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By
DLINDU MALAGOD
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THE OLD HOUSE
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By
0LINDG MALAGODI
office of publication:
Rooms 2128-29-30-31, Park Row Building



THE OLD HOUSE.
IN THE YARD.
“Who is it? I heard a slow, quiet step. It is some time
since any one came in here at this hour in the evening. Can
it be the new master? . . .”
** No: don’t be startled. It is I; I am the old master; old,
even though I am not yet twenty-five.”
“You are right. You people nowadays grow old quick.
Your uncle Francisco was younger and fresher at fifty than
you. You have grown old in a few years; I hardly recognized
you.”
“And I, for my part, recognize you well, poor old thing.
I have grown old a little in face and a great deal in heart,
but not in memory. Your old cracked front, all covered with
ivy and American woodbine, presents itself to me now as I car-
ried it in my head. I recognize one by one all the windows,
smothered under the mass of boughs, and closed, and I know
what is behind each. The little garret windows too, up high
there, open to the wind and the rain, I recognize. I know
what is behind each; I know the place of all the old things
laid aside, spoiled, and piled away up there. You may wel-
come a friend. I have lived in you little; but none of the old
ones, of those who were born and died here, ever knew you
so well. All the things that I have seen have not cancelled
from my memory a single one of your features, a single one of
your long-familiar wrinkles, poor old thing.”
* Originally printed in the “Rivista d’Italia,” November 15, 1899.
g -
3

4. THE OLD HOUSE
An old cross-bar.—“Do you remember me? . . . Once you
barely succeeded in touching me, and you swung yourself up
with great efforts to perform wonderful acrobatic feats; to re-
peat the wonders that you had seen in the public square Satur-
day evening or on market-days. Now you are grown, and
reach with your hands where then your boldest leaps did not
reach.”
“I remember very well. Once my hands missed their
hold, and I struck my head against the ground. I still bear
the mark of it; better than of other things more serious and
important.”
A cherry-tree.—“And do you still remember me? In July I
became the object of your aims; you put in motion all the
chairs of the house and the short ladders of the woodshed to
reach and pick clandestinely my beautiful blazing fruit; so
beautiful that you could not decide to eat it, but hung it on
your ears. But then the mouth ended by winning the day, and
I had to keep furnishing fresh ear-rings.
“Now I too, alone among them all, have grown old here.
My shrunken roots no longer give me strength to bear flowers
and fruit. Only here and there a young branch, up at the top,
throws out a red berry; but they are for the birds. You,
grown as you are, could not reach them.”
The chicken-house window.—“And have you still a memory
of me, me? Do you remember? . . . In the morning in sum-
mer the sun, descending silently from the roofs, used to touch
me first. Then the little door opened and the cock appeared
with his fiery red crest, like a little sun himself, and poured
out his proud, shrill notes. He was the clock of the house.
You chased him with stones, and he, bold bird, sometimes
turned against you.

THE OLD HOUSE 5
“Now the sun still reaches me, forgotten and left open as
I am, every morning; but the beautiful bright cock no longer
goes out from within; only the darkness goes out.”
A vase of oleanders. —“And have you forgotten me? Or
perhaps you did not see me, so slender, in the dark?
“And yet you had an important affair with me. One
evening, in a darkness like this, you, after having walked up
and down a while, looked for a beautiful flower, and finally
picked mine. And that flower was to have a great significa-
tion, was to be the beginning of a great matter . . . Seven
years are past now; what has come of it? . . .”
“Water that has run by, lovely friend, water that has run
by. And you still bear flowers? . . .”
A stone seat.—“Water that has run by, old-time things.
The last time you were here at home for a few hours, you sat
here—you remember?—with the old man. And you remem-
ber how you noticed then that your poor daddy had grown
old suddenly, very old? The ideas grew a little confused in
his head, and the words in his mouth; and you perceived it.
But you remained only a few hours all the same. . . . And yet
you had presentiments . . -
‘‘No, no; I did not think . . .”
“And yet, you remember? . . . When you went away, your
--
daddy, who was accustomed to accompany you to the street
gate, remained sitting here, that last time, tired, and did
not wish to accompany you. You had kissed him already;
but then you turned back to kiss him again. You had
presentiments . . .”
“Don’t talk; let be those recollections. Let be those dead
things which make me sick at heart . . . It is cold out here in
the dark.”

6 THE OLD HOUSE
The top of the kitchen roof.- Then you did not see me, up
here in the darkness, high and massive over all the house?
It is late; go in; I feel the cold rain up here in the air.
“For some time the smoke has no longer rushed merrily
from my mouth. And I am as if dead up here among so many
smoking roofs, which have each one its hearth-fire and its
family. And in the December nights I am cold; in rainy
nights I feel goose-flesh. The winter snow piles up on me in
masses.
“Look: the evening is dark, and the rain already shivers
in the air. Why do you not go in 2 The fireplace is al-
ready waiting; for you, and for me.”
Other whispers reached me from all parts of the yard: from
the well, from an old watering-trough that had failed of its
purpose. A damp coldness came down from the clouds with
the wind. I remained in the court a little while yet, chilled
all through with the November weather, looking, recognizing
one by one all the old things; divining in the dark what I did
not see. And it seemed to me that they looked at me too,
that from all parts familiar, calm, silent looks came toward
me. Then I entered the portico, in the dark.
IN THE CHIMNEy-Corner.
Toc, foc, foc.
“Come in, come in. Why do you knock? Do you for-
get that there is no longer any one here? Not for some
time? But come in.”
I felt in my pocket for the bunch of keys. The second key
creaked in the rusty lock, and I found myself in the damp
darkness, full of an old musty smell. -

THE OLD HOUSE 7
I went straight to the fireplace, and felt in the darkness for
it. I struck a match on the wall, found the lamp left on the
table, and lighted it. A faint light was produced: the old
table, polished and worm-eaten, was illuminated beneath the
lamp; but the ceiling remained in the dark, as if the poor
lamp had to clear away the condensed darkness of so many
days and nights without light. Over the pale wall passed a
gigantic long-legged shadow; it ran about, stopped, and then
went to lose itself in the dark of the ceiling. It was the
flight of a spider.
Little by little the lamp warmed up and gave a stronger
light; and the kitchen came out of the half-darkness, all of
it, with all the old things.
With all the old things! None of them were changed.
Everything was in its place. The copper-shelves, large,
shining with the reddish reflections of the solid, beautiful old
utensils, heirlooms in the family from generation to genera-
tion, covered the wall in front; at the right the old clock with
the enormous pendulum, varnished red, which cast on the wall
a long shadow down to the ground; at the left the tall side-
board, with so many drawers and mysterious niches. I turned
and saw again over the fireplace the calendar of San Antonio
glued to the wall, with the blessed olive-bough above it,
wrinkled and grizzly with dust and smoke. All the things
were like the recollection I had of them, strangely, as if in
the dark shut-up house time had not passed for them.
But the shadow of the pendulum was motionless, and over
all there was a clammy veil of dampness, dust, and cobwebs,
—a sort of cold death-sweat.
“Do you see? all is there still; nothing is changed. In-
side too; in the drawers of the sideboard and table. Open

8 THE OLD HOUSE
them: you will find everything; everything in its place.
Look, if you want to warm yourself; there is still, left there,
the last wood that he himself brought.
“How long it is since the fire has been lighted down here!
The winter frost has penetrated to the heart of the bricks; I
too want to get the numbness out of me, to feel a little warmth
again.”
I bent over; I gathered a little of the wood that he had
touched, and heaped it on the fireplace. It had lost the
knack of its trade—the old chimney; the flame muttered un-
certainly; the smoky flue rattled; pieces of soot fell down,
and a rain of great black drops made the coals crackle and
shudder. The flame gave a flicker of death, a murmur of
suffocation; but then it broke loose, took hold vigorously of
the dry wood, climbed to the top, and prevailed, broad, pal-
pitating, triumphant.
The broad, blackened, peaked roof of the fireplace was
lighted up around its edges; but in the upper part remained
the marvellous darkness from which, when I was a boy, the
fairies' presents came down. The immense flue took up
again its hoarse contrabass snore, the flame its story-telling
prattle; and, looking at me with its hundred dancing eyes, it
began to speak.
Oh, how many times as a boy, silently snuggled into the
chimney-corner, tired of the old plays, I had listened to the
beautiful flame of the winter evenings murmuring, whispering,
lilting, with its mysterious voice! And I had always pre-
ferred the stories it told me, always new, to those usual ones
that grandmother in a corner of the room repeated to my
brothers and cousins gathered in a circle around her. And
how many strange, marvellous things I had observed and

THE OLD HOUSE - 9
followed with fixed eyes in its labyrinths of light! How
many mysterious journeys I had taken, far away, beyond those
mobile, palpitating, lightning-flashing pupils!
“Look, look, look. Do you no longer see in me any of the
marvellous things that you observed at one time? . . . The
treasures of gold and of precious gems; the eyes of the
princesses who smiled on you; the malignant sparkling looks
of the demons and the dwarfs; the fixed orbs of the serpents
that poison with their look? Do you no longer see any?
And yet you remember? . . . at one time you saw. When
the beautiful black house-cat sat on your knees with its
gleaming-yellow eyes fixed on the flame, you began to divine
that in the joyous and mysterious flame cats discover strange,
magnificent things, invisible to others. The discreet animals
discover them and keep the secret; not slaves like the dog,
that brings its master whatever it scratches up in the road;
content with the revelation made to them, proud that they
alone can enter into a charmed domain closed against their
vain, haughty masters. And you, you were melancholy that
you could not see what your friend the good cat saw in the
flame, and you wished you could have cats’ eyes. And little
by little, by force of looking into the palpitating flames, some-
thing began to reveal itself, to come out. Do you remember
how all your heart trembled and your face grew red at the first
smile that greeted you from two eyes more beautiful than
those of your cousin Teresa, through the luminous veil? And
with what terror your hair was stiffened and your spine bathed,
when a demon darted the first baleful look at you? . . . And
the treasures: the beautiful round gold coins that passed,
passed like waters from a fountain, mixed from time to time
with rubies, sapphires, other unknown gems more beautiful

10 THE OLD HOUSE
than those? . . . But the beautiful black cat, the silent,
haughty animal, saw quite other things. He could decipher
strange messages from distant and underground countries; and,
when the fire died down and was going out, and you had to go
to bed, he went off in the night for his serious business,
more serious than even that of great men. He went off, and
travelled in very distant regions; who knows by what roads,
and with what magic powers? Why did he then reappear all
at once, through the mud, the rain, the snow, and not a single
hair wet, the charmed animal? . . .
“Who knows what has become of him? When the others
died, and then you went off, perhaps he remained some days
yet in the silent, shut-up house that he had deigned to inhabit
for so many years. And then he too went off, and this time
forever, far off: and now perhaps he is dozing and gazing on
the fire from the lap of one of your princesses, that fairest-
complexioned one who smiled on you with her melancholy
eyes till yours were filled with tears of compassion, and then
she broke out in a mocking laugh out of the flame.
“Look, look hard again, see if you can discover her. . . .
But perhaps she no longer comes back; perhaps she is mar-
ried to one of the horrible serpent demons, who tortures her
every day. Or perhaps she is dead: because they die even
there. . . .”
The flame (it had perhaps forgotten that I was no longer the
boy of once upon a time) ogled, muttered, lilted. Its good
grandmotherly voice lulled me into a slumber. And I began
to dream of old-time things again.
How many of them had died and disappeared forever!
Old-time things; of the time when the house was not as now,
all deserted, all silent, all shut up, with a single lamp lighted,

THE OLD HOUSE ll
a single fireplace burning, a single room alive, and in this
a single sad person who is not thinking of the present, not
dreaming of to-morrow, but thinking of the past, dreaming
and suffering in memory! The old, broad, sweet house,
when all its rooms were peopled with trembling and smiling
grandparents, busy and stern mammas, litigious boys, and
even the rooms reserved for strangers, the handsomest in the
house, were rarely closed to the sun. The noisy old house,
when the stables were occupied by four great horses, shining
like a looking-glass, and by Lisa, the good cow always ready
to give us milk; and in the yard the hens scratched in troops,
and the rabbits hid out of sight; and near the gate was the
mysterious little house for which we envied Tell and Fido;
and over the roofs constantly fluttered a whirring company of
doves, white, reddish, and gray. And there were so many
other inhabitants; a swallow’s nest on every tile, and the
sparrows about the windows of the haymow; and the beehives
at the end of the yard; and the wasps in the cracks; and the
rats in the drains, as big as cats; and little delicate mice in
the garrets; and the great ant-hills always alive. The old
house, when at evening all gathered around the table and in
the large chairs about the fireplace; the two families, from
the grandparents to the babies, and the old servants, who had
also become part of the family. . . .
“Look. Wake up. Look around you; they have come
back; all, almost all come back. . . .”
The light of the oil-lamp flickered and died down, moving
great circles of half-shadow around it. The flame of the fire-
place was convulsively agitated, making the shadows stagger
on the wall. And lo, all at once the door opened slowly,

12 THE OLD HOUSE
cautiously: and they began to come in one after the other, as
usual, without noise. And then all were in their places, in
their old places. Grandfather Sebastiano, taller than I,
though bent and seated, and Grandmother Lucia, all rosy and
white, at the right-hand corner of the fireplace. Aunt Teresa,
pale and dressed in black, sickly as then, at the end of the
room; my mother seated at her work at the table, under the
lamp which gilded her hair and hands; Checco, the old ser-
vant, half asleep, with his feet near the fire and his pipe,
gone out, in his mouth; little Nina, who disappeared so quick
and had made me weep over death when I was as yet only a
five-year-old boy; the little sister whom I would now have
wished to take in my arms and kiss, and who looked at me
astonished, frightened, no longer remembering me. And
then behind me, up and down through the room, a restless,
irritated step; a tall shadow back and forth; perhaps that
of Uncle Carlo, who had never been content with the house,
who could not stand still, and whose legs felt the need of the
long journey to America, from which land he had never re-
turned, and whence no news of him had arrived.
Others were missing. Those were missing who now are
far off, in life. And he was missing, my poor daddy. He
has been dead too short a time: he is finishing dying in the
cold and dark of the earth, in the November night; and he
could not yet come back with his kinsfolk to his old house; he
could not come back to me: not yet.
And grandfather talked, alone, out of his dark corner. I
did not see his face; but his voice sounded as if he were pro-
voked.
“It’s cold down here. It isn’t enough to light the fire once
in the year to warm this room. All the house is full of damp-

THE OLD HOUSE 13
ness. You feel it; one shivers before the fire. And every-
thing is empty. There is no more wood in the woodshed;
there is no more hay in the haymow. Where can they have
put such a lot of goods? And why is there no longer any one
here? Where have they gone? Couldn’t some one have
staid here? In my days the sons did not go running about
the world, leaving the old at home to die. I knew nothing
would end well here; I said everything would come to such an
end with these new ways.”
I heard a laugh behind me; and Uncle Carlo continued to
walk back and forth.
Grandfather began grumbling again at him:
“And why did you come back? could you not stay where
you had chosen to go? and, if you choose to keep going still,
why did you not keep going ahead?
‘‘I worked sixty years at putting this house together; the
weight of every stone in it is on my shoulders. I carried
these stones one by one; and now you want to do with it what
you choose. It is no longer my chattel; it is your chattel.
It is yours to waste.
“And now they want to sell it. To-morrow they will sell
it. They will sell it for a mouthful of bread; for a tenth of
what it cost me; only to dig out of it some coins to waste in
madness: in drinking and gambling. To-morrow they will
sell it, and we shall have to go. Understand? . . . shall
have to go. I am not willing to stay here in another’s house.
And you will have to come with me. If they are insane, let
us do what they wish. But you ladies have to obey me.
We shall go; into the wind and rain. They are selling the
house, understand? . . . my house; turning us out of our
house . . .”
No one answered. I heard only a fresh laugh from Uncle

14 THE OLD HOUSE
Carlo, and my mother—poor mamma—bowed her head,
sighing.
The hours passed. The lamp had gone out; but my mother
remained under it, with her head bowed. She was no longer
working. Her head was bowed, bowed; but she was not
asleep. I understood. She was weeping; but in silence.
The others seemed to have gone to sleep.
But little by little that silence was broken; broken by a
baby's voice; by a baby's sob; by Nina crying, trembling
with cold. Her wail cut me to the heart. But I did not
move; no one moved; not even my mother, her mamma, who
remained motionless in her place.
All at once the door was violently slammed; Uncle Carlo
had gone out with an oath. All the rest rose; moved; fell
into confusion; disappeared.
IN THE NIGHT.
The half-open door had slammed; and the old shadows dis-
appeared with my nap. I shook myself, and started up the
stairs; up our stairs, which had so much importance in our
life as boys; where, outside the rooms, away from the big
folks, all our most marvellous adventures had run their course,
with battles, marches, and triumphs. The old stairs which
went up, up, up, as if they were never to finish, first of marble,
then of stone, then steeper, of wood, and were lost above in a
mysterious world, all ours: in the garrets, incumbered with old
furniture, all full of pitfalls and mysterious corners; where
strange visitors appeared, unknown to all the others in the
house; the old blind cat to whom we carried food (and no one
in the house knew it); and where, in a deep darkness which
we dared not penetrate, which not even the cat would venture
into, shone two great gleaming eyes, the owl which had re-

THE OLD HOUSE 15
mained there years and years in its place, never moving.
And above, between the tiles, rays of the sun shone through,
and flying bodies passed over, and twitterings. And we, when
we were sure that no one would surprise us, opened the
dormer-window and looked out, timid and curious, over the
roofs; from which all the world was to be seen.
But now the old stairs no longer invited me up; my legs are
tired now; they now have hardly strength to carry me where I
have to go for every day’s business; excursions into the dis-
tant countries of fancy are a luxury which they can no longer
allow me. I passed slowly, cautiously, as when I was afraid
of waking some one, before all the doors, now shut over cold,
deserted rooms. Behind each of these some one of the family
had died; and now it seemed to me that all the dead, the old
and the babes, were asleep there in a light slumber which
listens and suffers, but is never broken.
I turned at the three landings, and entered my room. It
welcomed me: calm, friendly, pleasant; as it had been wont
to in the past years, in the time of my enthusiastic labor, when
I remained alone studying in the warm, lighted living-room,
while all the house, all the village, was asleep around me; and
I heard with delight the last hours of the night sounding loud
and clear from the clock in the public square; sounding only
for me. And sleep then welcomed me into the dream that was
taking possession of me even while awake; into the beautiful,
luminous dream of hopes and desires. -
But now sleep did not come. When the light was out, the
room, and then little by little all the house, seemed to wake
and whisper around me. I heard the tick-tack of the
kitchen clock. I heard vague noises from the distant stables;
from the yard; movements and strange forgotten familiar

16 THE OLD HOUSE
voices reached me; from where? . . . From the garrets at the
top; from the cellars at the bottom. And then, a noise at the
street gate, then a silence; another noise, clearer and more
suppressed, at the stairway door, then a calm, measured step,
a step that I knew, his step, coming up, up, around the stairs.
It did not stop at the door of his room, as at one time. It
kept on, but then ceased to sound. Where had it stopped?
. . . In that moment I had fallen asleep. Perhaps at the
door of my room? . . . The door had not made any noise, not
a single creak; but from it a cold breath had reached my hair,
as when the dead arrive.
Perhaps it was a dream. I did not see his shadow, I did
not hear his voice; all remained silent and cold.
Long hours passed. I was slowly falling asleep, when all
at once I felt that he was present. He was sitting by my pil-
low, a little to the back, hidden from my eyes; one of his
arms was stretched over the pillow, and his hand was on my
head, among my hair.
He spoke calmly, as if resuming a discourse; his voice
sounded clear in the dark.
“I have waited for you so long; I have waited for you with
so much desire, as I waited for you that day, and you did
not come. And now I am sitting here by your bedside; how
I wished that you were sitting by me that day when I died,
and wanted to see you for the last time! and I wanted to die as
if falling asleep with my hand in yours. And I had so many
things to tell you that I had never told you; that I had never
been willing to tell you, for fear of vexing you.”
I felt a sort of bitter and provoked sadness. Yes; it was
as I had always known, while pretending not to know it. I
had not satisfied him.

THE OLD HOUSE 17
The voice was silent again for a moment, and then
resumed:
“Oh, yes! But I did not want to reprove you; I wanted
only to tell you certain things for your good, to put you on
your guard. Oh, yes! I was pleased with you; but you
wanted to do too much, and there you made a mistake. But
you young people will not believe the words of those who are
experienced in life; you are provoked when they speak; you
seem to think they do it out of jealousy. You are bound to
learn alone; to experience for yourselves the disappointments
that those of your father might have spared you; you are
bound to suffer, to go to meet the evil and the misfortunes, and
we must be silent. And perhaps even now I should do better
--
-
to be silent . .
(Oh, no, daddy; speak, speak; just say everything. Do
not think that even then I did not understand, though you
were silent. Do not think it. I read all those things in
your eyes, despite the words that fell from your lips; and, if
I would not have been willing to listen to them from you, it
was because I was already inwardly thinking them too much.
When I went out, do not think that I was so much the knight-
errant, seeking the adventures of the future, forgetting light-
heartedly how much he leaves behind him. Do not think it;
I was thinking in silence; I was thinking with a mingled feel-
ing of scorn and anguish. Oh, no, we are not like the in-
genuous idealists of a former time; we know everything, we
have foreseen everything. We know that all our struggle is
vain; that we shall be beaten, that we shall lie crushed under
the heavy car of the world, or else shall die of impotence and
vexation, apart, without understanding any more of life, far
from the rest. And we know another thing, too; we know

18 THE old House
that, even if we won, we should not gather the fruits of the
victory; others will come to harvest them—the usual har-
vesters will come. And all will begin again as at first. But
‘what matter? . . . We go ahead all the same, for ourselves;
not for our brothers, who are insupportable to us; but for our
own selves, to sing the great bold song a little on the street of
life, and not for another.)
Did he perhaps hear my thoughts? He was silent. His
silence filled the pauses of my feverish meditations. And
then, when my thoughts died away in sadness and irony, the
voice spoke again:
“You think the world is born again every time one of you
is born. And instead it is always what it was, and all things
return to the same point. Doesn’t the same thing happen with
us? And don’t you yourselves recognize it? . . . We set out
from home and went to get massacred, and then, when we had
won, they were always there to play the masters, as at first.
And this time things will go even worse.”
He stopped, and then spoke with a fainter voice, hesitating,
as if he had to speak and did not wish his words to reach me:
“You do not know, you cannot imagine, what I suffered in
these last years. When you were a boy, and I worked so
much for you, thinking that you would support me when old,
and that our house would become full and warm and light and
merry again; and when, meanwhile, to keep you at the uni-
versity, I lived in only two or three rooms, all the rest being
darkness and cold—
“Perhaps you do not know; you never knew. The house,
our house, many years ago, when you were a boy, was no
longer ours. It was eaten up with debts as well as with
worms; it was mortgaged, to the last stone . . . How many

THE OLD HOUSE 19
times I was afraid it would be sold over our heads! And how
I had to sweat to lift all those debts one by one! And at
times, when it seemed to me I had reached the end, there
came some new misfortune, and the debts came back to cover-
it!
“But you were far away, and knew nothing of all those
matters. You never knew how much I had to do to keep you
there. But all that was nothing. It was worse afterward,
when I recognized that I had done wrong to send you far
away, and when you came back no more. I am not reproving
you; I know things have gone as it was said that they must
go; I know you did what you thought was best and your duty
to do. But how cold the house was in those last years! How
long the winter evenings were, near the fire, thinking of past
things and thinking of you; where you were, what you were
at that moment doing. And it seemed to me that you could
not even be thinking of us, because your head was full of so
many other things. Even when you were here for some days,
at Christmas and New Year’s, you talked so little; you read
and seemed uneasy, in haste to get back to your concerns.
The home . . . we were no longer your concerns.”
(It is true, it is true; then I forgot. But I thought of you
much, I thought of you much, afterward when all was over.
Oh! those first months after the news! and the constant un-
nerving thought that all was over! The terrible “ never!
again” that smote with every pulse-beat in my brain! And
all the remorse for the past, and all the solitude for the future!
Then, every time that the thought of your death unexpectedly
returned to me, and when I thought and felt that, if I had been
there that night when you died alone in your chamber, per-
haps you might have been saved, might yet have been preserved

20 THE OLD HOUSE
for some good years of rest after so many fatigues, I felt,
as it were, a measureless weight piling up little by little on
my shoulders; an insupportable weight that bent me and
crushed me to the earth: I felt a need to spread myself out
inert on the ground, and fall asleep there in a sleep of pain,
and that in that sleep the ground should, little by little, absorb
me into the cold, the dark, where you are . . .)
“And now you will go off again in a few days, as you did
then? . . . And perhaps you will come back no more. Listen:
then I wanted to entertain you, for my sake; but now I would
like to have you stay for your own. Oh! I wish you could
see how much better for you it would be to remain; how much
a peaceful life here in your country would be better for you
and for the rest. I would not have us all, all our family
from father to son, condemned to live in anxiety and rancor
always, always, always. I should, like to have some one come
who should live a little peacefully, a little happily, and who
should at last make his children, our children, healthy and
contented. -
“But you are not willing. And you think you are not able.
Henceforth destiny is complete, you think; and you must go
ahead, always ahead. And you yourself don’t know where;
and you yourself are not pleased with what you do, with
where you go, with your course, with your dreams. Your
dreams that at one time appeared to you with the white wings
of doves before you, around your head; now they have black,
tired wings, they flutter about you like bats: they no longer
hope to reach the sun; they still agitate their wings thus as a
matter of habit, wearisomely, simply not to fall. And per-
haps you will be more unfortunate than I.’”
And I heard a sigh.

THE OLD HOUSE 21
“But I do not want to vex you. Just go where you think
you ought to go. I do not want to vex you, as I did not then:
I did not want to spoil those few days that you staid with me.
I do not want us to grow sad now, now that it is perhaps the
last, last time we are together. The last forever. And now
good-by. You are tired, and must sleep.”
And I felt his hand withdraw, trembling, from my head;
I felt that he was going away. The door let in a puff of air
again; a silence, and then a step on the stairs, receding.
I sat up in bed, shivering. I wanted to stop him; I wanted
to tell him that I had decided to stay; that all my pride was
dead; that I would have killed it; that I would have staid here
forever with him: only that he should not go, should not leave
me for the last time, forever . . .
That he should stay? All was over now, forever. The
step stopped on the last stairs; the door moved; the step
sounded again in the yard; then the street gate was heard.
He was going away forever, in the dark, in the rain. The
rain was beginning to spot the door-posts, to drip from the
roofs and leaves; it seemed that the whole house was weeping.
And he was going away in the cold rain: he was turning the
corner of the street toward the fields, and passing with bowed
head, perhaps weeping himself, down the avenue so beautiful
and so sad, the solitary avenue that leads to the silent little
city down there, —to the cemetery.
IN THE MORNING.
Toc, foc, toc . . . Bum, bum, bum . .
This time it certainly was not a spirit, down at the street
gateway. Rays of sunlight were flickering in from all the
cracks of the worm-eaten windows. The rustling of the old
garden was heard from without.

22 THE OLD HOUSE
Isprang out of bed; I opened the windows to the sun and
the damp November air. The clash of the casing sent down a
shower of rotten bits of mortar, which raised a turmoil of
frightened birds flying all about; and the garden, still drip-
ping with the rain of the night and shivering with the morning
wind, sprang up toward me with its sickly, fantastic, dying
autumn leaves: great masses of greenish, yellowish-green,
yellow and reddish foliage; shrunken, leaden, clammy leaves.
The highest branches, completely stripped, lifted toward the
cold sun their gaunt skeleton fingers, and showed the brown
abandoned nests; but the feet of the trunks, and all the
ground, were covered under a luxurious carpet of fallen leaves.
But not even the pallor of autumn could hide the exuberance
of that nest of vegetation. Everything, in the desertion and
solitude of the last years, no longer kept in check by the
pruning-hook of Tonio, the old gardener (another dead!), had
grown there. The boughs of trees almost shut off the sky.
The American woodbine, thinking perhaps that it had found
here a corner of its old forests, had climbed up and wrapped
itself thickly and clumsily around everything, covering with
its copper-colored leafage the four grayish walls; burying the
first and second-story windows, and coming up to kiss mine,
the highest in the house. At certain points it had begun to
run up on the roofs. Down below, from among the bed of
fallen leaves, rose certain hairy, thorny, pulpy, coarse,
strong weeds, that seemed not yet to have been touched by the
frosts of the November nights. Among all this sylvan in-
vasion the traces of the old things, alleys, trenches, embank-
ments, parapets, could hardly be recognized; they showed
through like slight shadows which a few more springs would
have buried forever. And all this vegetable pack, inundated
by the fine rain of the night, had still, in the death of the
year, an obstinate shiver and stir of life.

THE OLD HOUSE 23
But, if the rain showed the superb vitality of that bit of
sylvan life, it showed still better the ruinous decay of the
house in those few years of desertion. Outside, in the open,
the rain had been over for several hours; but not inside the
house, where the water, gathered in pools on the rotten and
obstructed roofs, continued to filter and rain through in drops
and fine runnels from ceiling to ceiling, from floor to floor. It
was absolutely necessary to sell; or to lose all.
Bum, bum, bum.—The knocker on the street gate continued
to sound.
I dressed in haste, while outside, in the garden, a clamo-
rous winged conversation ran on, provoked without doubt by
the unusual fact of that open window. Now and then an es-
pecially daring sparrow steered his crooked flight near the
window, cast a glance inside, and skipped away to carry the
news; then the conversation was renewed, more clamorous
than at first.
“These sparrows are the tenth or twelfth generation from
those that used to fly to these windows to peck the crumbs from
our hands; and now they have entirely forgotten. This mir-
rors the decay and oblivion of history.”
I crossed the garden, and reached the street gate, while be-
yond it two voices were discussing, and the deeper was saying,
‘‘Let us knock again. . . .”
I opened. And in front of me, blocking all the entry of the
little porch over the gateway with his great, corpulent person
and his usual immense jacket, appeared Lorenzo, the famous
broker, the best known and most popular man in the entire
province.
Grown old a little; for his great whiskers, his not less abun-
dant eyebrows, like another pair of whiskers stuck to his fore-

24 THE OLD HOUSE
head, and his hair escaping in shaggy tufts on all sides from
his great brimmed hat, -which I had known as grayish when I
was a boy, -were now white, with here and there some tufts
still proudly black. For the rest, his wine-colored cheeks;
his great, benevolent, pretentious, talkative eyes, which ran
before the tongue and followed when it had finished or could
do no more; his fat hand, with the innumerable dirty wrinkles;
the knotty cudgel (which was named Garibaldi) and the big
riding-master’s boots, -nothing was changed.
Behind good Lorenzo’s shoulders appeared the respectful
figure of a young man, a well-dressed peasant.
‘‘ Good-day, Lorenzo,” I cried to him, “ you are the first
that I meet here! ”
“Ah! I knew you hadn’t forgotten me!” replied the
broker, bending to pass through the little door and making a
sign to the other to follow him. Then his hat was raised with
a great gesture of respect and dignity, lowering it almost to
the earth, but only to put it on again afterward and crush it
suddenly down on his head, while he made a sign to his com-
panion to keep his in his hand. “I knew you hadn’t for-
gotten me. You have been all over the world, in Milan, in -
--
Africa, and in America. . .
** The dickens! don’t make me run too far. . . .”
“Been there, or are going there. . . . But running about the
world makes no difference; one doesn’t forget old friends; and
then you began your journey about the world—you remember?
—on my shoulders: when your mamma was still alive, a lady
that was pure gold, and your Grandfather Sebastiano, an
original. . . . Excuse me; a great head, but an original. I
don’t forget either, you know. I knew of your arrival only
last night, and here we are. . . .”
Lorenzo’s voice, at first a little restrained and humbled,

THE OLD HOUSE 25
was now swelling into sonorous thunders in the pleasure of
familiarity, and made the loggia of the entrance echo.
“And who is this companion of yours? I don't remember
him.’’
“There, that’s a little harder. You could not recognize
him directly; he’s from another part of the country. But think
well. Look a little at that face, that seems as if it belonged
to a holy blockhead, but has behind it the fox that shows in
the eyes. . . . Don’t you remember? . . . Don’t you remem-
ber your old servant, Beppo; . . . This is his son. He’s that
rascal's son. Beppo died only last Christmas. I don’t want
to speak ill of him here before his son, but the old man may
boast of having gone to hell without having ever given me a
glass to drink. . . . Don’t take it amiss; but it’s so. Be-
sides, it’s so much better for you . . . I wish I too had had a
father who had gone to hell and left me what your father left
you. But my father, good soul, drank it all away from me,
to the last glass. . . . For a fact, when he died, there was not
a drop left in all the casks in the cellar, and we had to buy
the wine for the grave-diggers. . . . And perhaps it’s on that
account that I always was so thirsty afterward,” he concluded
jocosely, clucking and winking.
Then, changing tone all at once, and assuming the severe
professional air:
“This young man is about to set up housekeeping, and has
taken it into his head to buy a house (and he does quite
right!), and he ventures to think of whether he can come to
some agreement with your honor. . . .”
“Very good; it was precisely with the intention of selling
that I came . . . .”
“And I had guessed that too! ” thundered Lorenzo. “Do
you know that for years, down here, I thought that, in the

26 THE OLD HOUSE
midst of all your business, you had forgotten these four walls,
and that they were destined to go to the devil, which would
have been a sin” . . . But with your head you forget nothing.
So it came to your mind, and here we are. It seems a little
strange to sell it to the son of a servant who used to sweep out
its stables. But we know, the world is made in stairs; one
goes down and another goes up. And here is the master’s
son selling, and the servant’s son buying. No offence, you
know; for you have not gone down, but rather up, and do not
know what to do with a house in this hole. You are needing
a palace at Milan now . . . you who with your own hands
make thousand-lira notes out of scribbled paper! . . .”
We crossed the garden, to the great astonishment of the
sparrows and of certain fat gray rats that fled in all direc-
tions. And we found the bunch of heavy rusty keys; and
with some kicks, a little oil, and a little swearing, we suc-
ceeded in opening all the doors, one after another. Every-
where our entrance and the oil lamp made mice run and bats
flutter about; in every corridor our faces drew back in disgust
at clammy threads of spider-web. Yet I felt and saw other
things: strange gray shadows of far-off days, of things past
and dead: silent shadows shrunken away into dark corners,
squatting on old seats or on top of a cask or a pile of rotten
wood. . . . They appeared to have been there for centuries,
in a profound slumber; but at our approach, at the flicker of
the poor lamp, they glided away in silence; and they would
never again have returned.
Then we sat down around the large table in the kitchen.
It was the great moment when we must needs come to pro-
posals and responses. The great Lorenzo pulled out his
pipe, cleaned it attentively, and loaded it to the brim for

THE OLD HOUSE 27
the solemn smoking of the contract. The young man sat
down composedly, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling. At
length the pipe was ready, and Lorenzo prepared for the tra-
ditional fencing-match leading up to the grand stroke of fix-
ing the price. For any purchase and sale, such a ceremony
usually takes days, weeks, years, with us. Seller and buyer
feel of each other, for fear, the former of asking too little, the
latter of offering too much. -
But, to the broker's wonder and annoyance, I named my
price at once. Of course it appeared too much.
The discussion began, and in it Lorenzo’s great voice and
traditional wisdom ruled supreme. He talked with the sever-
ity of a judge and the authority of a soldier, yet mixing in
curious winks and mysterious nods, now to the seller, now to
the buyer.
But the buyer parried, and refused to declare himself.
Lorenzo shouted, explained, begged, swore, with greater effort
and fury than usual because the wine, which is part of the cer-
emony as in the mass, was not there to moisten the discus-
sion. This lack was a great sin, thought Lorenzo; the more
so as the fishy-eyed young man, not being excited by drink,
drew back and declared that he did not wish to buy, that he
had blundered. His idea was more modest, said he.
But the supreme expedient of Lorenzo's tactics still re-
mained. He then stated to me that he wished to speak with
me a moment alone; and we went out into the yard. Arriv-
ing there, the broker attacked me with an extraordinary vio-
lence of admonitions, entreaties, supplications, in a very loud
voice. Not only the buyer down in the kitchen, but all the
country-side could hear us. But this is part of the traditional
tactics; one must seem to be speaking to you in secret, but it
is necessary to make one’s self heard by the other party.

28 THE OLD HOUSE
Then the broker’s voice unexpectedly sank; his intonation
changed. His hairy paw came down on my shoulder, and his
mouth, smelling of the morning’s grappa, approached within a
span of my nose.
He talked in a low voice, but with more violence than at
first, as if insulting me, pretending that he could not restrain
himself.
I must not play the fool. Such an occasion would not pre-
sent itself again. This house was no longer worth a penny.
If I had thought of selling some years ago, he would have
found me as much as I wanted. But now it is too late. All
the good families are running away from the country-side or
going bankrupt; and there is a regular plague of houses to
sell. Our forefathers had been stone-sick; they had produced
more houses than sons. Half the country was empty. Then
there is something worse. The house, abandoned for years,
had gone to the bad. It was ruined; rotten; no longer worth
anything. It was a nest of rats and wood-worms; it was tum-
bling down on all sides; look—and with a thrown stone he
knocked in the door of the pig-pen; with a blow of his cudgel
he took off a stone from the wall. “It’s a rotten wreck . . . .
Believe me: he who buys it will ruin himself, come to poverty,
trying to patch it. . . . .”
“But in this case I don’t wish to cheat anybody. . . .
No matter! that man's father had made him his money by
--
fraud. And then that innocent there was a sly one: he
would get another out of it by cheating. . . . The house would
go the rounds. . .
And Lorenzo dropped down to sit on the edge of the well,
panting; he pulled out a great red and yellow handkerchief,
and, wiping off his sweat and sighing, “I can do no more;
don’t make me wear out my lungs for nothing. . . .” he im-

THE OLD HOUSE 29
plored me with his eyes and hands to come down to the fair
figure; he knew what it was. . . .
I yielded. And now Lorenzo went over to the other side;
he betook himself to the kitchen to take the buyer by himself,
while I, respecting the ceremonial, waited in the yard.
And from the yard I saw his shadow gesticulating behind
the panes; I heard the whispers that were precipitated like a
fire of musketry: then the voice was raised, and a torrent of
cries, insults, oaths, made the house resound to the great
fright of its present legitimate inhabitants. At last the yard
door opened with a loud noise, and the fishy-eyed young man
was driven out with a great shove by the shoulders; then
Lorenzo took hold of him again, before he could turn, and
pushed him toward me with blows, while the other was still
trying to change his mind and turn back.
The bargain was closed.
“And all without wine–
--
muttered the broker, as he went
off, wiping away the sweat with his sleeve. “I never had
that to stand! . . .”
Two days later I was at the vetturino’s while the horses
were being got ready. Over our heads, in full midday,
swarmed multitudes of sparrows, with frightened chirps and
crazy flights.
“What is this?’” I asked.
“They come from
-
's house,”
replied the vetturino,
who did not know me. “ The young owner, who lives at a
distance, has sold it. The house had been left shut up for
seven years, and had become a grove, a wilderness, and all
the birds in the country-side had nested there. Now the new
owner is clearing out the garden and cutting down the trees;
and it was high time.”

30 THE OLD HOUSE
O poor birds, with your little frightened cries and mad-
dened flights, up there above and around me while the car-
riage moves and carries me away forever; O poor birds, now
left without nests in full autumn; very few and very paltry
are those half-dozen coins that I feel here in my pocket, and
which I have derived from the sale of that old den! . .
Might it not have been better to leave it to you? . . .