up on his fingers all the things they had done in the course of a brief nine hours.

Mario declared that a little glimpse of green was better than a bottle of Asti; but when he found the green there was never time to see it.

He sat under it, he walked on it, he lay on it perhaps, but only until he got his breath. On those very rare occasions when Mario found a meadow he would scamper over to the next.

He had the sort of mind that goes with large adventure, preferring always that which lies beyond.

This mind of his, imprisoned for the best part of the year within the narrow confines of his business, broke loose the very moment it could sniff the country air;

He adored his children, so they too must be considered; he was never quite happy without them.

He was not quite happy with them, but Mario shrugged his shoulders and supposed that that was often the way in this world.

It was spring, and even in Old Compton Street the spring is apt to be exciting. Nerone’s new skylark sang and jumped and sang. Nerone had made a felt top for its cage, the better to shut out the sky.

Having left Gian-Luca at Fabio’s side-door, they betook themselves slowly homeward. Rosa was carrying Geppe, still asleep, Mario was leading Berta; with his other hand he clung to the hamper, which bumped against his leg as he hobbled.

A quiet May dusk, the friend of tired faces, went with them down the street.

“And have you enjoyed yourself?” inquired Rosa, when at last she and Mario lay side by side in bed.

Now, however, it was different, he himself was the rule, he could read or not read what he chose; and this fact gave Gian-Luca a pleasant sense of power, so that even the volumes which he had brought from school became suddenly much more interesting.

From his early childhood he had loved the sound of words, and now he began to discover things about them; their length, their shape, their color, their balance, their relation one to the other.

He discovered the felicity of certain groupings, the strength and virility of others; the power of a name, the clamor of a line, the solemnity and vastness of a stanza.

From his early childhood he had loved the sound of words, and now he began to discover things about them; their length, their shape, their color, their balance, their relation one to the other.

He discovered the felicity of certain groupings, the strength and virility of others; the power of a name, the clamor of a line, the solemnity and vastness of a stanza.

For the magic that unsealed his ears and his eyes, lay for him in a volume of verses; the verses were Italian; he had found the book one day, quite by chance, in Mario’s bedroom.

“Some day I shall make money, and then I will write,” Gian-Luca remarked confidentially. “

It is better to grow rich before writing lovely things, otherwise one might starve.

”

The bluebells at Kew proved still harder to express, for he felt that they required so few words.

He knew just what they looked like and just what they meant, but when he had finished his lyric about bluebells, it might have been written about onions.

He consulted the “Gioia della Luce” once more, and this time while he read it he scowled; he was growing very angry, and he swore a fat oath that Rocca occasionally used.

On the whole, however, you enjoyed serving people; you could study them while you served.

You realized quite soon that you never knew people until you began to serve them.

During Gian-Luca’s two years at the shop, he learnt about all sorts of things. England was busily fighting the Boers, so Gian-Luca learnt a little about war, and a little about Death, from hearsay.

He had soft brown eyes and a devilish temper. His skin was sallow and luminously greasy; his nose was aggressive, his mouth overripe, and his teeth were magnificently healthy. He was tall, but already his soiled white waistcoat showed signs of a little paunch.

For the rest he was obviously born to succeed, being quite untroubled by scruples.

Fabio had felt a little doubtful about him when it actually came to the point, but Gian-Luca had preferred the life of the restaurant to the more monotonous career of the shop.

The Padrone stood still in the doorway for a moment with his soft brown eyes fixed on Mario; then he opened his mouth and began to shout.

All the while he was shouting his eyes remained gentle⁠—dove’s eyes in the face of a tiger.

One by one he checked off the mistakes of the day, beginning with the horror of the salad:

feeling hot and uncomfortable all down his spine, blushing with embarrassment for him. Then gradually a light began to dawn on Gian-Luca, though he tried to turn away his eyes; with a terribly clear vision he perceived the truth—

Mario bragged from self-abasement; Mario had long ago realized himself, and he lied from the humility of failure.

“But a man should not fail,” thought Gian-Luca sternly. “Who has got the time for failures?”

A year slipped by uneventfully enough in all save one momentous happening; Gian-Luca experienced his first love of woman, and the woman he loved was the blue-eyed Padrona with her masses of red-gold hair.

A boy’s first love is a love apart, and never again may he hope to recapture the glory and the anguish of it.

It is heavy with portent and fearful with beauty, terrible as an army with banners; yet withal so tender and selfless a thing as to brush the very hem of the garment of God.

It was all very lonely, more lonely by far than anything he had yet known.

In the past he had been lonely but without the Padrona, whereas now he was utterly lonely with her; and to find oneself lonely with the creature one loves is to plumb the full depths of desolation.

There was no one he could talk to, Mario did not sympathize and Schmidt was a low-minded fellow; as for Fabio and Teresa—at the mere thought of them Gian-Luca could not help laughing.

He fidgeted self-consciously under Gian-Luca’s eyes, and his hand went up to straighten his white necktie. They began collecting things; Mario could not find the napkins, he swore because the table-drawer had stuck; and presently he grumbled:

“It is hard, this life of ours, always standing, always running, always serving someone else. I feel at times as though I must go out and climb a mountain so as to look over something wide.”

Gian-Luca only grunted, and picking up a tray, he hurried off to set his luncheon tables.

Geppe would have liked to run away to sea—he had read of such things in his paper-backed “shockers”—but whenever he thought of the sea for too long he invariably felt rather sick.

He had many wonderful adventures in his mind, but his body shrank weakly from hardships.

He was soft; his skin was now colorless and flabby, his hands would easily blister; woolen vests made him itch; and now, when he shaved, the razor brought up little pimples. He was lazy with youth and would lie long abed;

Oh, but many grand people now rejoiced the Padrone, who was somewhat less fierce than he had been.

The best cure for bad temper is prosperity, of course⁠—what a pity that we cannot all be prosperous!

And then there was now something living upstairs, a tiny, red, bawling Padroncino; a thing with eyes the color of gentians, and lungs that left no manner of doubt regarding its paternity. Whenever its father could spare a minute he would rush upstairs and yell:

That was the way Berta talked in the shop; with her own special cronies it was different. “Damned old fools, if you saw them!” giggled Berta. “Heaving their stomachs up to their chins till they look like a lot of pouter pigeons!”

Berta herself had become quite slim owing to rigorous fasting; her fasts had nothing to do with the Lord, they were purely an offering to Venus.

Berta had now many young lady friends who, like her, used lipstick and giggled. Their Sundays were spent on the river in summer; they were usually accompanied by one or two “boys.”

our babies were Italian, they needed the air and the sun of their patria. And so,” he concluded a little sadly, “no child should be born on strange soil. We think only of money and we sacrifice our children—yet some of us still remain poor!”

“If we lose our children we are very poor indeed, even when we become rich,” said Rosa.

Everyone knows that the true connoisseur prefers to savor in silence; that the thumping of a piano and the scraping of strings, however efficiently thumped or scraped, disturb a sensitive palate.

No doubt there are dishes which, like certain poems, are rendered less effective by music; they must stand quite alone if their paramount merits would be fully appreciated.

And so to Gian-Luca came mostly those clients who wished to do justice to their meals; there were also a few who came for Gian-Luca, because in his room they got promptly served;

He became a kind of elegant, soft-voiced tutor; if he spoke to them thus they had perforce to listen, and when the food arrived they would be glad that they had done so.

Men consecrate their lives to many different things, but truly it may be said that to each the object of his life will become an ideal⁠—for otherwise how could we live? There are many ideals, some higher and some lower, but all real as long as they last.

It is only when they cease to be our ideals, and descend with a rush to their natural levels, that we find ourselves suddenly outraged and debased by the thing we have lived to serve.

And suddenly he knew that he was very homesick, that he had been for years and years.

He was homesick for some place a long way away⁠—much farther away than Rome.

But he said:

Gian-Luca turned, the better to see her; she filled him with a sense of peace; the curve of her bosom was kind and maternal.

Her beauty was that of a vine-clad arbor, an arbor heavy with purple grapes, where a man might rest after toil.

“May I not know your name?” he said gently; “I would like to know what I may call you.”

Then he said: “I have no name to offer my wife, I was born in what men call sin.”

“If you are the fruit of sin,” she said softly, “how great must be God’s forgiveness.”

“Will you marry a man without a name?” he persisted.

“I would have a blessing on our love,” she had said. And because of the gratitude he felt towards her, he had been unwilling to grieve her. He had told her that he did not believe in God, and at that she had only smiled.

“You may not believe in Him yet,” she had said, “but remember that He believes in you.”

“A man should believe in himself,” he had replied; “he should not be dependent on his God.”

For the first time in his life Gian-Luca knew what it meant to have a home; for home is a place in which we are wanted, in which there is someone to whom we matter more than anything else on earth.

Of such an one’s love are the four walls created—but to cover them with garlands we ourselves must love. Maddalena had built the walls that were home, and Gian-Luca rejoiced exceedingly;

For the first time in his life Gian-Luca knew what it meant to have a home; for home is a place in which we are wanted, in which there is someone to whom we matter more than anything else on earth.

Of such an one’s love are the four walls created⁠—but to cover them with garlands we ourselves must love.

Maddalena had built the walls that were home, and Gian-Luca rejoiced exceedingly; nor did he perceive in his first flush of pleasure that the walls she had built were bare. He would look at his wife very gratefully and gently;

overjoyed at having someone to whom he could speak freely—indulging himself in the blessed relief of putting his thoughts into words. She reassured him as though he were a child who might be afraid of the dark.

“You are all folded up in my love, Gian-Luca; you need never be afraid any more.”

And he wondered how she knew that he had been so much afraid, afraid of being alone.

“Papa, you are wearing yourself out,” protested Rosa; “a man of your age to behave so—it is foolish!”

“Today I am not an old man,” said Nerone; “today I am Italy, the eternal.”

Only Geppe, of them all, was strangely pale and silent, moving as though in a dream. His loose-lipped mouth sagged a little at the corners; sagged as it had done when he was a baby, and Rosa had taken away her hand.

And Teresa replied with another true proverb: “

‘To find a staunch friend you must dig deep in trouble.’

” Then she added: “I thank you, signora.”

Sometimes Millo would linger to watch his dancers, and the smile on his lips would grow rather grim, then after a little he would shrug his broad shoulders.

In Berlin they were cursing, in Paris they were praying, and in London they were dancing⁠—oh, well, such was war⁠ ⁠…

But Death was in nowise daunted, it seemed, for the spring came in on a great tide of blood. Yet this was not nearly enough for the glutton, who must needs go seeking out peaceable people who neither danced nor made war.

And he answered: “Amore mio, amore,” while he strove to find peace and contentment of spirit, even as she had found it.

All night they lay in each other’s arms, and her cup of happiness was full, for she thought that all night he came nearer and nearer⁠—yet all night he was slipping farther away from the arms that she fancied held him.

The next day he was gentle but strangely silent, and she studied his face more closely. Then it was that she knew that her husband had aged.

This then was the atmosphere of well-being that Millo had managed to create.

He believed in giving people exactly what they wanted, for someone was certain to gain in the process, and as a rule it was the giver.

Millo might sometimes smile rather wryly, he might even shake his wise head, but then he would murmur: “Le monde est ainsi fait.” And remember that he had not made it.

“I care very much indeed,” said Gian-Luca, and his voice was loud and aggressive; “I care for the things that I know to be real; I cannot afford to be a dreamer like you. I am just a headwaiter at the Doric.”

“I know nothing so inexpensive as dreams⁠—” said the little Librarian, smiling.

But Gian-Luca did not smile: “He is quite mad,” he mused; “I suppose they keep him on out of pity!”

“How curious; he reads Ugo Doria’s poems,” thought Millo as his headwaiter left him.

“How little one knows about other men’s minds, and as for their hearts⁠—well, nothing.”

That afternoon Gian-Luca went back to Maddalena. “Maddalena! Where are you?” he shouted.

Like a fearless eagle he had soared in the air, swooping, destroying, then up, up and up, while something went spinning earthward! Roberto seldom spoke of these deeds, but one day he had said to Gian-Luca:

“I will never keep birds in a cage any more, for now I know what it means to have wings.”

Gian-Luca’s anger would well-nigh choke him, because this Roberto must open their wine; and then he would urge him to open still more, eager for their undoing.

And indeed he was marvelous, little Roberto, considering all he had done—a quiet, sober man with a great sense of duty; contented too, or so he appeared, as he opened those innumerable bottles.

And if he was less contented than he seemed he took care that you should not see it, arguing no doubt that the longings of your waiter would make bad seasoning for supper.

Gian-Luca discovered that on certain days there would be more to watch than on others; on certain days interesting people would arrive, people whose faces appeared in the papers, together with their outlandish doings.

But the thing that Gian-Luca detested most was a species of ball-bearing jawbone, you could see it rotating inside the cheek with the effort of mastication.

The more his mind dwelt on this problem of chewing, the more he marveled that they did it in public; hundreds of good-looking people all chewing, openly chewing in front of each other⁠—that was what amazed Gian-Luca.

One day he felt a violent distaste for the pleasant, white-tiled refectory, where he himself would begin to chew, and Roberto, and all the others.

“It is scandalous, you look younger than ever!” she lied. “And as for your grey hair, I like it; it is very becoming, it gives you distinction, a headwaiter looks better with grey hair.”

And this obvious falsehood really consoled him, at all events for the moment, since the hearts of some men are the hearts of small children⁠—especially when they ache badly.

Nerone, however, was not nearly so tactful. “It is all that infernal bunion!” he shouted. “Why do you not get the damned thing cut off? Are there no hospitals in England?”

Down the street came a jolting coster’s barrow, and the barrow was full of spring flowers.

All the colors of heaven seemed to be passing, drawn by a mangy donkey.

The sun came out from behind a cloud, making the flowers more lovely: and because of a child who could not see, Gian-Luca realized the flowers.

And then there were the idle who passed in their motors, which were constantly checked by the traffic. Inquiring faces would look through the windows; what a bore it all was, they wanted to get on!

They wanted to go quickly, to go more and more quickly; they had nothing to do so they wanted to go quickly, in order the better to do it.

And then there was Gian-Luca, seeing sadness in these things, disintegrating with pity, so that the years swept backwards to childhood, so that he muttered the words of a child: “Oh poor, oh poor, oh poor!”

“Be quiet, do not thank me!”—for the thanks of the poor filled him with a sense of outrage.

He had not yet learnt that Compassion, the divine, has a sister whose name is Gratitude, and that each must form part of the perfect whole that alone is capable of healing.

Gian-Luca made his peace with the clan very simply, by going one day to see them.

The train had steamed out of Genoa station and was moving slowly by the side of the water, now into a long dark rumbling tunnel, now out into the glorious sunshine again, the rich, orange sunshine of mid-October.

The sea and the sky were incredibly blue, and the peace of the sky stooped down to the sea, and the peace of the sea reached up to the sky, and the drowsy, motherly peace of autumn encircled them both, as with arms.

Gian-Luca stood in the corridor of the train with Maddalena at his side; they were holding each other’s hands, and their faces were steadfastly turned to the window. The peace had got into Maddalena’s eyes so that they were full of contentment;

Sisto continued trying to be friendly because of Gian-Luca’s wife. Lidia was friendly because of Gian-Luca; she liked Maddalena’s tall, quiet husband; but even Lidia was not at ease with him, he struck her—indeed, he seemed to strike them all—as being a “forestiere.”

The Englishman’s home may well be his castle, but the home of the Latin is his fortress, and seldom may the stranger hope to penetrate beyond its outermost portal.

Thus Gian-Luca, while sharing their family life, had a sense of being always just outside; they were never completely natural with him, he suspected a number of subtle reserves, and this made him stiff and shy in his turn, shy of asserting his claim.

Yet all the same, he must say to Maddalena:

“I have come home too late, donna mia⁠—a man may come home too late to his country⁠—”

And she, in her turn, could find nothing to reply; she could only gaze at him sadly.

the dumb things do suffer, if you look you will see it in their eyes.” He could not go to sleep, and she had perforce to listen while he pleaded the cause of the dumb:

“They cannot tell us,” he kept on repeating; “they can only trust us, Maddalena.”

And now Maddalena was almost weeping, yet he knew that she was only half convinced.

But where could he turn to be rid of this seeing? There were days when he knew despair:

“A country as lovely as Paradise and as cruel as Hell!”

he would mutter.

Maddalena was loath to go, for Gian-Luca seemed almost well again, cured by the fine air and sunshine. Her cousins quite openly said that he was mad, but because of his affliction they forgave his behavior.

“If he is not mad, then he is English,” declared Sisto, “and, that after all, is very much the same thing!”

His solitary habits lent color to the rumor that Gian-Luca was one of God’s afflicted; he would wander all over the countryside, never speaking to the peasants, unless it were to urge them to show some mercy to their beasts.

“I have known that for a long time past. Why, I knew it when you were quite a little boy—” Then he smiled at his recollections. “You were rather a greedy little boy, I remember—Swiss roll with apricot jam—” Then he said more gravely:

“You ask me for books that will help you to face your life; well, the world is literally snowed under with books, and nearly all books are written about life⁠—but not one of them can help you with your life, Gian-Luca; that book you’ll have to write for yourself.”

He saw something very like terror in the eyes that were eagerly searching his face. “Why are you so much afraid?” he inquired.

And Gian-Luca answered irrelevantly: “Because I am feeling so terribly lonely—and yet I want to be alone.”

“No one is ever alone,” said the Librarian, “but of course it needs solitude to prove it.”

He got up stiffly, for now he was old, and he found a few well-worn volumes. “Take these,” he said; and Gian-Luca stared at them—he had given him fairy tales. The Librarian laughed softly:

she proposed to play football dressed like a man, in short breeches! When Teresa had asked her abruptly one day why women were doing these things, the young person had laughed:

“We’ve got to keep hard, we’re not just breeding cattle, signora.”

Teresa Boselli went back into her parlor, at the door of which progress had stood still.

Then they kissed each other very gravely and sadly and they looked into each other’s eyes, and Gian-Luca said:

“God must exist somewhere, since you exist, Maddalena.”

He thought: “It is like a very kind garden where everything goes unmolested.”

And he marveled at how little he knew this garden.

“I must always have been too busy,” he mused, beginning to loiter a little.

For that matter he did not know his way forward, but he took the road to Egham. He felt rested, he was stepping out quite briskly with his knapsack, and, after a little, Virginia Water was lying on his right, through the trees.

Now he was passing small woods and parklands; there was bracken, too, with its questioning fronds like green marks of interrogation.

The sun was turning the water to silver, as though it lay bathed in moonlight; but all these fair things were behind iron fences, and none of them seemed quite happy or free.

Gian-Luca smiled at him:

“Well, no, not exactly, but every road must lead somewhere in the end.”

And now the tramp felt thoroughly suspicious: “I suppose yer’ve come walkin’ out ’ere for fun; yer one of them crack-brains wot wants ter live simple. Blimey! you try it! It ain’t so darned simple to live no’ow, to my way of thinkin’.”

But Gian-Luca was not attending to the words; he was watching the creating of the fire from three paper bags, and a few dryish sticks collected on the lee-side of the hedge.

There in that rain-soaked English meadow the prehistoric ritual was performed⁠—the ageless ritual of the calling of fire to the help and service of man.

Like a priest of old, the tramp stretched forth his hands in a gesture of command and benediction, and the flames leapt up to the summons of those hands.

But such fires smelt pleasantly of dry leaves and pine wood, and their soft, smoky glow was alluring, so Gian-Luca must toss one old sinner a shilling, feeling like an outlaw himself.

Cadnam! The name of an unimportant village, having neither interest nor beauty, yet for those who pass through it in search of dreams the name of a deeply-enchanted gateway, for just beyond lies the softly-breathing forest⁠—still dreaming after eight hundred years.

Gian-Luca went through that enchanted gateway, and even as he did so, it seemed to close behind him, and he looked at the forest, and the forest looked back out of drowsy, thoughtful green eyes.

Up and down his old ladder climbed the little black adept, spacing his faggots to admit of a draught; and last, but not least, came the large iron shovel filled with red crematory embers.

Then the air would grow fragrant and cloudy with wood smoke, the scent of it reminding the homeless of home⁠—the dear, warm, ingratiating scent of logs burning, so companionable always to man.

Sometimes Gian-Luca would sit watching for hours, lending a helping hand when it was needed; and the charcoal-burner would welcome this stranger, for his was a solitary life.

The humbler creatures got used to his presence—they began to eye him with interest; while he, in his turn, would offer them friendship, moving gently among them with a kind of politeness.

“You were here before me,” he would say very often; “it is kind of you to make me feel welcome.”

His desire for the beautiful had grown into a craving which the forest constantly augmented, for the great trees were lovely in rain as in sunshine, especially the beeches with their small pointed leaves—glossy leaves, surrounded by a gossamer down which Gian-Luca liked to touch …

some were peaceable, others quite quarrelsome at times, and one of their number was a veritable fiend—a species of Nero, but with ten times his courage and more than ten times his cunning.

Gentle and fierce by turns was the forest, like a great, throbbing human heart.

Its gentler thoughts came to life in its bracken, in its delicate mosses and silvery lichens, in its little wild berries—the food of the birds—in its pools and its glades and its flowers.

Anemones and cuckooflower had been blooming, and quite soon the hawthorn had followed. Now it was June, the month of dog-roses, the month of the kingcup in damp, boggy places, the month of forget-me-nots growing along streams or clustering beside quiet water.

The days held the nights imprisoned in their brightness, for the dawns broke early and the twilights were long; the darkness, when it came, must perforce reflect light in an endless faint afterglow.

Long before the big moon was ready to vanish, the sun would be eyeing her out of the east; then the night and the morning must love one another in a tangle of leaves and birds’ wings and stars.

The days held the nights imprisoned in their brightness, for the dawns broke early and the twilights were long; the darkness, when it came, must perforce reflect light in an endless faint afterglow.

Long before the big moon was ready to vanish, the sun would be eyeing her out of the east; then the night and the morning must love one another in a tangle of leaves and birds’ wings and stars.

Below in the forest Gian-Luca would be lying with his face turned up to the sky;