the banked fire of america’s sabbath gave its quiet to bowling green the day that bertino landed in new york. it was not the new york he had seen so often from the heights of cardinali. the cloud-piercing houses had always loomed in his dream pictures, but no returned exile had ever told him that they filled the soul with this nameless dread. he longed to be in mulberry, which all travellers agreed was the next best thing to being in italy. with a goatskin box under one arm, a tawny cotton umbrella pressed by the other, and his left hand clutching the knotted ends of a kerchief holding more luggage, he set out from the barge office. in the band of his narrow-brimmed[pg 19] black soft hat—the precious adornment of festal days—stood a gray turkey feather, and about his bare neck in sailor noose was tied a cravat of satin, green as the myrtle of his native steeps. as he strode up broadway, past old trinity and wall street, the heavy fall of his hobnailed boots started the echoes of the new world’s financial centre.
a flock of fellow-pilgrims clattered by at high speed in care of a guide, who charged five cents a head for piloting them safely to the italian colony. the hatless women, burdened with babies and heavy sacks, struggled bravely to keep up with the men, who carried the umbrellas. bertino fell in behind, and soon they turned the corner of franklin street. here they got their first glimpse of mulberry, which lay clearly visible in the distance at the foot of a hill whose summit is broadway. beneath the bridge of sighs, which spans the street at the tombs prison, forming an arching frame for the picture, they could see the pleasant lawn of paradise [pg 20]park. it was a bright afternoon, and the broad patch of greensward gleamed like a great emerald down there in the sunlight, and the low-roofed houses all around, with the sun’s fire in their window panes, had a homelike countenance. this was not the image their minds had wrought of mulberry, where travellers said the people were herded in pens that knew not the light of day. how strange that no one had ever told them it was so cheerful and bello! but when they reached the heart of the quarter they had no more thrills from the contemplation of natural beauty. here the air throbbed with the staccato cadence of south italian patois. the signs over the shops were no longer gibberish, and bertino blessed the day that he, armando, and marianna had paid the mountain pedagogue three liras to teach them words of ordinary size.
mulberry was in its accustomed sunday manner. nearly all the shops were closed, and their faces, so smiling on week days in scarlet wreaths of dried peppers, clusters of [pg 21]varnished buffalo cheeses and festoons of bologna salame, now frowned in shabby black or dark-brown shutters. madre chiara’s bower, evergreen on working days with chicory and dandelion salad and savoy cabbage, had vanished with its owner. no gossip-hungry women, with primed ears, bent about the basket of the garlic seller on china hill, for she was out with everybody to-day in her best clothes. the crippled beggar at the hydrant was not missing, but he shivered in the may sunshine because sara the frier of pepper pods was not there with her pail of fire. another important brazier was in sunday retirement—that of old cantolini the gondolier, and in consequence there floated on the air no suave odour of cooking pine cones, whose seed the napolitani of the basso porto so love to munch.
in the rear courts, where gamblers at morra bawled and capered like madmen, rows of pushcarts, their stubby shafts in the air, told of a twenty-four-hour truce in the [pg 22]strategic fray waged between the peddler army and the artful police. the narrow ribbon of sky between the tall tenements had a sunday look; it was not mottled with shirts of many patches hung out to dry, and the iron fire escapes, stripped of their week-day wash things in the general sprucing up, gave to the eye here and there the colours of italy. the dingy caffès, from whose tenebrous depths tobacco smoke poured with the scent of viands, were crowded with the calabriani, the siciliani, and the napolitani of the rural districts visiting mulberry for an innocent spree.
the jewelry shops were open and doing a lively trade. young men bought wedding rings and tried them on the fingers of their promised wives, while faint-hearted bachelors, at the same counter, parted with their hard-earned coin for little silver-tipped horns against the evil eye. at the door a brawny flower woman in spickest gingham held a basket of dahlias fresh, mingled with carnations and asters that had lost the bloom [pg 23]of first youth. it was a sure vantage ground for her traffic. the mating couples, proud in their ownership of the wedlock band, stopped at the basket, every one, and close-fisted indeed was the future husband who did not hand a posy to his bride elect.
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. [pg 24]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.
[pg 25]
“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 [pg 26]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,[pg 27] pausing before a house that faced st. patrick’s graveyard. “this is casa di bello, the finest domicile in the colony.”
it was an old-style brick dwelling of two stories and attic on the northern fringe of mulberry—the only house in the street whose front was not gridironed with fire escapes. the low stoop, iron railing, and massive dadoes, the ionian door columns of hard wood, the domed vestibule and generous width, marked it a rare survivor of the building era that passed with the stagecoach and the knickerbocker—a well-preserved ghost of the quarter’s bygone fashion and respectability.
bertino looked up and read in bold text upon a well-polished brass doorplate the assuring name, “di bello.”
“grazie mille,” he said to his guide. “i am too poor to make you a present. grazie mille.”
the other made off with a long face, but protesting that he had not expected a present for such a small service.
[pg 28]
heartened by the nearness of a friend, bertino gave the heavy bell handle a stout pull. decorously and without undue promptness the broad-panelled oak swung narrowly, and the mountaineer looked into the stern complacency of his aunt carolina’s eyes. he was too young to remember this smug dame of closing forty, who had gone from cardinali twelve years before to become perpetua[a] in the mulberry parish rectory. that peaceful career she had forsaken, for reasons of which we may learn; but the eight years of churchdom were still in her head. nor had she ever lost the outward badge. she was rotund and well-coloured, monastic of mien, and sleek as a cathedral rat.
“who are you?” she asked, scanning the lad from his hobnailed soles to the turkey feather in his hat.
“i am bertino manconi, nephew of signor giorgio di bello,” he answered [pg 29]proudly, unabashed by her poignant stare. “are you angelica the cook?”
when her breath came free she said: “but it was to-morrow—monday.” his arrival one day ahead of the appointed time shocked her rubric sense of order and ignored her ritual of coming events. “and you come to the door like a sicilian, baggage in hand and——”
“ha! welcome to my house!” cried a hearty voice at the head of the stairs. “a hundred welcomes, caro nephew! but what a stupendous height! step aside, my sister, and bid the giant enter. how is this? at the parish house did they teach you to make friends wait outside? well, it is not so at casa di bello. so you are a day ahead? well, so much the better. ah, what a fine voyage you must have had!”
it was no longer a voice on the upper floor, but the form and substance of a bush-headed, chubby man of dawning fifty, whose prodigious king humbert mustache quaked as he puffed down the staircase as [pg 30]best his short legs would permit. he threw himself upon bertino, who had to stoop a little to receive a resonant salutation on each cheek. then carolina bestowed a pair of stony kisses, first remarking with wooden seemliness, “welcome, my nephew.”
at the same moment angelica the cook, a mite of a crone with a roman nose, carried a steaming soup into the dining room, set it on the table, and called out in the shrillest genovese:
“ecco, signori; the minestrone is served, and the most beautiful minestrone i have made since the feast of the mother.”
after his three weeks of steerage fare bertino fell upon the dinner with a zest that delighted his uncle, but dismayed carolina, and caused the rims of angelica’s eyes to spread until they were as round as the o of giotto.
“well, did you stop to pick up any gold in the street?” asked signor di bello, winking at his sister, and sprinkling grated parmesan over a ragout of green [pg 31]peppers. “i suppose you have your valise filled with it.”
“ma che!” said bertino, holding up his plate and looking wise. “do you think i am such a fool? i don’t expect to pick up money; but shall i tell you something? well, it is this: in this country i shall soon make enough money to fill that valise.”
the others dropped their knives and forks and regarded him with amazement.
“by the egg of columbus!” exclaimed signor di bello. “are you not to work in my shop?”
“oh, yes; of course.”
“then how do you expect to make so much money?”
there was no reason for it; but bertino, oddly enough, yielded to a sudden impulse to repress the truth. cocking his eye first to the ceiling and then on the tablecloth, he uttered a fib that concealed his and armando’s darling project for selling life-size busts in america.
[pg 32]
the coffee served and the maraschino sipped, signor di bello drew the straw from a virginia and settled for a smoke, while aunt carolina showed bertino to the room in the attic appointed for his use. she unpacked his few belongings and placed them tidily in a small chest of drawers, at the same time laying before him solemnly the parish-house rules by which she governed casa di bello. had her brother below stairs heard this, it is likely that he would have sent up many a guffaw with his smoke rings, for by him these rules had received little honour save in the steady nonobservance.
carolina had never set her face against bertino’s coming to the house, and there was no method in the frosty greeting she had given him at the door. it was merely that the sight of him, standing there, bag and baggage, a whole day before the time, had staggered her orderly being and drawn from her an instinctive protest. this all came of her unruffled years as perpetua of the rectory—that[pg 33] domain of peace and even tenor, whose broad, clear windows she often regarded wistfully, looking over the churchyard to mott street, from her sanctum on the second floor.
a half decade had gone by since the wednesday of ashes when the brother and sister patched up the quarrel that had separated them in their poorer days and she returned to the air of laity. but the sacerdotal brand would not wear off, nor did she wish it to. in the conduct of the household her churchly notions had free scope enough, but applied in censorship of her brother’s life they met with dreary contempt. to no purpose did she preach when mulberry buzzed with the latest story of his gallantries, for his ready argument was always an eloquent “ma che!” and an unanswerable shrug of the shoulders. in vain did she wait up, often from compline to prime, that she might shame him when he came home aglow with bumpers of divers vintage. it was after a certain rubicund night at the caffè of the [pg 34]three gardens that he cut short her usual sermon with a roaring manifesto against church and state and a declaration of personal liberty for all time.
“snakes of purgatory!” he had remarked in conclusion, one foot on the staircase. “am i not a man? if you want priests, go to the parish house, where you belong. once a priest always a priest.” with this taunt, meant to be a parting one, he toddled up to bed, but, reaching the landing, stopped and called back: “if you don’t leave me alone, i’ll bring a wife here.”
from that time, which was two years before bertino’s arrival, she gave up her nocturnal vigils, and without let or hindrance the signore feasted and drank with boon comrades, and cracked walnuts on his head with an empty bottle—a feat for which he was justly renowned in all the caffès of the quarter. the lowering peril of a wife in the house had set her to thinking as she had never thought before on this dire possibility. [pg 35]her brother’s nonconformity was a flaw in her sceptre, but she knew that a wife meant the utter collapse of her sovereignty in casa di bello. wherefore she resolved to abide by the lesser evil, and bend her strength to warding off the greater. thus it befell that with the accession of bertino to the family she was not ill content. the coming of a man to the board imparted no misgiving. what her soul dreaded and her wits had guarded against was the advent of a woman. and she felicitated herself that no wife had succeeded in crossing the threshold. to her ever-watchful eye, she fondly believed, was due the blessing of her brother’s continuance in the path of bachelorhood, despite the caps that were set for him on every bush. the first families of the calabriani, the siciliani, and the napolitani, along with the flower of the genovesi, the milanesi, and the torinesi, had in turn put forth their famous beauties as candidates for his hand and grocery store. but they all had been driven from the rubicon, and at present there was no pretender [pg 36]in the field. had there been she would have known it, as she knew of all the other marital campaigns, through angelica, who went to market daily and kept in touch with sara the frier of pepper pods, mulberry’s queen of gossips.
