After the Divorce, Grazia Deledda [the giving tree read aloud .txt] 📗

length of time it took to cross a valley that appeared to be so small. But most of all he wondered to think that he was crossing it on his way back to his own village.

He was walking now between two fields of grain above which the slanting light threw a veil of golden haze, and its surface, rippled by the breeze, seemed stroked by an invisible hand.

He went on picturing his arrival, Isidoro having written to ask him to come straight to his house: “ ‘Come in,’ he will say, and then, ‘Giacobbe Dejas is dead; it was he who did it!’⁠—‘I know that already. The devil! Is that all you have to tell me?’ ‘Well, then, your wife has married some one else.’ ‘I know that too.’ ‘Then why don’t you cry?’ ‘Why on earth should I? I have cried enough; I don’t want to any more now. I’ve crossed the sea; I’ve seen the world. I’m not a boy any longer; nothing makes much difference to me any more.’ ” But at the very moment when he was boasting to himself of his indifference and worldly cynicism, an icy grip closed about his heart.

Oh! to be going back to find the little house, Giovanna, his child, his past!

“There is nothing left,” he said aloud. “The storm has swept over it and carried everything away, everything, everything⁠—”

He threw himself down on the edge of the field of grain in an agony of grief. It was often this way; the great tempest of sorrow had broken over him long before and seemingly passed on; but instead of that it had only hidden itself for a time; it was there now, stealing along, keeping pace with him; for long distances he would not see its evil shape; then suddenly it would leap forth, bursting through the ground at his very feet and whirling around its victim, clutch him by the throat, beat him to the ground, suffocate him⁠—then leave him spent, exhausted.

After a while Costantino sat up, unfastened his wallet, and drew out a dried gourd filled with wine, throwing his head back, he took a deep draught; then he put it away, and sat looking around him at the sea of grain on whose golden-green surface floated splotches of crimson poppies. Somewhat revived he presently resumed his journey, but all the eagerness and spring with which he had set out had died away. What did it matter whether he got home this day or the next, since there was no one to expect him? And so he plodded on till the first shadows of approaching night overtook him just as he reached the end of the valley. The crickets had turned out like a tribe of mowers with their tiny silver sickles, the scent of the shrubs and flowers hung heavy in the warm air; the breeze had died away, and the birds were silent; but the black triangles of the bats circled swiftly in the luminous grey dusk.

Oh, that divine melancholy of a spring evening! Felt even by happy souls, may it not be an inherited homesickness, transmitted through all the ages? A longing for the flowers, and perfumes, and joys of that eternal, albeit earthly, paradise which our first parents lost for us forever.

Costantino tramped on and on: he had passed long years under a brutal oppression, between infected walls, amid corrupt companions in an environment whose very air was confined, and now⁠—he was walking in the open, treading grass and stones under foot! As he ascended the mountain from the valley below, every step brought more of the horizon into view and a wider expanse of soft, overhanging sky as boundless as liberty itself. And yet⁠—and yet⁠—never in all those years of imprisonment had he experienced a sense of such utter hopelessness as that with which he now saw the shadows fall from those free skies. He was pressing on, but whither? and why? He had set forth eager, elated, as one hastening to a place where pleasant things await him. Now he wondered at himself. In the uncertain twilight he seemed to have lost his way; his journey had turned out to be vain, abortive. He was trudging on aimlessly; he had no country, nor home, nor family; he would never reach any destination; he had gone astray, and was wandering about in a boundless, desert tract, as grey and cheerless as the sky above him, where the stars were like camp-fires lighted by solitary travellers who, unknown to one another, wandered, lost like himself, in the unwished-for and oppressive liberty of the trackless wilderness.

And yet it was not the actual thought of Giovanna herself that weighed him down, nor yet his lost happiness, nor the misery that a wholly undeserved fate had forced upon him; all these things had long ago so eaten into his soul that they had come to form a part of his very nature, and he had grown almost to forget them, as one forgets the shirt he has on his back. Now his grief fastened upon memories of certain specific objects which had passed out of the setting of his life, and which he could never recover.

His mind dwelt, for instance, persistently on the little common in front of Giovanna’s cottage, the stones in the old wall where they used to sit together on summer evenings, and above all on the great, wide bed, where he would lay himself down beside her after the hard day’s work was over. He felt now as though he might be going home at the close of one of those long, toilsome days. But now⁠—now⁠—where was he to turn for rest and ease? Thus, up through the load of unhappiness that bore him down, all-pervading and indefinable as the fragrance of the wild growth about him, a sense of physical discomfort forced itself; he was conscious of hunger and weariness.

Reaching the top of a knoll, he sat down and opened his wallet. Night had fallen,