CHAPTER III

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From dawn until twilight, the songs of the reapers--men and women--alternated on the slopes of the fecund hill. Masculine choruses, with a bacchic vehemence, were celebrating their joy at the abundant feast and the richness of the old wine. For the men of the scythe, the time of the harvest was a time of abundancy. Hour after hour, from dawn to twilight, according to the old-time custom, they interrupted their work to eat and drink on the field of stubble, among the newly made sheaves, in honor of the generous master. And each took from his porringer the share of nourishment sufficient to satiate one of the women. Thus, at the hour of the repast, Boaz had said to Ruth the Moabite: "Come thou hither, and eat of the bread, and dip thou thy morsel in the vinegar. And Ruth came and sat down beside the reapers, and was sufficed."

But the feminine choruses were prolonged in almost religious cadences, with a slow and solemn sweetness, revealing the original holiness of the alimentary work, the primitive nobility of this task, where, on the ancestral soil, the sweat of man consecrated the nativity of the bread.

George heard them and followed them, his soul attentive; and gradually a beneficent and unhoped-for influence penetrated him. His soul seemed to gradually dilate, by an aspiration always broader and more serene in proportion as the wave of the chant, propagated in the still torrid noons, became purer, but in it the hope of the pacifying night began to spread a species of ecstatic calm. It was a renewed aspiration towards the sources of life, towards the Origins. It was, perhaps, the supreme trembling of his youth attacked in the deepest part of its substantial energy, the supreme panting towards the regaining of happiness lost, henceforth, forever.

The harvest-time was drawing to its close. Passing along the mown fields, he caught a glimpse of the nice customs that seemed to be the rites of a georgic liturgy. One day he stopped close to a field already despoiled, where the haymakers had just constructed the last haystack, and he was a witness to the ceremony.

On the things exhausted by the heat hovered the limpid and sweet hour that was about to gather in its crystalline sphere the impalpable ashes of the consumed day.

The field was laid out in a parallelogram, on a tableland girt with gigantic olive-trees, through the branches of which were glimpses of the blue band of the Adriatic, mysterious as the velum perceived in the temple behind the silver palms. The high haystacks were erected at intervals in the form of cones, massive, and opulent with the richness heaped up by the arms of men, celebrated by the songs of women. When the toil was ended, the band of haymakers made a circle around its chief in the centre of the field. They were robust, sunburnt men, dressed in linen. On their arms, on their legs, on their bare feet, they had deformities which the long and slow endurance of manual labor imprints on limbs that toil. In the fist of each man shone a scythe, curved and thin as the moon in its first quarter. From time to time, with a simple gesture of their disengaged hand, they wiped the sweat from their brows, and with it sprinkled the ground where the straw was shining under the oblique rays of the setting sun.

In his turn, the chief made the same gesture; then, raising his hand as if to bless, he cried, in his sonorous voice, rich in rhythm and assonance:

"Let's leave the field, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost!"

In chorus, the men of the scythe replied, with a great cry:

"Amen!"

And the chief went on:

"Blessed be our master, and blessed be our mistress!"

The men replied:

"Amen!"

And the chief, in a voice that gradually gathered strength and fire:

"Blessed be he who brought us good food to eat."

"Amen!"

"Blessed be he who says: 'Don't put water in the wine of the haymaker!'"

"Amen!"

"Blessed be the employer who says to his lady: 'Give without measuring, and put sapor in the wine of the haymaker!'"

"Amen!"

The benedictions extended from one to another: to him who had killed the sheep, to him who had washed the herbs and vegetables, to him who had polished the copper saucepan, to him who had seasoned the meats with spices. And the chief, in the fire of enthusiasm, in the sudden transport of a sort of poetic fury, expressed himself, all at once, in couplets. The band replied to him by immense clamors that reverberated through all the creeks, while on the iron of the scythes the flashes of the twilight, and the sheaves arranged on the top of the stacks, had the appearance of flames.

"Blessed be the woman who sings beautiful songs while bringing pitchers of old wine!"

"Amen!"

There was a thunderclap of joy. Then all were silent, and watched approach the chorus of the women, bearers of the last gifts of the mown field.

The women, in double file, were singing, carrying in their arms the large painted jars. And the uninitiated spectator, seeing them advance between the olive-trees, as through a colonnade, against the maritime background, might imagine he saw one of those votive images that develop harmoniously in bas-relief on the friezes of the temples or around the sarcophagi.

As he went back to the house this image of beauty accompanied him along the road, while he slowly wended his way amid the illusions of the evening, in which were still floating the waves of the choruses. At a bend in the road, he stopped to listen to a melodious voice that was approaching and that he seemed to recognize. As soon as he recognized it he started joyfully: it was the voice of Favetta, the young singer with the falconlike eyes, with the vibrating voice that always awoke in him the memory of that delicious May morning, resplendent on the labyrinth of the blossoming furze, on the solitude of the garden of gold in which, to his surprise, he thought he had discovered the secret of joy.

Without suspecting the presence of the stranger, hidden by a hedge, Favetta advanced, leading a cow by the tether. And she sang, her head high, her mouth open towards the sky, the full light on her face; and from her throat the song gushed forth, fluid, limpid, crystal as a stream. Behind her the fine, snowy beast ambled gently, and at each step its fetlock undulated, and its massive udder, swollen with milk by the pasture, dangled between its legs.

When she perceived the stranger, the singer stopped singing, and seemed about to halt; but he went to meet her with a joyous air, as if he had met a friend of the happy days.

"Where are you going, Favetta?" he cried.

Hearing herself addressed by her name, she blushed and smiled with embarrassment. "I'm taking the cow to the shed," she replied.

As she had suddenly slowed down her step, the snout of the beast grazed her hips, and her bold bust stood out between the large horns as in the crescent of a lyre.

"You're always singing," said George, admiring her in this attitude.

"Ah! signor," she said with a smile, "if we couldn't sing, what could we do?"

"Do you remember that morning when you plucked the furze flowers?"

"The first flowers for your lady?"

"Yes; do you remember?"

"I remember."

"Sing again for me the song you sang that day!"

"I can't sing it alone."

"Well, sing another."

"Like that, all at once, in your presence? I'm ashamed. I'll sing on the road. Addio, signor."

"Addio, Favetta."

And she resumed her way along the path, dragging the peaceable beast after her. When she had gone a little way, she struck up the song with all the strength of her voice that invaded the surrounding luminous country.

The sun had just set, and an extraordinarily vivid light was shed over the coasts and over the sea; an immense wave of impalpable gold mounted from the occidental sky to the zenith and redescended to the opposite side, the glassy transparency of which it penetrated with infinite slowness. Gradually the Adriatic became more clear and more gentle, approaching the green hue of the first leaves of the new shoots of willows. Alone, the red sails, as superb as if they were of purple, broke the diffused light.

"It's a holiday," thought George, dazzled by the splendid sunset, feeling palpitate around him the joy of life. Where does the human creature breathe for whom the whole day, from dawn to twilight, should not be a Holiday consecrated by some new conquest?

On the hill, the songs in honor of the nativity of the bread continued and alternated. The long feminine files appeared on the slopes and disappeared. Here and there, in the still air, columns of smoke rose slowly from invisible fires. The spectacle grew solemn and seemed to sink back into the mystery of the primitive centuries, in the holiness of a celebration of rural Dionysiacs.

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