The Matchmaker (13 page)

“May we sitta here, signora?” and the first of the two Italians stood beside her table, looking down at her.

“Oh yes, that’s all right,” she answered in a loud, fresh, friendly voice, and pulled her book towards her again as she took the first grateful draught of hot tea. The two men, having thanked her, sat down.

But once more it was useless; she could not read; and after a moment she was gazing about the room as she ate and drank, with an air of not really observing it and a frown on her white forehead. She had the face of a child, small and pale cheeked with a deeply-dimpled chin and pouting lips like those seen in portraits painted during the eighteenth century, and a long throat and full bosom. Sensitiveness, intelligence, thought, were all absent from that face, but its bloom suggested some sturdy flower of the hedges and foreshadowed a type of looks—bouncing, hoydenish and healthy—that might one day become fashionable.

The tea and cakes were good and they refreshed her; each time she lifted her eyelids and glanced about the room with the placidity of returning comfort, there was an entrancing flash of dreamy blue against the pallor of her cheeks which naturally attracted the admiring attention of the Italian who had spoken to her. He stared at her continuously and boldly, but the other, whose eyes were blue as her own, sat lost in sullen thought and barely glanced at her.

Both men were subdued in comparison with the other occupants of the café, as if the gaiety of Christmas failed to touch them. They smoked and drank their weak sugarless coffee in silence save for an occasional quiet word in their own language, and all about them the noise and laughter grew louder as nine o’clock (when the Linga-Longa would close down for the four-day Christmas holiday) drew near.

Sylvia had nearly finished her meal when her book slipped from the table to the floor. Before she had time to stoop and pick it up, the livelier of the two Italians did so for her, and handed it to her with a polite smile.

“Thanks very much,” she said, smiling too.

He smiled again, with much display of poor teeth (for which the slums of Genoa were responsible) and exclaimed ironically, “Merry Christ-a-mas!” at the same time jerking his head towards one of the livelier tables while his dark eyes glinted mockingly.

“Well, why shouldn’t they?” she retorted, “they’ve been through enough, god-knows.”

“Me an’ my fren’, we far away from our home,” said Emilio, doing a quick change from mockery to pathos while his eyes wandered over her shabby suitcase and handbag to see if she were good for some cigarettes, “so we are sad-a, much, much.”

“That’s your fault. You backed the wrong horse. Too much
Viva il Duce
, eh?” and she made a gay sign to the waitress to bring the bill.

“No, no,” protested Emilio eagerly. “
È finito
—all that. He was bad man, much, much.”

“You’re right, comrade, he was,” she said, looking in her purse. “Look here, I suppose you don’t know the way to a place called Naylor’s Farm? Now let me guess the answer—you’ve never heard of it.”

The other Italian, who had been taking no notice of their conversation, glanced up, and Emilio exclaimed:

“
Si, si
, Naylor Farm—you want-a go there?”

“I do, comrade, and the sooner the quicker. Is it far from here?”

“Three mile.” It was the other Italian who spoke for the first time, and the words in that voice gave pleasure to the ear as if they had been two notes of music. Sylvia turned and stared at him while continuing to put scarlet paint upon her childish mouth.

“It can talk!” she exclaimed, “I thought you were dumb, comrade,” and she grinned, for he certainly looked it.

Fabrio slowly lifted his eyes, and took a long look at her; her laughing mouth that displayed big white teeth, and the little
round
hat now replaced upon the back of her head, and finally he laughed too, and turned to Emilio, saying, “What a monkey-face, eh?” for her rich curls, her skin, her eyes, were obscured to him by her uniform, which seemed to him, as an Italian peasant, the most ridiculous and immodest dress that it was conceivable for a girl to wear, emphasising her hoydenishness so strongly that he was only conscious of blunt features and a wide smile.

Emilio, however, made a flattering comment on her looks, and then the two of them had a little talk about her in Italian, wondering how old she was, and what her name was, together with other details, some of which were far from being their business. They knew, of course, that she must be the “langurl” with whose prospective arrival Mr. Hoadley had contemptuously threatened them, and they also knew that he had intended to meet her that afternoon at the station with the car. Where had she been (Emilio suddenly inquired of her, speaking English again) when the Signor Oadlie had been to the station and not found her? He had been angry; much, much.

“That’s cheerful,” and Sylvia made a face. “What’s he like, anyway?”

Emilio shrugged up his shoulders almost to his ears, and intimated a complete lack of interest in Mr. Hoadley. Fabrio, who had now become silent again, made no movement, and the waitress came up with Sylvia’s bill, which the latter paid.

The room had grown noisier as closing-time approached, and was now stiflingly hot and oppressive from cigarette smoke and fumes from the kitchen. Sylvia had been the object of steady stares from some soldiers, and of furtive regard from a gipsy, dark and dirty, who was seated at a table nearby, and she was relieved that she had the two Italians at her table. Their manner was not so respectful as she would have liked it to be, but there was nothing alarming in Emilio’s frank stare of interest and the other one, the quiet one, she dismissed as just dumb (though had he been beautiful as a god he would not have attracted Sylvia,
whose
admiration was reserved for beings who were not men but shadows). She felt capable of handling both of them.

The fat elderly manageress now appeared at the kitchen door in a greasy blue apron, clapping her hands at the customers and good-naturedly beseeching them all to go home and give the girls a chance to get a rest, and everyone began reluctantly to gather their possessions together and make their farewells, Sylvia among them.

“Can you show me the way to Naylor’s?” she asked of Emilio.

“It is long-a way. Three mile,” and he shrugged again.

“I know that. I’m not asking you to come too. I just want to know the way.”

“We come too,” nodded Emilio, buttoning his overcoat.

“Oh no you don’t, thank you. I can manage,” she answered quickly, alarmed at the idea of dark roads, deserted and lonely, and these two on either side of her. Her confident assumption that she could deal with them departed abruptly.

“We come,” smiled Fabrio, not quite pleasantly, and picked up his cap.

“Didn’t you get me the first time, comrade? I don’t want you to come.
Nienty
. No can do. I’d rather go alone.” The three of them were now moving towards the door.

“She is a-fraid,” said Fabrio, his musical voice now mocking her, whereupon they both began to laugh uproariously, standing on either side of her in the snowy street, whilst around them people gathered in groups, bidding one another “Good night” and “A merry Christmas.” She looked angrily from one laughing face to the other, not understanding a word they were saying.

“Oh, very funny, very funny, ha-ha,” she interrupted at last. “Now suppose you tell me the way and I’ll be off—
by myself
, thank you.”

“We come-a with you,” said Fabrio, suddenly ceasing to laugh. “We work there.”

“Me an’ my fren’, we work-a at Naylor Farm,” Emilio explained
in
his turn. “We go back to
campo
this night, we go with you some tha way.”

“Oh, you
work
there?” she cried.

“You langurl,” said Emilio, nodding and touching the flash on her sleeve. “We work all of us together there, sometime perhaps.”

“Oh, I get you. ‘Came the dawn.’ Come on, then, comrades, what are we waiting for? Let’s go,” and she slipped one arm through that of Emilio and the other—after a glance at his face—through Fabrio’s, and they set off.

Emilio was enjoying himself. He lived in the moment, and would have agreed with Lord Byron that old-fashioned pleasures were good enough for him; Sylvia’s arm and side were warm against his own and an agreeable perfume breathed from her face and hair. From time to time, however, he glanced at the face of Fabrio, which he could faintly discern in the starlight, and saw that it was haughty, troubled and slightly averted from Sylvia.
Now
what’s the matter with him? thought Emilio, irritated, for he loved his friend without understanding him.

Fabrio was annoyed at being unceremoniously seized by his arm, with never a hint of shyness on Sylvia’s part beforehand or of pride and pleasure after she had got it, and he also felt ashamed of being seen walking linked with this noisy young girl in trousers.

He had seen “langurls” on previous occasions, of course, cycling past the camp or working in summer on the surrounding farms and always he had thought how shameless and ridiculous they looked, and when they were pretty that only made it worse. Now he was striding along beside one, with her fresh young presence troubling him, and now—oh Holy Saints, she was singing! Mother of God, thought Fabrio, and winced, what a voice!

As the language difficulty made conversation constrained, Sylvia thought it best to sing, and what she chose to sing—as the untrodden snow rolled away before them in the starlight
and
keen winds wandered through the dusky leafless coppices—was
Jesu, Joy of Man
’
s Desiring
. Even so might some Pagan seller of lupin-seeds in the Rome of Nero have bawled a good tune which he had overheard the Christians singing in the night watches from their prison above the Circus. Sylvia had heard this good tune on the wireless.

After listening for a moment or two, Emilio caught the air and joined in, but Fabrio uttered never a sound, sung or spoken, until the lights of the camp shone on the opposite side of the road, and then, as they all paused in their march, he abruptly shook off Sylvia’s arm, barely nodded to her, and strode off towards the gates of the camp, where the sentry walked up and down with chin sunk in his collar against the cold.

“What’s biting him?” she demanded indignantly, but a conscious expression in her eyes and colour deepening in her face betrayed that she was not completely insensitive, and the glance which she gave along the lonely road lying ahead was apprehensive.

Emilio only shrugged; he often found his comparative ignorance of English useful in embarrassing situations but in this case he did not know the answer.

“I come-a with you,” was all he said, trying to take her arm again. His face looked pinched and yellow and not attractive in the dim light.

“There’s no need for that,” she said, hesitating between a little mistrust of him and a real dread of the solitary walk before her, “You tell me the way.”

“No-o, no-a. Very difficult, much, much. I come-a an’ show you.”

The sentry had turned his head and was watching the two of them with a weary ironical grin.

“All right then, if it isn’t far,” she said, and let him take her arm again and lead her down the road.

Emilio calculated that he could walk with her for another quarter of an hour, for it was now half-past eight and he must be
back
in camp by nine; the last fifteen minutes must be spent in retracing his steps. Accordingly, when they had walked for some time in a silence made disagreeable by the fact that he had tried to kiss her and had been repulsed by a strong push and a loud indignant exclamation, he paused, and announced:

“Now I go-a back to
campo
.”

“Here, don’t do that, comrade!” she said, dismayed, and set down her suitcase (which he had not offered to carry) with an exasperated movement. “Where do I go from here?”

Emilio, a man of few words when he liked, sulkily pointed to a wide gap in the leafless hedge on their left.

“Down there? Thanks, I’m sure,” peering into the dimness. “Oo, it does look dark!”

“Naylor Farm,” said Emilio, jerking his thumb at the gap. “Go on, go on, go on. Then Naylor Farm. Now I go back to
campo
. See you some-a day, signora-mees.
Buona notte
,” and he sketched a salute and turned away.

“You are mean!” she called after him half-tearfully as his shape grew dim in the starlight.

“Merry Christa-mas!” he called back mockingly, and was lost in the snow-lit gloom.

Sylvia heard his footsteps grow fainter and finally cease, and stood there uncertainly, with her heart beating fast and lurid fancies engendered by the cinema, the wireless and the cheap bookstall rushing into her mind, assailing it with terrors as frightful as any imagined a hundred years ago by a peasant who could not write or read. She saw the front page of a certain morning paper with its heavy black headlines and on it her own name and the word Murder; she saw shapes in the white obscurity of the hedges buried in snow, motionless, watching her; she stared wildly about her and was almost ready to run, had she not been even more afraid that something would spring out of the shadows and run after her.

Suddenly a woman on a bicycle came round the corner, pedalling placidly along with a cheerful little red lamp throwing its
ray
upon the trodden snow. It was the District Nurse, returning home after her day’s work, and she called a pleasant “Good night” as she went by.